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Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies
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Contemporary Bhakti Recastings
Laetitia Zecchini a a
CNRS, France Published online: 03 Jun 2013.
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To cite this article: Laetitia Zecchini (2014) Contemporary Bhakti Recastings, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16:2, 257-276, DOI: 10.1080/1369801X.2013.798128 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2013.798128
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CONTEMPORARY BHAKTI RECASTINGS
Recovering a Demotic Tradition, Challenging Nativism, Fashioning Modernism In Indian Poetry
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Laetitia Zecchini
CNRS, France
................ By exploring how many modern Indian poets (namely, here, Arun Kolatkar, bhakti Indian poetry modernism multilingualism translation Arun Kolatkar
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Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Dilip Chitre) have chosen to trace their affiliations and lineage back to the inclusive bhakti devotional tradition, I am exploring the fecund connections between practices of translation and creative writing in contemporary Indian poetry, but also the emergence of a modernity that results from the complex interplay of languages, lineages and hybrid transactions. These transactions between translation and creative writing, between English and other Indian languages, between folk music and poetry, between bhakti and Euro-American modernism, bhakti and the blues or the Beats (since the restaging of these medieval compositions is often made in a kind of jazzy, colloquial American idiom, confusing ‘western’ and ‘Indian’ categories), expose the simultaneous confluence of local and global literatures, the porosity of languages and traditions. Modernism and bhakti become paradigms for renewal and for emancipation. Indian poets also propose a form of belonging as a defiant all-inclusive category, an open-ended process of translation that subverts the quest for origins, transcends the national and celebrates deterritorialization. Translation becomes a form of transgressive practice with powerful dissident political and ‘heretical’ implications in the Indian context.
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1 Though I use the singular here to talk of ‘bhakti tradition’, bhakti is everything but a monolithic category. Many different strands of medieval devotionality are cumulatively known as bhakti, which first emerged in Tamil south India around the sixth century before spreading to the rest of India. Only medieval bhakti in the northern and western parts of India will be considered here: the varkari (lit. ‘pilgrim’ because of the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur) Marathi tradition of Maharashtra to which Tukaram, Namdev, Janabai and Jnandev belong
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2 If contemporary poets reclaim bhakti for its anti-elitist, dissident and demotic dimensions, and consider Tukaram, Kabir and other bhakti figures as poets rather than saints (a claim which is iconoclastic in itself), it is important to bear in mind that bhakti is a site of contested appropriations. Bhakti has also been equated with national resurgence, instrumentalized to demonstrate the essentially spiritual nature of India (and its unity) or to
Against majoritarian, petrified and exclusive perceptions of the past, of the nation and of identity, many contemporary Indian poets have chosen to recover the alternative medieval bhakti tradition;1 a compelling and nonexclusive movement of popular devotion which included men and women from all castes, classes and stages of life, and thus challenged the religious monopoly and orthodoxy of Brahmins. This ‘revolutionary form of Hinduism’ (Ramanujan 1999: 26) has been reinterpreted as subaltern and subversive. ‘Whereas worldly dharma establishes its ethical community by means of social differentiation and complementary function, bhakti does so by reuniting socially disparate elements in a common cause: the praise of god’ (Hawley 2005: 63). Bhakti has also been associated with an ‘enormous democratization of literary language’ (Ahmad 1992: 273) which is particularly appealing to contemporary poets, many of whom consider that bhakti ‘saints’, by rejecting Sanskrit to produce spontaneous ‘free-verse’ poetry in the vernaculars and using metres close to speech forms, have given them their creative tools and their voice, foundationally shaping the language in which they write today. To contemporary poets, Bhakti seems to stand for a marginality and a heterodoxy that pluralize the relationship to otherness, expose a poetics of dissent, deterritorialization and inclusiveness. The transgression of frontiers (linguistic, casteist, regional) which is one of the defining principles of this tradition and of its reinterpretation today, as well as the demotic anti-elitist thrust of bhakti are an inexhaustible source of inspiration.2 A remarkable number of contemporary poets are indeed translating bhakti texts and recovering their modernity in this highly malleable, multilingual, collective tradition. What are the modalities of this dialogue and of the life-long engagement of poets like Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (born in 1947) who writes in English, started working on his Kabir translations in the 1960s and was publishing his Songs of Kabir in 2011, or the bilingual MarathiÁ English poets Arun Kolatkar (1931Á2004) and Dilip Chitre (1938Á2010), who were both steeped in the bhakti tradition of Maharashtra, and started writing and translating Tukaram, Jnandev (Dnyaneshwar), Janabai and others from the 1950s onwards?3 What model of language, cultural transmission and belonging does this dialogic interaction foreground and what modernity is bhakti the sign of? How is bhakti renewed through English and through the prism of Euro-American modernism? What alternative lineages of modernism do these reinventions of diverse poetic traditions signal and how is translation the means through which these transactions take place? Literary modernism in India results from a complex process of hybridization, which must be understood both as a process of deterritorialization and invention (in the Saidian sense of ‘finding again’) and as the ‘transnational and translational’ redefinition of identity and tradition identified by Bhabha
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Laetitia Zecchini construct a canonical nationalism before independence (‘bhakti was also attractive to all kinds of indigenisms and nationalist aporias of consent and organicity, including Gandhi’s own’ [Ahmad 1992: 274]). 3 See, for example, the special issue of the Baroda little magazine Vrishchik on bhakti poetry in 1970, with poems from Muktabai, Janabai and Namdeo translated by Kolatkar, ‘recastings from Kabir’ by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and translations of the medieval Gujarati poet Vasto by Gieve Patel. Many other Indian poets are steeped in bhakti and translating bhakti texts: Kedarnath Singh, Nagarjun and Kunwar Narain in Hindi have reclaimed Kabir, but also other poets writing in English like Gieve Patel, who is translating the seventeenth-century Gujarati poet Akho, or Ranjit Hoskote, who is translating the fourteenth-century Kashmiri poet Lal Ded.
