C. Copyright Bruce King

2004: Ezekiel, Moraes, Kolatkar

by Bruce King

For the national and international community of Indian poets who write in English 2004 was a sad year; three major writers died ‑ Nissim Ezekiel (b.1924), Dom Moraes (b.1938) and Arun Kolatkar (b.1932). Each was an excellent poet, a well‑loved individual, and significant on the Indian cultural scene. Each was known abroad and has left work which will continue to be read and anthologized. If it were not for the deaths of the three writers 2004 would have been a vintage year with the publication of Moraes' Collected Poems 1954 ‑ 2004, Kolatkar's two volumes ‑ Sarpa Satra and Kala Ghoda Poems ‑ and a new edition of Ezekiel's Collected Poems at the printers. Both Moraes and Kolatkar knew they were dying; the former consciously wrote poems about the experience, the latter worked to have the two books in print before his death. For those who do not know their poetry this is an introduction.

Ezekiel was perhaps the central figure in the evolution of Indian poetry in English to a more modern idiom than the amateurism and windy, shapeless, overblown spiritualist epics prevalent when he began to write. He made Indian poetry up to date. His poems were about urban life, economical, well crafted, often filled with ironies, and directly communicated to the reader. Although recognizably about an Indian and India they were on the same wave length as poetry then being written on both sides of the Atlantic. An intellectual, his reading and interests ranged from the existentialists, W. C. Williams, and African art to the still lively factional disputes of Marxism and Socialism.

While holding various full‑time jobs Ezekiel was a leader of those writing poetry in English when politicians and most intellectuals were trying to impose Hindi as a national language and when Indian literature too often consisted of wrenching stories of peasant life, romanticized tales of nobility, the cultural conflicts of those returning from education abroad, and, best, quiet comedies of provincial society in which tradition prevailed. In using his own disquiets as subject matter, Ezekiel shifted the focus of Indian poetry to contemporary life in India, especially Bombay, the nation's largest, liveliest, and most culturally productive city. He remained a central figure in Bombay's literary community and he wrote and published throughout his life.

Born into the ancient Indian but then impoverished Bene Israel community of Jews, his parents were highly educated teachers: he was raised with a largely secular outlook and took an early interest in politics and ideas. By 1948 he joined the after‑the‑war migration of former citizens of the British Empire to London where he shared a basement room, barely supported himself with odd jobs, attended lectures in philosophy, had poems in literary journals, and published his first book of poetry, A Time to Change (1952). The title refers to what was to be a theme of his early books, the need for moral decision when faced by opposing attractions, especially those of the body and a settled, productive life. This would take various directions, usually involving sexual desire or love in contrast to marriage, and was often resolved in poems about art giving form to the conflict. 'London' is about those formative years:

Sometimes I think I'm still

in that basement room,

a permanent and proud

metaphor of struggle

for and against the same

creative, self‑destructive self.

After three and a half years of intellectual and sexual adventure he worked his way back to Bombay scrubbing decks and shoveling coal on a steamer.

He soon had a job on The Illustrated Weekly of Bombay where his responsibilities included reading the manuscripts of and advising other Indian poets, such as the soon famous Dom Moraes. Whereas most Indian poets in English were amateur versifiers, Ezekiel, influenced by Rilke, insisted poetry was a career which a writer worked to master. He later quarreled with P. Lal (whose Writers Workshop was then the only significant publisher of Indian Poetry in English) over what he felt was a lack of critical standards, and he became the leader of those who were aiming to write as well as English‑language poets abroad. His decision to return to India (he could have stayed in London or emigrated to Israel), his active involvement in Indian literary and intellectual life, and his setting his poems in Bombay, made him India's equivalent to New York's Jewish cultural community, someone whose minority status made him especially conscious of the contradictions of modern life. Although his outlook was secular he never severed his connections to the Bene Israelis and at times, such as asking his mother to arrange his marriage, he unexpectedly showed his need to be linked to a community. As the cultural and financial energies shifted from Delhi and Calcutta to Bombay, India's most cosmopolitan and modern city, Ezekiel became one of the nation's more important cultural figures. He represented the opposite of the Hindiizing, peasant‑idealizing, Soviet‑sympathizing, nationalist cultural assertion of the government and many intellectuals.

