Arun Kolatkar is considered one of the most influential writers of India’s post-independence period. A bilingual poet who wrote in English and Marathi, he is most famous for his two early volumes of poetry: Jejuri (1976) in English and Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita (1976) in Marathi. Jejuri won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. It was so popular that three editions were quickly published to keep up with demand.

Kolatkar’s poetry is acclaimed for its nitty-gritty honesty, dramatic originality, and formal properties. A maverick of sorts, Kolatkar preferred to publish his works in little magazines and local periodicals of various sorts, beginning as early as 1955. Late in life, however, he published several more volumes of poetry in Marathi as well as English and gained widespread, enduring fame as one of India’s most important poets.

Kolatkar was born in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, on November 1, 1932. He attended schools there and graduated from the Rajaram High School in Kolhapur. Interested in graphic arts from an early age, he enrolled in art schools in Kolhapur and Pune and earned a diploma in painting in 1957 from the J. J. School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai), at which he had enrolled in 1949.

He subsequently earned his livelihood in advertising, working for such prestigious advertising agencies as Lintas—first as graphic designer, then as art director. Kolatkar lived in Mumbai, where he was famously inaccessible and averse to publicity and self-promotion, but known to his close circle of friends as an amateur musician and darkly witty.

His early Marathi poetry was decidedly avant-garde: difficult sometimes to decipher because partly in underclass argot, modernist in its sensibility, and surreal in expressive strategy. It has been associated critically with India’s Little Magazine Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Like the poetry of America’s Beat generation, Kolatkar’s early Marathi poetry seems humorous while disturbing, sinister, and mischievous all at once.

According to Amit Chaudhuri, it was written in what was for him “a time of reappraisal and ferment” when Kolatkar was interested in conveying “the extremities of urban and psychological experience” and the way the world looks to “a social outcast who had been dabbling in mind-altering drugs while reading up on Surrealism, William Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Indian mythology and Marathi devotional poets like [17th-century] Tukaram” (Chaudhuri).

During this period Kolatkar translated and reworked Tukaram’s “rather belligerent hymns to God” into English. Kolatkar was interested in historical versions of machismo as a way of communicating the “proximity between the disreputable, the culpable, and the religious—a living strand in Indian devotional culture and an everyday reality in places like Banaras and Jejuri” (Chaudhuri). The net result was a seamless, crossbred aesthetic.

Arun Kolatkar pictured at the Wayside Inn, Kala Ghoda, Bombay, 1995 (photo: Madhu Kapparath).

Jejuri and the later volume in English, Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), possess some of these traits and take for subject matter the working-class Kala Ghoda neighborhood of Mumbai but in general are not so daringly noir as the poems Kolatkar composed in Marathi, where he played dangerously fast and loose with the traditional properties of poetic idiom without losing expressive power.

In his later Marathi works—Chirimiri, Bhijki Vahi, and Droan (all published in 2004)—where Kolatkar’s poetic voice is less solipsistic and terrifying, the poems are more obviously satirical, and the social realities of Mumbai’s underworld are referenced with something more like sympathy.

Sarpa Satra (2004), composed in English, is similar to Bhijki Vahi (2004), which, like Kolatkar’s long narrative poem Droan, combines the representation of contemporary life in urban India with traditional myths and allegorical storytelling stratagems and offers a contemporary commentary on the ambiguities, complexities, and contradictions of life in a great Indian metropolis—a poetic commentary not so much social or cultural as, perhaps, philosophical and pragmatic. There is no hint of the ideological rhetoric associated with the political Left.

For many readers Jejuri represented an in-your-face version of the period’s anxiety-ridden search for identity in the postcolonial era. It is a poem about the 1960s experience of an agnostic, cosmopolitan young Marathi man who visits a dilapidated temple complex at Jejuri in the company of a busload of (perhaps sincere) pilgrims. He takes note of the place as a physical reality, one—for him, at least—seemingly devoid of any consequential spirituality or current relevance. The poem conveys the modernist sense of dislocation from cultural roots of the modern metropolitan and his emphatic recognition of the shabbiness of city life wherever he happens to go for respite or illumination.

In contrast, readers of the Kala Ghoda Poems consider this later work a milestone of a different sort for Indian poetry in English, remarkable for conveying a mature poetic vision of urban India with its “pockets of daydreaming, idling, and loitering, its loucheness,” an India that contrasts in remarkable ways with that represented in the acclaimed novels of Salman Rushdie and that heads up another genealogy of literary and cinematic influence just as important as Rushdie’s (Chaudhuri).

Kolatkar received the Kusumagraj Puraskar awarded by the Marathwada Shitya Parishad in 1991 and the Bahinabai Puraskar in 1995. He was six times awarded the prestigious CAG Award in the field of advertising and elected to the CAG Hall of Fame during his lifetime. He was posthumously awarded honors for Bhijaki Vahi by the Sahitya Akademi.

Bibliography

Chaudhuri, Amit. Introduction to Jejuri. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006.
Islam, Khademul. “Arun Kolatkar (1932–2004): Of Coups, Quest and the Letter.” The Daily Star 5, no. 128 (October 2, 2004). https://www.thedailystar.net/2004/10/02/d41002210289.html
Kolatkar, Arun. Jejuri. New York: New York Review of Books, 2006.
Ramnayaran, Gowri. “No Easy Answers.” The Hindu (September 5, 2004). Available online. URL: http://www.thehindu.com. Accessed on April 23, 2025. Contains full text of the extraordinary “An Old Woman” from Jejuri.

Categories: British Literature, Literature

Tags: Arun Kolatkar analysis, Arun Kolatkar awards, Arun Kolatkar biography, Arun Kolatkar criticism, Arun Kolatkar cultural criticism, Arun Kolatkar influence, Arun Kolatkar Jejuri characters, Arun Kolatkar Jejuri review, Arun Kolatkar literary style, Arun Kolatkar Little Magazine Movement, Arun Kolatkar modernism, Arun Kolatkar narrative poetry, Arun Kolatkar poems English Marathi, Arun Kolatkar poetic form, Arun Kolatkar poetic language, Arun Kolatkar poetry analysis, Arun Kolatkar summary, Arun Kolatkar surrealism, Arun Kolatkar symbolism, Arun Kolatkar themes, Arun Kolatkar urban poetry, bilingual Indian poets, Indian English poetry, Jejuri analysis, Jejuri character study, Jejuri criticism, Jejuri historical context, Jejuri interpretation, Jejuri metaphors, Jejuri myth criticism, Jejuri plot, Jejuri poem analysis, Jejuri postcolonial reading, Jejuri spiritual critique, Jejuri summary, Jejuri symbolism, Jejuri temple poem, Jejuri themes, Kala Ghoda Poems analysis, Marathi modernist poetry, postcolonial poetry India, Sarpa Satra themes