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4 For instance, B. S. Mardhekar and P. S. Rege, the two precursors of modernism in Marathi poetry were
(2010: 7). This redefinition is linked, in the multilingual Indian context where the porosity of linguistic frontiers and the heterogeneity and plurality of the language situation are among the most striking features of India’s pluricultural ethos (Khubchandani 1997), to the productive connection between translations and creative writing. Contemporary poets make it new by restaging the past, but this restaging ‘estranges any immediate access to an originary identity or a ‘‘received’’ tradition’ (Bhabha 2010: 3). Indian poets have traced their lineage back to that specific tradition while, at the same time, discovering and translating contemporary western poetry, especially American or French, later east European. It is the coexistence of these literary lineages Á medieval bhakti poetry and modern Euro-American poetry Á and the complex interplay of translations, affiliations and languages that have fashioned literary modernism in India, at least when it comes to the linguistic traditions (English, Hindi and Marathi) of the poets under study.4 Arvind Krishna Mehrotra remembers that at the end of the 1960s he was ‘writing under Breton’s influence one week and under Ginsberg’s the next’ (de Souza 1999: 105), while at the same time trying his hand at translating the fifteenth-century bhakti poet Kabir. Dilip Chitre explains that in the process of translating modern French poets like Rimbaud and Verlaine into Marathi and Marathi bhakti poetry into English, he found that ‘traditional Marathi poetry itself could sustain contemporary poetry of a different kind’ (Ramakrishnan 1995: 235). He also comments on this period: ‘the return to the deeper and larger tradition, combined with the immediate heritage of Western poetry, and the spirit of restless individual commitment, resulted in a remaking of the tradition itself’ (Chitre 1967: 4). The paperback revolution in the publishing industry after the Second World War coincided with a feverish activity in translation in India. ‘A tremendous variety of cross-influences were unleashed all of a sudden’ (Chitre 1967: 5), especially in colonial metropolises like Bombay and Calcutta, where books started pouring in from all over the world and literally overwhelmed the pavements. Partha Mitter proposes the concept of ‘virtual cosmopolis’ to explain the critical engagement of the urban intelligentsia with modernity in colonial cities where the interactions between the local and the global were played out and largely negotiated through the medium of print and through English (Mitter 2007: 11). The 1960s indeed appear as a ‘fantastic conglomeration of clashing realities’ (Chitre 1967: 5), a period of experimentalism and of ‘self-conscious literary bohemianism’ (Engblom 2001: 391) that developed strong affinities with Euro-American modernism, the counter-culture of the 1960s and the internationalism of the avant garde. Ezra Pound and T. S Eliot, the Dadaists and the surrealists, William Carlos Williams and the contemporary Beats in the United States,5 but also underground anti-establishment magazines were the defining influences on a lot of modern Indian poems. Village Voice,
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......................... also inspired by the western modernist galaxy and by bhakti.
