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Abstract
The tumultuous politics of the post-Independence period in Bombay/Mumbai, and the creation of the linguistic states, released multiple and contradictory energies towards a re-examination of the Marathi language and its valence in linguistic, literary, social and cultural contexts. This essay employs the bilingual poetry of Arun Kolatkar and the Marathi-language poetry of R.K. Joshi to show the ways in which the sathottari poetry of Bombay engages with these socio-political questions of language and region by channelling the principles of concrete poetry and making the visual presence of the language (in its script, its lines, its presence on the page) a part of its meaning-making process.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge with gratitude the detailed comments of the anonymous South Asia reviewers that have helped make this essay better in many ways.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2021.1920592)
Notes
1. Renée Green, ‘Survival: Ruminations on Archival Lacunae//2002’, in Charles Merewether (ed.), The Archive (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 53.
2. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 175.
3. Anjali Nerlekar, Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016).
4. Narayan Surve, Narayan Surve Hyanchya Samagra Kavita (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2011), p. 70.
5. When the linguistic state of Maharashtra was formed in 1960, it was created by reorganising parts of the regions of the former Bombay state, Saurashtra, Hyderabad state, Berar and Vidarbha with the plurality of linguistic registers and languages that came with the mix. See Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, History, Culture and the Indian City: Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), for a historical overview of the tumultuous creation of the state of Maharashtra.
6. Marathi is written in the Nagari script which has a header line that runs at the top of full letters called the shirorekha. Surve uses the visual presence of this script to talk about the precarity of the working-class lives that hang in balance.
7. Prachi Deshpande’s forthcoming book does not yet have a final title or publisher.
8. Prachi Deshpande, ‘Shuddhalekhan: Orthography, Community and the Marathi Public Sphere’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 51, no. 6 (6 Feb. 2016), p. 78.
9. See the forthcoming book by Roanne Kantor that traces an alternative lineage of modernism for Indian writing in the Latin American world of literature and art. Kantor’s book does not yet have a title or publisher.
10. The movement is said to have had roots in both Brazil and Europe. Haroldo de Campos and Augusto de Campos, together with Décio Pignatari, wrote the manifesto for the post-war movement in Concrete Poetry in Brazil while German poet Eugen Gomringer wrote one in Europe at the same time.
11. Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 7.
12. Mike Weaver, ‘Concrete Poetry’, in Visible Language, Vol. 6 (1976), p. 294.
13. Wendy Steiner, ‘Res Poetica: The Problematics of the Concrete Program’, in New Literary History, Vol. 12, no. 3 (Spring 1981), pp. 529–45 (540).
14. Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1936), p. 9.
15. Jack Spicer, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser (ed.) (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1980), pp. 33–4.
16. Solt, Concrete Poetry, p. 60.
17. ‘Little magazine’ is a loosely defined term for magazines that have one or more of the following characteristics: irregularly published, published in limited numbers, distributed to small groups of readers, not sold for profit. For more on the form, see Eric Bulson, Little Magazine, World Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
18. The poems in Jejuri are not ‘pure’ concrete poems, but they employ the visual/spatial techniques of concrete poetry that are being discussed here.
19. For more on Kolatkar’s book, Jejuri, as well as Kolatkar’s bilingual sensibility, see Vinay Dharwadker, ‘Arun Kolatkar’s Historical Imagination’, in Smita Agarwal (ed.), Marginalized: Indian Poetry in English (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), pp. 151–82; and Nerlekar, Bombay Modern, pp. 195–212.
20. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, ‘I Love You Idiot’, in Translating the Indian Past, and Other Literary Histories (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2019), pp. 49–136.
21. Kolatkar’s unpublished papers are stored in boxes by Ashok Shahane in Mumbai, India; henceforth, Kolatkar, unpublished papers.
22. Kolatkar, unpublished papers.
23. See Prachi Deshpande’s forthcoming book in which she carefully lays out the conflicted but close connection established between Sanskrit and Marathi grammar and vocabulary and the connection of such debates to the consolidation of caste/Brahman world-views in Maharashtra. Title and publication details not yet available.
