Contemporary Bhakti Recastings

Abstract

By exploring how many modern Indian poets (namely, here, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Dilip Chitre) have chosen to trace their affiliations and lineage back to the inclusive bhakti devotional tradition, I am exploring the fecund connections between practices of translation and creative writing in contemporary Indian poetry, but also the emergence of a modernity that results from the complex interplay of languages, lineages and hybrid transactions. These transactions between translation and creative writing, between English and other Indian languages, between folk music and poetry, between bhakti and Euro-American modernism, bhakti and the blues or the Beats (since the restaging of these medieval compositions is often made in a kind of jazzy, colloquial American idiom, confusing ‘western’ and ‘Indian’ categories), expose the simultaneous confluence of local and global literatures, the porosity of languages and traditions. Modernism and bhakti become paradigms for renewal and for emancipation. Indian poets also propose a form of belonging as a defiant all-inclusive category, an open-ended process of translation that subverts the quest for origins, transcends the national and celebrates deterritorialization. Translation becomes a form of transgressive practice with powerful dissident political and ‘heretical’ implications in the Indian context.

• bhakti
• Indian poetry
• modernism
• multilingualism
• translation
• Arun Kolatkar

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Ashok Shahane for their generosity, time and friendship, for sharing their intimate knowledge of Arun Kolatkar's work and for the impressive amount of material which they made available; and to Soonoo Kolaktar and Ashok Shahane for permission to quote from Kolatkar's unpublished work. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers of this essay for their insightful recommendations.

Notes

¹ Though I use the singular here to talk of ‘bhakti tradition’, bhakti is everything but a monolithic category. Many different strands of medieval devotionality are cumulatively known as bhakti, which first emerged in Tamil south India around the sixth century before spreading to the rest of India. Only medieval bhakti in the northern and western parts of India will be considered here: the varkari (lit. ‘pilgrim’ because of the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur) Marathi tradition of Maharashtra to which Tukaram, Namdev, Janabai and Jnandev belong and the northern Sants like Kabir.

² If contemporary poets reclaim bhakti for its anti-elitist, dissident and demotic dimensions, and consider Tukaram, Kabir and other bhakti figures as poets rather than saints (a claim which is iconoclastic in itself), it is important to bear in mind that bhakti is a site of contested appropriations. Bhakti has also been equated with national resurgence, instrumentalized to demonstrate the essentially spiritual nature of India (and its unity) or to construct a canonical nationalism before independence (‘bhakti was also attractive to all kinds of indigenisms and nationalist aporias of consent and organicity, including Gandhi's own’ [Ahmad 1992: 274]).

³ See, for example, the special issue of the Baroda little magazine Vrishchik on bhakti poetry in 1970, with poems from Muktabai, Janabai and Namdeo translated by Kolatkar, ‘recastings from Kabir’ by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and translations of the medieval Gujarati poet Vasto by Gieve Patel. Many other Indian poets are steeped in bhakti and translating bhakti texts: Kedarnath Singh, Nagarjun and Kunwar Narain in Hindi have reclaimed Kabir, but also other poets writing in English like Gieve Patel, who is translating the seventeenth-century Gujarati poet Akho, or Ranjit Hoskote, who is translating the fourteenth-century Kashmiri poet Lal Ded.

⁴ For instance, B. S. Mardhekar and P. S. Rege, the two precursors of modernism in Marathi poetry were also inspired by the western modernist galaxy and by bhakti.

⁵ Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky met many Indian poets during their 1962–3 trip to India. In Bombay they befriended Arun Kolatkar (whose partial translation of Kaddish into Marathi appeared in the little magazine Aso in 1963), Ashok Shahane and other ‘starving poets’, rather than the more ‘polite and genteel’ poets in English like Nissim Ezekiel: ‘Allen's affinity was for those starving poets who wrote in their mother tongue and readily provided them with a tour of Bombay's seamy underside’ (Baker 2008: 149).

