“A ground of more than necessary love”: Magic and loss in the poetry of K.D. Katrak

Abstract

Known primarily for his flamboyant and turbulent career in advertising, Kersy Katrak was also a remarkable poet. This article makes a case not only for retrieving Katrak’s poetic voice, and situating it in relation to his poetic peers in the 1960s and 1970s, but also for exploring the deep relation between Katrak’s publicity work and his poetic concerns. The article argues that the link may be drawn through Katrak’s lifelong engagement with esoteric practice.

Keywords:

• K.D. Katrak
• advertising
• magic
• poetry
• Mass Communications and Marketing (MCM)

Acknowledgements

Over the years, many people have generously shared with me their memories of Kersy Katrak and their thoughts on the life and times of MCM. I look forward to acknowledging their individual contributions in the longer work of which the present article is a preliminary part. For reflections that found their way into the present article I would like to express my gratitude to Shyam Benegal, Dilip Bhende, Sylvester da Cunha, Maia Katrak, Mohammed Khan, Ashok Kurien, Alyque Padamsee and Goutam Rakshit. I want to thank Laetitia Zecchini and Anjali Nerlekar for giving me the occasion to think about Katrak’s poetry; Adil Jussawalla, Gieve Patel and Keki Daruwalla for taking the time to remember and reflect on the predicaments of poetry; Sean Mahoney and Sy Ginsburg for helping me take baby steps in esoteric worlds; and Maia, Usha and Kersy Katrak for speaking so fearlessly about the places where the personal meets the professional. This article is dedicated to Usha Katrak, who passed away on December 12, 2015, just as I was finishing the penultimate draft.

Notes

1. For a different and longer version of this article, see my introduction to Katrak (2016).

2. We do learn a great deal about Katrak as a poet from his own, often very fine, writings on other poets – as well as from his wickedly funny pastiches of his contemporaries (see Katrak 1965, 1966a, 1966b, 1968b, 1982a, 1982b, 1983).

3. I use the terms “esoteric” and “exoteric” throughout this article to refer, respectively, to the inner or latent as opposed to the outer or manifest dimensions of life. Both the work of art and the work of advertising depend on actualizing inner or latent potentials in the shared substance of social life.

4. Katrak chose to read “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” at the memorial service held for Arun Kolatkar at the Kala Ghoda Festival in 2005. His own service would be held in the same venue three years later.

5. Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921): richly bearded Russian anarchist thinker and activist.

6. A popular household antiseptic.

7. Katrak was an active participant in Alkazi’s Theatre Unit, founded in 1954 as a successor to Sultan “Bobby” Padamsee’s Theatre Group. Alkazi directed several productions in which Katrak played against his future wife, including Lorca’s Yerma and Euripides’ Medea. More generally, Bombay’s English-language theater scene was, in the 1950s and 1960s, a gathering point for many young actors who would go on to be major players in the Bombay advertising world, including Alyque Padamsee, the da Cunha brothers (Gerson and Sylvester), Bharat Dabholkar, Roger Pereira, Homi Daruwalla and others.

8. Sri Madhava Ashish (1920–97), born Alexander Phipps in Edinburgh, came to India as an aircraft engineer during World War II. Following the war, he embarked on a spiritual quest that eventually brought him to the ashram at Mirtola, near Almora in the Kumaon foothills, where he took a vow of renunciation and became a devotee of founder Sri Yashoda Ma and her disciple Sri Krishna Prem. Following the latter’s death in 1965, Ashishda took over the ashram, which is where Katrak met him for the first time the following year. For more on Ashishda’s life and teachings, see Ginsburg (2001).

9. Katrak first joined advertising in 1959, after returning from a period spent in London.

10. If the yogi is the one who submits to the askesis of a discipline, then the bhogi is the “enjoyer, sensualist” (Madan 1987, 10). Katrak’s own definition of “bhikshu” is calculatedly unassuming: “A Buddhist monk. One committed to the Buddhist Way or simply to The Way” (Katrak and Katrak 1971, 29).

11. “How the Bhikshu Was Born” (1974) reappeared in Underworld as “Births” (Katrak 1979, 11–13).

12. This from a section of “The End of Winter” (Katrak 1972b, 16) that would not reappear in “Chairmen”. In the transition to “Chairmen”, other telling excisions include the removal of MCM colleague Indira Dhody’s name from the line “Nissim Ezekiels, Indira Dhodys, philistines and poets” (16; compare Katrak 1979, 22). Similarly, “Persephone. In the Heavens at Midnight” has lost the word “adman” when the poem reappears in Underworld as “Auras”.

13. Vivid descriptions of the rigors and rewards of resident life at Mirtola may be found in Pandey (2003) and Tandan (1997).

14. This 1998 interview was, sadly, the only time I met Katrak. At the time, I was conducting my PhD fieldwork on the Mumbai advertising business and had been referred to Katrak as a legend from the old days. I had no idea that he was a poet.