He contributed to the intellectual life of India as a poet, literary critic, art critic, editor of literary magazines, playwright, advisor to publishers, newspaper columnist, university professor, and in oppositional politics. He seemed to know everyone and be everywhere, shaping opinion as well as poetry. Besides becoming a university professor he was an editor of PEN's newsletter and his office at PEN was practically his home. Perhaps because after his stint on the Illustrated Weekly he had managed some businesses, and perhaps because of his helping to edit political journals, he somehow managed to get money, at least for short periods, to support the publication of poetry; the years during the mid‑1950s when he was editor of Quest, a general publication of arts and ideas which was associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, encouraged a generation of poets. It was the Indian equivalent of the British Encounter. The six issues he edited of Poetry India (1966‑7) are still regarded as a high point for the translation of excellent poetry from other Indian languages into English verse by bilingual writers. A social democrat and humanist who disliked the way India was leaning during the Cold War he was one of those who brought the study of American literature to Indian universities. When Mrs. Gandhi proclaimed an Emergency, 1975‑7, and the nation's political journals shut down he started and edited Freedom First.

Many of the poets who are now thought of as the canon of modern Indian poetry in English were his friends, studied with him, were published by him, recommended to publishers by him, or were influenced by him for a significant time ‑‑ Dom Moraes, A.K. Ramanujan, Eunice de Souza, R. Parthasarathy, Adil Jussawalla, Saleem Peeradina, K. D. Katrak, Gieve Patel, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Arun Kolatkar's poetry was first published by him. He is the subject of many poems by Indians, some seeing him as a model, some replying to his views, some, by women, mocking him as a famous poet seducer.

While an example of a writer engaged in the world Ezekiel remained primarily a poet who kept publishing verse of variable quality throughout his life. Many of his poems, such as 'Enterprise', 'Night of the Scorpion', 'Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher', 'Marriage', 'Philosophy', 'Background, Casually', and 'Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T. S.', are often and rightly anthologized. While some of the better poems concern the conflict between desire and ethics, others take an amused look at situations when cultures and languages come into conflict. He remains one of the few Indian poets (as contrasted to those who lived abroad such as A. K. Ramanujan and Agha Shahid Ali) whose poems are known and taught in other countries.

Ezekiel's best‑known poem outside of India is probably 'The Night of the Scorpion', written when he was a visiting Professor at Leeds University, England, and meant to be read to Commonwealth Literature students. The poem tells of the reactions of two parents when their child is bitten by a scorpion and humorously reveals a conflict between the father's education and his reversion in an emergency to peasant superstition. But even this poem which is consciously written for English students concludes with what might be described as a Jewish mother joke, the effect of which is to universalize the emotions, characters, and the conflict between cultural traditions and modern knowledge. Ezekiel's well‑known 'Background, Casually', another example of his nationalism, was written for the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival:

I have made my commitments now.

This is one: to stay where I am,

As others choose to give themselves

In some remote and backward place.

My backward place is where I am.

Many years later in 'The Egoist's Prayers VII' he wrote

Confiscate my passport, Lord,

I don't want to go abroad.

Let me find my song

where I belong.

Ezekiel always had desires to roam, whether sexually or to move

on to another job, another place, another literary manner, and his best poetry contrasts such urges of renewal and creativity with his considered judgment that a settled, dedicated life is better. But the temptation was always there and in 'The Egoist's Prayers III' he asks God, 'But do you really mind/ half a bite of it?'

Although a father of modern Indian poetry in English he was not a radically original poet. Rejecting the long‑winded spiritualism and twee estheticism of much contemporary Indian poetry in English, he began by writing formal, tightly rhymed verse in iambic pentameter in which he expressed his search for a balanced way to live. He increasingly became the poet of Bombay, using it as the backdrop for his poems, at times imitating its use of English, and making it a symbol of modern anxieties and confusions. In this he was a post‑colonial heir of such writers as Baudelaire and Eliot although his actual verse manner was somewhere between post‑1939 Auden and the Movement.

The Unfinished Man (1960) is an impressive, short, tightly written volume in which the conflicting attractions of freedom and moral responsibility are crystallized in the libido and marriage, and set in a city, Bombay, which figures economically and shadowy as both backdrop and projection of the self. He evolved as a poet with the times, in the late 1960s and 1970s using LSD he wrote poems to go with posters, increasingly used free verse, and turned to meditation to soothe his soul. As he became less critical his poetry sometimes became slack. While there are interesting poems among the long later sequences, they seldom are as good as the ironic, wry, tight poems in which he created what has come to be thought of as the model for the Bombay poets. Such Bombay poems are often short, ironic, witty, monologues or conversations about an ethical problem, or observations of and moral reflections on some emblematic character or situation. Whether it is a newspaper report, meeting a friend, a social event, or describing a scene, the context is clearly Bombay in its varied aspects although the background is more present as an image or allusion than filled in.