24. Kolatkar, unpublished papers.
25. Ibid.
26. Vinay Dharwadker, ‘Twenty-Nine Modern Indian Poems’, in TriQuarterly, no. 77 (Winter 1989–90), p. 184. See a comparative discussion of Dharwadker’s translation of ‘Takta’ with that by Kolatkar himself in Rajeev Patke, Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
27. Dharwadker, ‘Twenty-Nine Modern Indian Poems’, p. 219.
28. The last three lines of the first stanza of ‘Kovalan’ are slightly different and read thus:
29. My translation.
30. See Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s essays in Translating the Indian Past, in which he discusses Kolatkar’s letters that refer to the French poet, Apollinaire, a forerunner of the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s. Mehrotra also refers to this in his introduction to Arun Kolatkar, The Boatride and Other Poems (Mumbai: Pras Prakashan, 2009).
31. The Marathi modernist poet, B.S. Mardhekar, made similar experiments with the poetic line in his own work, even though it never became a dominating poetic practice in his poems.
32. See Santosh Kshirsagar, ‘Ra Kru Joshinche Aksharmarga’, Maharashtra Times (7 Feb. 2008) [https://maharashtratimes.indiatimes.com/-/articleshow/2764362.cms, accessed 24 Jan. 2016].
33. See Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2012), p. 59, in which Mehrotra recalls being able to access Penguin Modern Poets 5 even in Allahabad.
34. The influence went further—it is said that it can be seen in the work of Joshi’s younger daughter, Amruta; she wrote a thesis on concrete poetry for her MA diploma.
35. Chandrakant Patil and N.D. Mahanor (eds), Punha Ekada Kavita (Pune: Neelkanth Prakashan, 1982), p. 3.
36. Ibid., p. 129.
37. See also the deeply affectionate piece in Marathi on Joshi’s work in the entertainment industry, in advertising, in poetry and in computer design of fonts by his long-time friend, filmmaker and writer Arun Khopkar: ‘Chamchamit Kahi Lihave: Raghunath Krishnarao Joshi, 22 February 1936–5 February 2008’, in Chalat Chitravyuha (Mumbai: Lokvangmaya Griha Prakashan, 2012), pp. 52–75.
38. R.K. Joshi, ‘Ratricha Ek’, in Vacha, no. 3 (1968), p. 65.
39. For a more detailed discussion of this, see Nerlekar, Bombay Modern, pp. 86–7.
40. This same interest in the letter/script/language later resulted in Joshi’s close involvement with the creation of the Microsoft computer font for several Indic languages, mainly Marathi (he named the computer font for the Devanagari script, ‘Mangal’, after his wife, and this early font continues to be used widely).
41. ‘Akara: The Art and Spirit of Indian Calligraphy, A Conversation with R.K. Joshi’, in Kohei Sugiura, Books, Letterforms and Design in Asia: Sugiura Kohei in Conversation with Asian Designers (New Delhi: Adarsh/Marg Foundation, 2014), p. 274.
42. This poem was given to me by Prof. Saynekar, a colleague and friend of Joshi. I have not been able to find the source of its publication yet, despite asking many of his friends about it and looking through libraries and archives for extant publications. All Joshi’s friends vouch for the poem and I am using it here because it is indeed one of his spectacular poems on the renowned vocalist and deserves close attention.
43. Ashok Vajpeyi, Bahuri Akela: Kumar Gandharva par Kavitaen aur Nibandh (New Delhi: Sanskruti Prakashan, 1992). Chandrakant Patil translated this into Marathi as Tari Ekakich—Kumar Gandharvansathi Niropachi Gaani (Hyderabad: Marathi Sahitya Parishad, 1993).
44. My translation.
45. R.K. Joshi, ‘Pandhara Rasta’, in Satyakatha (Sept. 1967), p. 14, my translation.
46. R.K. Joshi, ‘Chaar Drushta-Dhvani Kavita’, in Satyakatha (Nov. 1970), p. 136.
47. Patil and Mahanor, Punha Ekada Kavita.
48. For lack of space I have not included the important forays into English concrete poetry by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. As a Bombay poet, Mehrotra was part of this world of language questions, linguistic identities and modernist literary influences, and his channelling of the concrete poetry movement still awaits a detailed study.
49. Solt, Concrete Poetry, p. 243.
50. Stephen Bann, Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (London: London Magazine, 1967), p. 15.
51. This line was translated differently as ‘the l.c.m. of language’ in Nerlekar, Bombay Modern.
52. R.K. Joshi, ‘Sankshipta Swabhava’, in Rawa, Vol. 10 (1972), p. 14, the translation of the poem is mine.
53. Deshpande, forthcoming book.
54. Arun Kolatkar, Bhijaki Vahi (The Soaked Notebook) (Mumbai: Pras Prakashan, 2003).