The Hindu Business Line : He placed facts in poetic order, leaving rest to reader

writes poet Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar in `Suicide of Rama' and the lines are apt for the poet who said his last bye last week. Often, one has spotted Kolatkar at Churchgate walking with his head, white as raw cotton, held down with a jholna bag hanging from his shoulder. But one did not make it to him and now there is no way.

Jejuri, the first collection of poetry in English, lives as the lines are easily laid out stating facts like a well-written news report. The facts carry the message to the reader if Arun ever thought of any.

"The roof comes down on Maruti's head.

Nobody seems to mind.

Least of all Maruti himself.

May be he likes a temple better this way,"

Arun writes in the poem "Heart of Ruin." Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets, believes Jejuri is among the "finest poems written in India in the last 40 years" apart from being a hit with the public.

Jejuri is Khandoba country near Pune and going by D.D. Kosambi, the cult of Khandoba spread in the Middle Ages, by swallowing many traditions and "is now concentrated on the mountain at Jejuri, high up the Karha valley," linked to the Dhangar (shepherd) community. The patron yaksha of Paithan, known well before the fourth century A.D. as Khandaka, became the local Siva. The cult spread in Maharashtra under the original name Khandoba, with its centre at Jejuri.

The God has two wives but they do not share his temple. Mhalsa is a frightful goddess while the second wife, Banai or Balai, could be traced to the Bana tribe and dynasty in the 4th century. The Dhangars are nomadic and the unit (vadi) of a dozen people and about 350 sheep moves constantly except during rains. The men tend and graze the sheep while the women move with their few pots, fleece tents and children, loaded on pack ponies, observes Kosambi.

One is not sure why Kolatkar chose quaint Jejuri for some limpid poetry and when someone asked him whether he believed in God, he replied, "I leave the question alone. I don't think I have to take a position about God one way or the other." At Jejuri, the form and contents of the presiding gods have been shifting from a tribal god to a brahminic Shiva while Kolatkar kept away. The critic Mehrotra makes a valid point saying "the presiding deity of Jejuri is not Khandoba, but the human eye."

For Arun Kolatkar, born in Kolhapur in 1932 and educated at Rajaram High School Branch, Kolhapur, Jejuri offers a lot for the quiet observer. Whether he believed in Khandoba or not, the poet came away from Jejuri with poetry sure to last long.

"Scratch a rock

and a legend springs,"

writes the poet of Jejuri. In the poem, Between Jejuri and the Railway Station, Arun writes,

"You leave the little temple town

with its sixty three priests inside their sixty three houses

huddled at the foot of the hill

with its three hundred pillars,

five hundred steps and eighteen arches.

You pass the sixty fourth house of the temple dancer

who owes her prosperity to another skill.

A skill the priest's son would rather not talk about."

Arun has placed the facts in poetic order leaving the rest to the reader. He might have picked up the habit in the times spent at J.J. School of Art, Mumbai in 1949 and sharpened it while working in ad firms. As a youngster he spent long hours in his father's study gazing at Baroque and Renaissance Art including the works of Bernini and Michelangelo. The ad world is harsh, preferring facts to poetry, and Arun learnt to write poetry (bare lines) without mush. That's evident in Kala Ghoda Poems which does not carry an intro from the poet with the poetry starting from the first page. It says something about the man preferring to get along with the job rather than tarry. In the first poem Pi-dog, Arun writes:

"This is the time 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

that doubles as a parking lot

on working days... ...

the concrete surface hard, flat and cool

against my belly,

my lower jaw at rest on crossed forepaws;

just about where the equestrian statue

of what's-his-name

must've stood once, or so I imagine."

The man has entered the city with the minimum of fuss. There is humour when he says:

"The tight lid

of the jumbo aluminium box

opens

with the collective

sigh

of a hundred idlis

waiting to exhale,

followed by a rush to the exit

— a landslide of full moons

slithering

past each other... ."

Over the week one read Arun's poems as there will not be anymore from Arun. Thanks Kolatkar.