Ezekiel's achievement as a poet was finished by the time of his Collected Poems 1952‑1988 (1989) although he afterwards continued to contribute verse to literary journals. The new edition of his Collected Poems (2005) contains only one poem not included previously. The last decade of his life was a terrible period of being on his own while suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He did not wash, wore smelly clothes, lived among filth, and was frightened, under‑nourished, ashamed, and unwilling to be helped. He feared returning to his house and begged to stay with friends; he gave what he and others had to beggars.

The story of his early years, his continuing relationship to the Bene Israelites, why he never divorced and his wife's revenge, and especially his pitiable old age, can be followed in R. Raj Rao's Nissim Ezekiel: the authorized biography (2000), a useful although badly written and malicious book. Rao, a poet whom Ezekiel helped and now a university professor, claims that his mentor did not sufficiently appreciate his poetry. Now that he has uncloseted himself Rao wishes he spent the ten years of his life collecting material about a gay or lesbian poet rather than a womanizer.

Although from another of India's minorities, Dom Moraes was almost Ezekiel's opposite. Born into a Roman Catholic family, his father, Frank Moraes, a famous newspaper editor of Goan origins, his mother a medical doctor, Moraes might be thought of as a product of the late colonial anglophone elite. His father was one of those both promoted by the British as they prepared to leave India and one of those who challenged them, a friend of many of the nationalist leaders. When Dom was seven his mother began to go insane. She developed a religious mania, would scream, throw furniture from windows, lock Dom in a room, and burn him with cigarettes. For the remainder of her life she would be in and out of mental homes. At first her husband tried to ignore the problem, go to his office, and leave Dom alone with her and the servants. Later he escaped for some years as an editor in Sri Lanka and Australia taking Dom with him, at times sending Dom back to India in the hope that somehow this would make his wife calmer. He would continue to think that, and plead with Dom to take care of the mother, even when Dom was an adult and had a career of his own abroad. Dom came to associate India with his mad, violent mother and hated it. After attending school in Bombay, 1954, he studied Latin in England as preparation for Oxford and traveled in Europe. He was already a writer having published a book on cricket when he was thirteen; through his father he had met Stephen Spender and other visiting poets in India and had been published in literary magazines in England and the USA.

In London he soon became part of a then and still famous Soho bohemia; his circle of drinking friends and acquaintances included the painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, the poets George Barker, W. S. Graham, David Gascoyne, the publisher David Archer, and Henrietta (born Audrey Wendy Abbott), the beautiful, amoral, witty, foul‑mouthed, hard‑drinking, thieving, drug‑taking, Queen of Soho. Archer's famous Parton Press (Dylan Thomas' publisher) would publish his first book of poetry, A Beginning (1957), while Moraes was still a student at Oxford (1956‑9). It won the Hathornden Prize, the first time it had been given since the war, and Moraes was the first Indian as well as its youngest recipient. Henrietta, who had already been married and had children, seduced him when he was eighteen and became his first wife, living with him in Oxford and London in a house in Chelsea she had been given by a rich admirer. Moraes eventually left her as he did his second British wife, and later his third, this time Indian, wife, but for a decade he was very much in fashion, the lover of many beautiful women, a highly profiled poet, journalist and magazine editor, and acquaintance of such famous poets as W. H. Auden and Alan Ginsberg. He was the author of Poems, which was a Poetry Society choice (1960), John Nobody (1965), and Beldam Etcetera (1966). Poems 1955‑65 was published in the USA by Macmillan. Gone Away (1960), the first of his three autobiographies (republished under the collective title A Variety of Absences [2003], appeared when he was twenty‑two; the second, My Son's Father (1968), when he was twenty‑eight.

As a poet Moraes began as a dreamy romantic heir of the British verse tradition. He was more likely to echo Spenser, the cavalier poets, Keats, or early Yeats in contrast either to the Movement poets, the remaining modernists, or the Imagists. By the mid‑sixties he was clearly influenced by Auden, but he never was an experimenter, avant‑gardist, or influenced by American verse although he knew many good American poets in England including Allen Tate and Sylvia Plath. He was, like Derek Walcott, one of those writers from the former colonies who had a better ear for the harmonies of English verse than most British poets, but, unlike Walcott, he had nothing to say about colonialism, nationalism, racism, cultural conflict, the Cold War, existentialism, or any of the major political and intellectual themes of the time. His apparent lack of engagement was not from lack of knowledge ‑ as a reporter he covered the Eichmann trial in Israel and was later as a journalist to write about the Congo, the brutal conditions under which Communist prisoners were held in Indonesia, and many of the world's problems ‑ but such writing was in prose; his poetry was about himself, his mother, his hurts, or used conventional love themes addressed to some woman with whom he was then involved. Allen Tate incorrectly told him that no twentieth‑century female could be seduced with such old‑fashioned poetry.