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5 Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky met many Indian poets during their 1962Á3 trip to India. In Bombay they befriended Arun Kolatkar (whose partial translation of Kaddish into Marathi appeared in the little magazine Aso in 1963), Ashok Shahane and other ‘starving poets’, rather than the more ‘polite and genteel’ poets in English like Nissim Ezekiel: ‘Allen’s affinity was for those starving poets who wrote in their mother tongue and readily provided them with a tour of Bombay’s seamy underside’ (Baker 2008: 149). 6 Amit Chaudhuri talks about the way Bombay poet-critics ‘poached and encroached upon the territory of painters’ (2008: 224) in the 1960s. Most of the journals and little magazines published at the time are meticulously designed works of art
Partisan Review, Paris Review and Evergreen Review were circulated, and little magazines like the cyclostyled Shabda in Marathi launched by Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar and others in 1954, or Damn you: a magazine of the arts started by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in 1965 (which became the ‘temporary outpost of the American and European avant garde’ [King 2001: 23]) also flourished. The period is often described as a kind of ‘Indian renaissance’ and it certainly generated a lot of excitement, signalling years of exploration, experimentation and collective endeavours which affected all artistic domains. Poets formed creative fraternities, small alternative presses, cooperatives and workshops. They often worked with painters, film and theatre directors and sometimes, like Arun Kolatkar or Gieve Patel, they were both writers and visual artists. In Bombay during the 1950s and 1960s, we find the same creative symbiosis between the visual arts and literature that is also a trademark of Euro-American modernism.6 Though totally steeped in contemporary world literature, Indian poets also outgrow western modernism by the recovery of bhakti. Not only do they choose their contemporaries, but they also choose their poetic ancestors and make them their contemporaries. In the process, they emancipate themselves from some of the inhibiting British influences which had colonized the minds of earlier writers and produced a period of cultural dislocation from the native traditions, the rich repertoire of spoken languages. The imposed canons had thus to be challenged Á the British canon with its Victorian romantic literary ideals (and icons like Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth) imposed by the system of education introduced by Macaulay, but also the almost exclusive priority given to textual literatures, to the Sanskritic and Brahmanical traditions at the expense of the oral and syncretic, the vernacular and contemporary. These post-independence poets hence reject both romanticism and revivalism. ‘Crushed by English poetry, our freedom has been destroyed’ writes the Marathi writer Vishnu Krishna Chiplunkar (1850Á82) quoted by Sudhir Chandra, for whom ‘English poetry’ also stands for the entire range of western intellectual influences (1992: 17). Indian traditions were indeed defined and constructed by and for the British, Indian culture translated through western terms, the lens of religion and the ideology of antiquity: the older the texts and languages, the purer they were thought to be, the more recent, the more ‘mongrel’, ‘degenerate’ or unreliable (Ahmad 1992; Chandra 1992; Cohn 1985; Pollock 2003). It is no wonder then, that in the process of getting rid of inherited canons, contemporary poets recover a tradition, bhakti, that itself rebelled against an imposed (Brahmanical) orthodoxy to reveal the inclusive, informal and experimental dimension of language and of the sacred. Both dimensions, the linguistic and the spiritual are in fact intimately connected for bhakti and contemporary poets. The rejection of the textual and metaphysical bias in its petrified and ritualistic dimensions seems symptomatic of secular Indian
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(a legacy that Kolatkar’s Indian publisher Pras Prakashan is committed to keeping alive today), edited jointly by painters and poets. Kolatkar designed the covers for a lot of little magazines and collections: Shabda in the 1950s, Dionysus in the 1960s, the covers of the poetry publishing cooperative Clearing House in the 1970s, etc.
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sensibility, which Amit Chaudhuri defines by the constant tension between disowning and recovery, disruption and return, exile and homecoming: ‘the rejection of Indigenous culture and religion, relegating them to the realm of superstition and irrationality, would be an important act on the one hand; as would, on the other, its recovery of that very culture as a life-giving, if perennially problematic part of itself’ (Chaudhuri 2008: 41). This recovery hence never takes the guise of a nativist return to oneself. Contemporary poets prove that there is no such thing as an innate and organic relationship to tradition. Bhakti has to be reinvented, tradition reclaimed and repossessed. Original, god-given, national or natural filiations must be converted into affiliations, into connections that you forge rather than inherit (Said 1983: 23). These affiliations are either cosmopolitan or blur the frontier between what is local and what is foreign, authentic and alien, Indian and western. The recovery of bhakti seems to me precisely a life-giving, more precisely form-giving reinvention of oneself. ‘I want to reclaim everything I consider my tradition’ (italics mine), declares Kolatkar (de Souza 1999: 19). Through this affiliating process, poets fashion their own voice at a time when, after the colonial encounter and the advent of modernity, many writers acknowledge a form of intimate dislocation between adversarial belongings. This dislocation is often expressed forcefully, at times painfully, by modern Indian poets, especially those who write in English and live in India. The English they write is at odds with the languages spoken in the streets of the cities in which they live; their literature is necessarily discontinuous with Indian literary