⁶ Amit Chaudhuri talks about the way Bombay poet-critics ‘poached and encroached upon the territory of painters’ (2008: 224) in the 1960s. Most of the journals and little magazines published at the time are meticulously designed works of art (a legacy that Kolatkar's Indian publisher Pras Prakashan is committed to keeping alive today), edited jointly by painters and poets. Kolatkar designed the covers for a lot of little magazines and collections: Shabda in the 1950s, Dionysus in the 1960s, the covers of the poetry publishing cooperative Clearing House in the 1970s, etc.

⁷ Dilip Chitre describes the Marathi poetry scene in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘The biggest setback to Marathi poetry was people readopting Sanskrit metres and sanskritizing their poetry. The entire achievement of the Warkari saints was being neglected. They had opened up poetry by using metres like abhang and ovi which were very close to speech forms … What the poets of my generation had automatically begun to do was to write poetry as they spoke the language. And so in temper and idiom it came closer to the poetry of the saints' (Ramakrishnan 1995: 228).

⁸ See the ‘words for music’ section of The Boatride and Other Poems. Kolatkar, who never missed an issue of Rolling Stone, wrote song lyrics and at one point nourished the ambition of breaking into the international pop/rock scene. He played the guitar and the pakhawaj (Indian drum). Part of Kolatkar's library was sent to the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune; it includes countless books on rock, folk and the blues (Woody Guthrie's folk songs, instruction manuals on folk–blues guitar, issues of Jazz & Blues magazine, Richard Goldstein's The Poetry of Rock, etc.).

⁹ The book in English was never completed, but the 1200-page Marathi manuscript on Balwant Bua will eventually be published by Arun Kolatkar's Indian publisher, Pras Prakashan.

¹⁰ Kolatkar's intense association with bhajans and folk music must be distinguished from the revival of the bhakti repertoire within Indian classical traditions during the same period. Kolatkar often expressed his distaste for trained characterless ‘bhavgeet’ singers. Many bhajan singers, he says, were ‘people who were out to zap you with what they thought of as their virtuosity’, in contrast to Balwant Bua: ‘I had met someone at last whose voice, though untrained, and with just that bit of a ragged edge to it, could still breathe life into a lyric of Tukaram or Kabir’ (unpublished Balwant Bua book proposal).

¹¹ J. S. Hawley talks of ‘protean poetic identities’ (1988: 275).

¹² This might in part explain why Kolatkar published so little during his lifetime. His poetry had a huge gestation period before it was given its ‘definite’ form. To a certain extent, his work-in-progress was as malleable, unsettled and plural as, bhakti retellings, and was given countless provisional variants.

¹³ ‘The gods of mythology do not sweat, smell or sneeze, and the goddesses do not menstruate. But in folklore they do. They are embodied’ (Ramanujan 1999: 3).

¹⁴ This angularity to the nation and dissidence to mainstream culture distinguishes, to some extent, post-independence anti-establishment writers and artists from the preceding generation of pre-independence poets for whom the ideal of the nation and a certain form of cultural nationalism were important. Poets like Kolatkar, Mehrotra, Chitre and Jussawalla are freed from the idea of nation-building and seem, like Kabir (who ‘slipped through the fingers of both Islam and Hinduism’ [Mehrotra 2011: xx]), to target the divisibility of truth, the equation between Indianness and an exclusive, intangible prescribed identity.

¹⁵ See for example Novetzke (2008) on Namdev and the battle over the saint's legacy. The book also shows how identity in Maharashtra is tied closely to the remembrance of historical figures like bhakti saints, who are projected as symbols of India's glorious – often Hindu – past. On the contested appropriations of bhakti, the polemic between Dharmvir, ardent proponent of the Dalit cause, and the Brahmin critic Hariprasad Dwivedi is telling. Dharmvir vehemently accuses Brahmin critics of bringing Kabir back into the Hindu–Sanskrit tradition, of purging him of his low-caste origins, roughness and heterodoxy (Horstmann 2000, 2002).