Eventually his muse left him, he wrote no more poetry for seventeen years during which time he worked for the UN in New York and was, ironically, sent to India as a UN gift to Mrs. Gandhi who claimed she needed him to write educational television scripts. Actually she had no use for him, although he was later to write her biography. Stranded in India he would learn that he had been away from London too long and from now on would need support himself in Asia which, after a period in Singapore, concluded with him unhappily stuck in Bombay as the highest paid journalist in India grinding out daily newspaper columns, writing coffee‑table books, and drinking far too much. Moraes at this point of his life was a formerly successful poet in England who was barely remembered there and although he had been one of the first modern Indian poets he had written no poetry in India for decades although he kept trying.

Then unexpectedly but significantly during a time when he was out of work and no longer writing much prose the muse made her appearance again. A privately printed volume, Absences (1983) showed him tentatively trying out new verse manners, a less ornamental reporterish style as he attempted to write about his experiences abroad as a journalist. His Collected Poems 1957‑1987 sold extremely well in India, followed by Serendip (1990), both published by Penguin India. He was a poet once more. He remained haunted by his early success in England, and many of his later poems looked back on that time with nostalgia and sense of loss.

But other tones and themes were starting appear, often when using masks especially of ancient warriors, or when addressing Leela, his third wife, a Swiss‑born Indian who was previously a movie star, model, and who had walked out of a brutal marriage to a wealthy heir of a hotel chain. Some of these poems allude to a harsh godless world only made significant by activity, while the love poems are conscious that Dom and Leela are aging, alone, have had disappointments in their lives, and will eventually die. 'Future Plans' concludes with him and Leela 'A little tired, but in the end,/ Not unhappy to have lived.'

Moraes even points to the oddness of his poems in that they seem personal and confessional but actually he is not there, there is always a distance, a reserve, a mask, between poet and reader, as if there were an emotional shell around the speaker, a habit, we know from the autobiographies, that he developed as a youth. 'Barbur', one of his historical warrior figures, speaks of himself as 'lonely in all lands', claims 'my books are where I bleed',

If you look for me, I am not here.

My writings will tell you where I am.

Tingribirdi, they point out my life like

Lines drawn in the map of my palm.

Soon after Moraes promised in verse to grow old and remain with Leela until death he fell in love with someone else, a younger married woman with children who was separated from her husband. This led to emotional renewal, an intense period of writing, and some of his best poetry. In Cinnamon Shade (Carcanet Press, 2001) was the first volume of his poems published in England since 1966 and is modeled upon those Renaissance sequences in which poems of desire and complaint form an implied narrative about the problems faced by the two lovers, their psychology, their moods, their pains, their past, the poet's love and the woman's departures.

In Cinnamon Shade begins with a cankered, snail‑infested garden, representing the poet's past life, to which the concluding poem returns as the lady has left him;

Because of the moon, you have left my side,

for the moon made you different and afraid.

But wherever you are, I imagine you still,

sedated into sleep, long eyelashes sealed,

moist lips bereft. Rest in cinnamon shade.

Deep tides of darkness will cover the wound.

But of two once made one, what will be left?

Only footprints on water, handmarks on wind.

The mixture of sensual longing, erotic, almost pornographic desire ('most lips bereft'), conveyed in such romantic poeticisms, and formalism, would be mockable if it were not so excellent. Indeed many of the poems seem to be part of a canon of an invented former age of poetry which spoke differently than we do although the emotions are recognizably universal and applicable to Moraes. 'Alexander' proclaims

Write, scribe, I was my army. The world was mine.

Exiled from two countries I hated and loved.

At the end of the day I was my own enemy.

But, scribe, write: at the end of it I had lived

a life so crowded others envied it; also

my path would not have been gladly chosen by most. Look at me. I am my own ghost.

There are poeticisms, unnatural word order in places, but also

a mastery of technique, literary echoes, phrasing and phrase making, tone and sound, drama, and contrasts of form and breath groups. The history of English poetry is behind and has made this stanza.

