Arun Kolatkar was born on 1st November 1932, at Kolhapur, to a traditional Marathi Brahmin family. He described his home as “a house of cards — the rooms had mud floors which had to be plastered with cow dung every week to keep them in good repair”. He attended Rajaram High School, in Marathi Marathi medium. He graduated in 1949 and enrolled in a college at the J. J. School of Art, but completed his diploma in 1957. A gifted graphic designer by profession, he won many awards in his field of advertising.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that he began to write. A prolific writer in both Marathi and English. As he himself describes this as
“My pencil is sharpened at both ends
use one end to write in Marathi
the other in English”
or
“each with its separate history/ ecology life forms”.
His early Marathi poems carried streaks of dark humour, were whimsical, sinister and simple very funny as they dealt in many everyday matters. They were influenced “European avant-garde trends like surrealism, expressionism and Beat generation poetry”. However, in his later Marathi poetry, the poetic language is more accessible, easy flowing and less radical. He is considered the true successor to the great seventeenth century Marathi poet Tukaram.
A reclusive figure all his life, he lived without a telephone, and was hesitant about bringing out his work. Jejuri was his only publicly available collection, and too got out of print very soon. Anjali Nerlekar describes Jejuri as an “amazing series of poems on the temple town in Maharashtra where the poet rips apart the hypocrisy and rant of the powerful Brahmins with their vice-like hold on the religion and underscores the anachronism of this religion in the modern world”.
It earned him the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1976.
He was diagnosed with cancer in the late 1990s, following which he released four more books in the final two years of his life. In 2003, he released Bhijki Vahi and Chirimiri in Marathi — the former won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2004. The following year he released Dron, also in Marathi, along with Sarpa Satra and Kala Ghoda Poems in English.
Sarpa Satra is an ‘English version’ of a poem with a similar name in Bhijki Vahi. It is a typical Kolatkar narrative poem like Droan, mixing myth, allegory, and contemporary history. Many poems in Bhijki Vahi refer to contemporary history. However, these are not politicians’ comments but a poet’s, and he avoids the typical Dalit -Leftist-Feminist rhetoric.
Kala Ghoda poems portray the dark side of Mumbai’s underbelly. What stands apart in these poems are how the poet vividly describes the ethos, geography and history of the place in layers of bewildering complexities, manifesting the deep complexities and the societal divide that exist in this megapolis.
E.g.
She has dominion
over two traffic islands
and three pavements.
– The Barefoot Queen of the Crossroads, Kala Ghoda Poems by Arun Kolatkar
Poems in Kala Ghoda do not cry for identity or sense of loss and confusion. These poems are mature and make a statement, that will be etched in the history of Indian English poetry for generations to come. After his death, a new edition of the hard to obtain Jejuri was published in the New York Review Books Classics series with an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri (2006). Near his death, he had also requested Arvind Krishna Mehrotra to edit some of his uncollected poems. These were published as The Boatride and Other Poems by Pras Prakashan in 2008. His Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010. Arvind krishna Mehrotra’s book “Translating the Indian Past and Other Literary Histories”, published by Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University, captures the psyche and persona of the bilingual poet Kolatkar. It is laced with interesting anecdotes from the poet’s life.