Arun Kolatkar Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Chapters 5 and 6 of Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Moving Lines (Zecchini, 2014) consider the political dimension of Kolatkar’s poetry, in spite of the distanced tone of many of his poems, their deceptively simple or casual surface. If this poetry ought to be studied as poetry, and if a lot of Kolatkar’s poems are metatextual poems, poems about art and poetry, I also believe, with Edward Said, that texts are worldly. They must be interpreted, even when they deny it, as part of the social world and historical moments in which they are located. Political, social and historical circumstances press upon texts and writers, and Kolatkar’s poetry registered these with an acute, sometimes painful awareness, never as ‘some tiny, defensively constituted corner of the world’, of Bombay or Maharashtra, but as part of the ‘large, many windowed-house of human culture’ and history (Said, 2000, p. 382). ... In scratching away the veil of ‘habitualization’ or trivialization (Shklovski), art assumes an ethical and a political dimension. Kolatkar does not absolve himself from the violence of the world, refuses to anesthetize and aesthetize it and does not relegate certain voices, stories or realities to invisibility. The space of writing and the space of the nation itself, where politics of purification are taking place, are coterminous. But instead of cleansing space, history or language, Kolatkar’s hospitable poetry thrives on the pollution of footpaths, language and identity, on a hybridity that is also produced by history. For the rubbish of the city is also debris of history, and if the figure of the ragpicker is central to Chapters 4 and 5, the ‘story-teller’ is at the heart of Chapter 6. Kolatkar’s poetry is ‘unforgetful’. He burrowed away in the history of the world and the history of Bombay, awakening the stories that lay dormant in the streets, celebrating the multivocality of narratives and perspectives, as well as the bricolage or assemblage of reality. Kolatkar also confronts the Hinduization of the political and cultural landscape in India and Maharashtra, and challenges those who privilege space over time, ‘sons of the soil’ over outsiders and intangible narratives over ‘the essential impermanence’ (‘Meera’, KGP) his poetry celebrates.