Moraes continued in Typed with One Finger (2003) to write about the drama of his new woman, his renewed sense of self that came with being in love once more, and his pride in his past, and he hoped that Carcanet would publish an updated version of his collected poems. But he was suffering from cancer, was operated upon, and rather than change his ways and take treatments to prolong his life he decided to live as he had although he knew this would soon lead to his death. The powerful new lyrics in Collected Poems 1954‑2004 were written with such consciousness. The final sequence of twelve sonnets are magnificent in their range of emotions and memories, their variety of dictions, their compression, their recall and reinterpretation of his earlier poems, their wit and puns, their literary echoes, their explicit reference to events that had shaped his life, their lack of self‑pity, and their acceptance that life has no purpose except to live it fully. These are remarkable poems that should be given detailed explication, they belong to the classics of our time. Suddenly at the end of his life Moraes became a great poet.

Here is the first of the sonnets:

From a heavenly asylum, shrivelled Mummy,

glare down like a gargoyle at your only son,

who now has white hair and can hardly walk.

I am he who was not I. It's hot in this season

and the acrid reek of my body disturbs me

in a city where the people die on pavements.

That I'm terminally ill hasn't been much help.

There is no reason left for anything to exist.

Goodbye now. Don't try and meddle with this.

Why does your bloated corpse cry out to me

that I took from the hospital, three days dead?

I'd have come before, if the doctors had said.

I couldn't kiss you goodbye, you stank so much.

Or bear to touch you. Anyway, bye‑bye, Mumsie.

Moraes always had the useful ability to assume that his readers were interested in him, his pains, his past, and his self‑pity. There were even a few poems in which he unexpectedly tapped into the world of nightmares and the horrific. But he never before expressed such a wide range of emotions or commanded so many different attitudes and dictions in one volume let alone a single poem. While each or these final twelve sonnets is amazing, the other new poems in Collected Poems 1954 ‑2004 are also impressive. Those who do not already know Moraes' poetry should begin by reading his later work. It is like discovering a Sylvia Plath, but one who could compress many poems into a sonnet.

In the Times Literary Supplement 'International Books of the Year' for 2004 the well‑known novelist Pankaj Mishra claimed that

Indian poetry in English has a longer and more distinguished

tradition than Indian fiction in English, and may finally become better known in the West when Arun Kolatkar's narrative poem, Jejuri (1976), is published by the New York Review of Books in 2005. Kolatkar published two volumes of poetry, Kala Ghoda and Sarpa Satra (both by Pras Prakashan) before his untimely death this year. Moving deftly from street life in Bombay to Hindu myths, these last poems confirm his cult reputation as the greatest Indian poet of his generation. [TLS, 3 December 3004: 10]

Kolatkar was that good a poet. Although his work was known

only by those who sought it, he was a poet of world class with a very individual way of looking at the world. In his writing every cliché is transformed into something new and unexpected, a transformation by imagination, language, and tone. If Moraes is a master of older verse idioms, Kolatkar's realm is street talk, the colloquial, the poetry of the ordinary and anonymous.

Take, for instance, 'Pi‑dog', a nine‑part sequence which

begins Kala Ghoda Poems (2004), a volume of thematic connected poetry. Here a mangy street dog rests on a traffic island thinking of its ancestors and circumstances while Bombay sleeps. There is the quiet humor, physical realism, colloquial speech, subtle contrasts of registers and linguistic invention, and unobtrusive harmonies typical of Kolatkar's verse. It all seems so relaxed, the kind of seeming free verse to which prose aspires, yet behind the first five stanzas is familiarity with a great range of the world's poetry, the kind of distant echoes, allusions, and structures that would make a scholar's paradise. I find myself murmuring Horace, John Dryden, Thomas Gray, T. S. Eliot, W. C. Williams, knowing that any source or influence could be right or wrong as this is written by a poet who has absorbed such sources and influences to make them his own:

This is the time of day I like best,

and this the hour

when I can call this city my own;

when I like nothing better

than to lie down here, at the exact centre

of this traffic island

(or trisland as I call it for short,

and also to suggest

a triangular island with rounded corners)

that doubles as a parking lot

on working days,

a corral for more than fifty cars,

when it's deserted early in the morning,

and I'm the only sign

of intelligent life on the planet.

