“We were like cartographers, mapping the city”: An interview with Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

Abstract

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is one of the most distinguished “Bombay poets”, whose career spans six decades, from his first work Bharatmata: A Prayer (1966) brought out by the Ezra-Fakir Press he founded to his recently published Collected Poems 1969–2014. His contribution to the Indian English language tradition has been far-reaching, not only through his poetry itself, but through his role as translator, anthologist, editor and critic. In this interview, conducted on April 20–21, 2016, Mehrotra ranges over his extensive career, reflecting on the transnational web of genealogies, associations and translations that lie behind an “Indian poem”, on his friendship and artistic collaborations with Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla and A.K. Ramanujan, on the break that Indian writers and artists of his generation were trying to make, and on the way his own poetry was inspired by the American Beats. He also discusses his role in the little magazine/small press movement of the 1960s and 1970s when he edited ezra and damn you: a magazine of the arts, and co-founded the Clearing House collective.

Keywords:

• Bombay/Mumbai
• Indian poetry in English
• little magazines
• The Beats
• Arun Kolatkar
• modernism
• Nissim Ezekiel

Notes

1. A long poem that Arvind Krishna Mehrotra first published in mimeographed form.

2. The magazine Quest, “A Bi-monthly of Arts and Ideas”, sponsored by the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom and edited by Nissim Ezekiel, was one of the most influential English-language magazines devoted to cultural, literary and political matters in post-Independence India. See Graziano Krätli’s article in this special issue of “The Worlds of Bombay Poetry”.

3. See the interview with Adil Jussawalla in this issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

4. See this issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for Vinay Dharwadker’s translation of Arun Kolatkar’s poem (“Irani Restaurant”) from Marathi into English.

5. See the opening text of this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Arun Khopkar’s essay “Footloose and Fancy-free in Bombay: A Partial View of the 1960s and 1970s”) for an evocation of the Irani restaurants of Bombay.

6. Many different forms of medieval devotionality are known as bhakti, which first emerged in South India around the 6th century before spreading to the rest of India. Bhakti represented a compelling and non-exclusive movement of popular devotion, which included men and women from all castes, classes and stages of life. Bhakti “poets” such as Tukaram, Namdev or Jnandev from the Marathi tradition, or the 15th-century Kabir from North India rejected Sanskrit in order to produce extraordinary compositions and devotional songs in the vernaculars.

7. The remarkable first issue of the journal Poetry India (Ezekiel 1966) included translations of Vedic hymns from Sanskrit by P. Lal, translations of Tamil classical love poetry by A.K. Ramanujan, Marathi translations of Mardhekar by Dilip Chitre and of Tukaram by Arun Kolatkar.

8. Dilip Chitre’s translations of Tukaram later appeared in book form (Chitre 1991).

9. See Gulammohammed Sheikh’s interview in this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

10. Reference to a poem by Arun Kolatkar: “My name is Arun Kolatkar/I had a little matchbox/I lost it/then I found it/I kept it/in my right hand pocket/It is still there” (Kolatkar 2010).

11. See Gulammohammed Sheikh’s interview in this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

12. One of the most iconic bookshops of Bombay. See Arun Khopkar’s opening essay of this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for an evocation of Strand.

13. The Boatride and Other Poems (Kolatkar 2009), edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and brought out by Ashok Shahane’s Pras Prakashan, draws on uncollected and unpublished poems by Arun Kolatkar, and was published posthumously.

14. Part of Kolatkar’s unpublished papers. Quoted in Zecchini (2014, 72).