The poem rapidly moves by way of whimsy to the history and mixed culture of the city. The dog claims his body looks like 'a seventeenth‑century map of Bombay' with its seven islands black irregular spots 'on a body the colour of old parchment'. According to 'a strong family tradition' he is a descendent, 'matrilineally/ to the only bitch' among thirty hounds which survived the sea voyage from England, imported

by Sir Bartle Frere

in eighteen hundred and sixty‑four,

with the crazy idea

of introducing fox‑hunting to Bombay.

Just the sort of thing,

he felt the city badly needed.

Kolatkar is a master of the incongruous and the absurd in reality. Sir Bartle Frere actually existed as a British colonial administrator and was famous in his time; there are mountain peaks, fruits, and other memorials in former British colonies. It is typical of Kolatkar to focus on the importation of hunting hounds to show both the British influence on Indian culture and some of it inappropriateness.

The classical, Sanskritic, Hindu tradition was little better. On his paternal side the pi‑dog claims descent from the dog in Mahabharata who remains with Yudhishthira long after such warriors as Draupadi, Sahadeva, Nakul, Arjuna, and Bhima 'had fallen by the wayside'. The epic roll call contrasts with the physical description of the journey into the Himalayas ('frostbitten and blinded with snow,/ dizzy with hunger and gasping for air') which itself jostles with the conclusion in which the epic 'flying chariot' appears in the same context as the colloquial 'airlift', 'get on board', and 'made it to' :

. help came

in the shape of a flying chariot

to airlift him to heaven.

Yudhishthira, the noble price, refused

to get on board unless dogs were allowed.

And my ancestor became the only god

to have made it to heaven

in recorded history.

In still another version of 'man's devotion to dog', Harlan

Ellison's 1969 science fiction short story, 'A Boy and his Dog', which is described as 'a cultbook among pi‑dogs everywhere', the boy

sacrifices his love,

and serves up his girlfriend

as dogfood to save the life of his

starving canine master.

The range of literary allusions continues with an explanation of the pi‑dog's name, 'Ugh', which, rather than an expression of disgust, is supposed to come from Sanskrit, 'the U pronounced as in Upanishad'; Ugh is 'short for Ughekalikadu,/ Siddharayya's/ famous dog'. Such literary allusions are supposedly part of the dog's thoughts as he meditates in the morning sun surrounded by the concrete highrise buildings of Bombay knowing that soon the city will awake and he will 'surrender the city/ to its so‑called masters.'

The choice of science fiction is not just for its story.

Kolatkar shows that the Sanskritic literature of ancient India, the literature which is allegorized, spiritualized, treated as moral and historical truths, and used as a foundation of Hindu nationalism, really is little different than present‑day science fiction, a collection of amusing, often sophisticated invented tales, meant to entertain, amuse, shock, a world of fantasy. In doing so he is making a cultural statement which is also political. His is a poetry of reality, of pi‑dogs, of saying the world is as it is, a place of colloquial language and the present, in contrast to the idealization of the past, its literature, and ancient Indian languages, symbols of both official Indian cultural nationalism and of the Hindu revivalist movement with its radical often fanatic politics. Kolatkar is often thought an aesthete, someone detached from notions of literature as engagement, but throughout his career as a poet he was creating a body of work which in its unique way is a tribute to the skeptical here and now as opposed to the dogmatic, idealizing, and ideological.

The long thirty‑one part 'Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda', at

the center of the volume, mostly observes for an hour the various people, objects, and actions around Flora Fountain in Bombay. Throughout the city people are eating but here the main attraction is an old lady selling from 'a jumbo aluminum box full of idlis' with 'a bucket full of sambar//fit for fire‑eaters'. She is 'Our Lady of Idlis' and sits on one of the many concrete blocks surrounding the traffic island, where the Pi‑Dog slept and meditated, around Flora Fountain. This is another version of or symbol of Bombay:

Each and every hungry and homeless soul

within a mile of the little island

is soon gravitating towards it

to receive the sacrament of idli,

to anoint palates

with sambar,

to celebrate anew, every morning,

the seduction and death

of the demon of hunger

(threatening the entire world)

at the hands of Gauri

in the form of a humble idli.

They come from all over; walking, running, dancing, limping, stumbling, rolling

‑ each at his own speed.

Besides the many characters described ('the laughing Buddha', 'the old pirate', 'the shoeshine boy', 'that old paralytic in a wheelchair/ made by cannibalising two bicycles', 'the legless hunchback', a 'scruffy looking stranger') there are also crows, dogs, and other species who join in the communal feast of idlis until the seller departs and the street drama, this urban part‑comic, realistic version of romance, ends and all we are left with is awareness of how art and imagination invests the ordinary with interest.

The pop‑up cafeteria

disappears

like a castle in a children's book

‑along with the king and the queen,

the courtiers,

the court jester and the banqueting hall,

the roast pheasants and the suckling pigs,

as soon as the witch

shuts the book on herself ‑

and the island returns

to its flat old

boring self.

Arun Kolatkar was born in Kohlapur, Maharashtra, to Hindu, Marathi‑speaking, artistic parents. He was educated bilingually in Marathi and English, took a diploma in art in Bombay, and was one of India's best‑paid graphic designers. He pointedly had no portfolio and claimed that those who did not know his work could not afford him. He designed the cover and layout of his books, which are a treat, simple yet works of visual art. When he wanted special effects he would write his poems in affective shapes. He was both an English‑ and a Marathi‑language poet, publishing in both languages, and is better known for his Marathi work. He was also somewhat of an eccentric. He had once been a heavy drinker and as a consequence lost his first wife; he lived in a tiny apartment with his second wife, a place so small it was necessary to eat outside to be seated at a table. The apartment was, however, filled with books, especially volumes of poetry from around the world. Kolatkar had no telephone, it was necessary to leave messages with an upstairs neighbor. If you wanted to see him he could always be found two days a week at Bombay's Way Side Inn, a cafe near Flora Fountain, seemingly left over from the late colonial past. It serves fish and chips, fried eggs and bacon, and tea, and Kolatkar always had a table reserved for lunch with a group of Marathi‑speaking friends, writers and intellectuals. He was at least as much immersed in Marathi as English and world culture. He spent a decade taping and trying to translate into English a popular entertainer and story teller. Nothing came of the project as Kolatkar with his sensitivity to language could not find an English literary genre and diction suitable for his purpose. Prose lost the poetry, poetry inflated or ironized.

Kolatkar's poetry continues a Marathi modernist tradition

previously best known for B. S. Mardheker (1909‑56) who had already fused Surrealism, the Imagists, Eliot and what is called Indian medieval or Saints' poetry. (Saints' poetry directly addresses the divine in a colloquial often erotic language with similar kinds of paradox and wit to that found in Europe religious and metaphysical poetry. Such poetry in India was written for many centuries in regional languages by devoted men and women long after and in contrast to the Sanskritic classics.) It is a lively regional modernism that has produced several good bilingual poets including currently Kolatkar's friend Dilip Chitre and Ranjit Hoskote. Kolatkar early explored the possibilities of the highly imagistic and its opposite, the anti‑poetic. His best‑known early poem is 'Three Cups of Tea' supposedly originally written in Bombay‑Hindi and translated into an amusing American tough‑guy realism that sounds like something written in the 1930s or 40s,

i want my pay i said

to the manager

you'll get paid said

the manager

but not before the first

don't you know the rules?

While 'Three Cups of Tea' has attracted much attention in India because it was in a very local form of Hindi before being translated by the author into a particular kind of American realism, I think it really shows Kolatkar's love of parody, tone, postures, and language. I even suspect there was no original from which it was translated; this is poet with a sense of humor and a delight in pastiche.

Kolatkar's 'the boat ride' tells of a touristy trip around Bombay harbor as both incredibly dull and yet surreal as the bored eye and imagination invests uninteresting material with the amazing.

because a sailor waved

back

to a boy another boy

waves to another sailor

in the clarity of air

the gesture withers for want

of correspondence and

the hand that returns to him

the hand his knee accepts

as his own is the hand

of an aged person a hand

that must remain patient

and give the boy it's a part of time

to catch up.

A similar purposeful flatness mixed with occasional free‑associations and sudden intrusions of the author can be found in Jejuri (which was awarded the Commonwealth Poetry prize), recounting a day trip to a famous ruined temple complex near Pune. The tone of the sequence of poems is argued over by Indian critics, probably because there are many possible attitudes as seen in 'The Doorstep'

That's no doorstep.

It's a pillar on its side.

Yes.

That's what it is.

The speaker has an eye for realistic details and mentions seeing underpants drying in a temple door, a calf in what might be a temple or cowshed,

what is god

and what is stone

the dividing line

if it exists

is very thin

at Jejuri

..

there is no crop

other than god

and god is harvested here

around the year.

When an old woman wants to get paid for taking the tourist to a shrine, she says 'What else can an old woman do/ on hills as wretched as these?'

Jejuri offers more than a skeptical, bored, tourist's perspective. Three of the poems allude to Chaitanya, a Bengali saint who tried to reform Jejuri.

he popped a stone

in his mouth

and spat out gods.

After Chaitanya left the holy place returned to cow‑like mindless faith, 'the herd of legends/ returned to its gazing.' Contrasted to the lack of dynamism in the shrines there is the life the poet sees around him in butterflies and in chickens dancing. (This is also visually a great poem. Kolatkar, a graphic designer, was an excellent concrete poet.) When the poet tries to leave he is faced by all the inefficiencies of India. The train station indicator and clock do not work, no one answers his questions, there is no way of telling when the next train will come. Jejuri is less a poem about loss of faith than, indirectly, about a national loss of the kinds of dynamism that produced the saints and their shrines, an energy found in nature (which some Hindus would claim is the actual source of religion).

As much as Kolatkar was interested in life's dynamism, a characteristic he found in the streets of Bombay as well as in nature, he also carried on a running battle with the ways that India's classical Sanskritic culture had been ossified by brahmins and scholars or used as a basis for social injustice, Hindu extremism, and for an unintelligible poetic diction that was meaningless to most people and resulted in bad art. Sarpa Satra, one of the two final volumes he published knowing he would soon die, retells from an alternative perspective the Snake Sacrifice performed by King Janemejaya in Mahabharata. If, by the way, you do not know this section of Mahabharata (Book VI, 90, 1‑27) you should read it as it is great, a wild precursor of both Star War's futuristic space battles and Uccello's stylishly patterned manneristic scenes of warfare. The sacrifice is intended to annihilate the Nagas, or Snake People, and like much of Mahabharata, uses war between various groups to teach a spiritual message. Such wars and stories are usually allegorized not only morally but also as alluding to actual historical battles such as between the northern invading light‑skinned Aryans and black southern Indians. Unfortunately most translations of Mahabharata are barely readable. Sarpa Sara modernizes and makes colloquial the often incomprehensible language common to translations of Sanskrit into English:

And I think it's your job,

Aastika.

I mean who else is there to do it?

Kolatkar's version is also a story about ending the duty to revenge; revenge breeds further hatred, more battles, and continual death:

You belong to the human race.

Don't forget that, ever.

And that's the reason

why you'll have to stop this sacrifice.

Not for Vasuki Mama's sake,

or mine.

Not for anything else ‑

but to make sure

that the last vestige of humanity

you are heir to,

your patrimony, yes,

does not go up in smoke

in this yajnya.

Kolatkar does not need to make explicit the application of this story to contemporary India with its intense religious, caste, and other communal conflicts. In modernizing the language and tones of the Mahabharata he is also offering a liberal or common sense revisioning of what in India has become a text used to justify the violence of reactionary Hinduism. It is like putting the Bible into contemporary speech and retelling it to give emphasis to its message of Love.

If Indian poets in English are less well known abroad than the novelists it is probably because their concerns are personal, local and yet universal; they do not write, at least not directly, about the nationalist and postcolonial political and cultural themes that the West patronizingly expects, even demands, from the formerly colonized. Several of the earlier novelists whose texts are sometimes used in university courses to illustrate the meeting of cultures, social injustice, or cultural assertion are dull, and obvious. It would be difficult to treat Ezekiel, Moraes, or Kolaktar, as exotics who need be protected by cultural relativism, babble about different national poetics, or other apologies for the second‑rate. Their work stands on its own as literature, while contributing to and helping shape the many strands and different views that comprise Indian culture. Although the best Indian poets can be read in terms of postcolonial critical theories, they are too good and too interesting for such a limited approach.

Nissim Ezekiel, Collected Poems: 1952‑1988, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1989. A second edition will be published in 2005.

Dom Moraes, Collected Poems 1957‑1987, Penguin, Delhi, 1987; Collected Poems 1954‑2004, Penguin, Delhi, 2004.

Arun Kolaktar, Sarpa Satra, Ashok Shahane for Pras Prakashan, Pune, 2004, Cover and Book Design by Arun Kolatkar; Kala Ghoda Poems, Ashok Shahane for Pras Prakashan, Pune, 2004, Cover and Book Design by Arun Kolatkar. These and other volumes of both Kolatkar's Marathi and English poems are available through Pras Prakashan, Vrindavan ‑ 2B/5, Raheja Township, Malad East, Mumbai 400‑097.

Bruce King, who lives in Paris, is the author of Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987, rev. 2001) and recently revised Three Indian Poets: Nissim Ezekiel, A K Ramanujan, Dom Moraes (1991) for a second edition.