traditions. Yet, as Edward Said and many others have shown, if the ‘unhealable rift’ and ‘crippling sorrow’ of estrangement (Said 2000: 173) may never be overcome, this position of marginality, unhomeliness and eccentricity is also formidably creative. What’s more, the difficulty of ‘belonging’ to India is by no means reserved to the too-often diagnosed alienation of writing in the erstwhile ‘colonial’ language. The feeling of estrangement and disjuncture between textual and oralÁperformative traditions, high culture and low culture, between westernized elites and the ‘common man’ of the Indian masses, writers and their audience (Jussawalla 1987) and the guilt that is often associated with such elitist marginalization, are also expressed by countless authors in the vernaculars (in Hindi, for example, the works of G. M. Muktibodh, Nirmal Verma, Krishna Baldev Vaid and Kedarnath Singh all come to mind). What is interesting here is that the tension between local and cosmopolitan systems, languages or affiliations, between the spoken word and the written word, is in a sense negotiated through the practice and hyphen of translation. Translating becomes a means of recovering the form of reflexivity that has been considered by the poet, translator and critic A. K. Ramanujan as one of the defining features of Indian culture and was radically disrupted by modernity with its new paradigms of originality, individualism and
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autonomy. Ramanujan defines reflexivity as a continuous process of cultural translation where texts and traditions incessantly comment, mirror, alter or distort each other. They do not come in historical stages but form a ‘simultaneous order, where every new text within a series confirms yet alters the whole order’ (Ramanujan 1999: 8), thereby blurring the frontiers between what is past and present, fluid and fixed forms, original and variation, high culture and popular culture. Bhakti represents the missing link of contemporary Indian poetry Á missing link to oneself, to a demotic language, folk culture and tradition, to the past, but also to the present, sidestepping, as it were, the poets’ nationalist-romantic-victorian predecessors. This link is all the more vital that the repertoire of medieval bhakti continues to be sung and interpreted in India, that the ‘pastness’ of the past is thus also immediately present. It belongs to the intimate biography of poets, to their history and to their modernity: ‘Translation then participates in our dream of making out of a historical past a contemporary past, creating out of the so-called linear sequential order of history, a simultaneous order, an active presence’ (Ramanujan 1999: 189). By relocating their modernity in medieval bhakti traditions poets counter the western-based teleological conception of progress and the sequential view of linear history. They also demonstrate, as I will suggest below, how tradition and change, far from being oppositional, have often been synonymous in India (Chandra 1992). Bhakti compositions are characterized by the ecstatic immediacy of these poetÁdevotees who addressed themselves directly and intimately to God. Oral utterances and songs were their only means of devotion. All mediations of the sacred (rituals, sacrifices, Brahmins, scriptural authority, etc.) are thus ignored in order to foreground another vision of spirituality which is personal and inclusive. Truth is not revealed, but experienced through the ‘walking mosque’ or ‘walking temple’ which the worshipper holds in his heart. It is also experienced through language. The language used by bhakti poets is thus stripped of all kinds of ornamentation and polishing. Sanskrit, the language of the political and religious monopole, is brushed aside in favour of spoken dialects, of an extraordinarily concise, colloquial and sometimes telegraphic language, full of familiar and occasionally crude comparisons. There is an extreme simplicity of linguistic means. ‘Remember, our best / Poems were always / As bald as facts, / As bare as these hills. / Because our spirit / Has aspects of stone, / And because our stones / are lasting mirrors’, writes Dilip Chitre in the last lines of his poem ‘Tukaram in Heaven, Chitre in Hell’, as he pays tribute both to Tukaram and to the language used by the medieval poet (Chitre 2007: 65). This hospitable vernacular idiom, demotic because it is mixed (in the case of Kabir, the language he uses is called rekhta, a mixture of Persian, Hindi and other north Indian dialects, which Mehrotra [2009: 18] also equates to a form of ‘holy argot’), with rugged and raw voices,
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7 Dilip Chitre describes the Marathi poetry scene in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘The biggest setback to Marathi poetry was people readopting Sanskrit metres and sanskritizing their poetry. The entire achievement of the Warkari saints was being neglected. They had opened up poetry by using metres like abhang and ovi which were very close to speech forms . . . What the poets of my generation had automatically begun to do was to write poetry as they spoke the language. And so in temper and idiom it came closer to the poetry of the saints’ 8 See the ‘words for music’ section of The Boatride and Other Poems. Kolatkar, who never missed an issue of Rolling Stone, wrote song lyrics and at one point nourished the ambition of breaking into the international pop/rock scene. He played the guitar and the pakhawaj (Indian drum). Part of Kolatkar’s library was sent to the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune; it includes countless books on rock, folk and the blues (Woody Guthrie’s folk songs, instruction manuals on folkÁblues guitar,
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seems an unlimited source of inspiration. Bhakti ‘poets’ are the forebears of modernist poets who reject traditional metres and conventional language, ornate style and diction, to foreground a contemporary anti-romantic idiom that reconciles their poetry to the everyday and to orality.7 Since there is no Indian English Creole as such, and no English in India that would correspond to an everyday language or to Kabir’s popular and syncretic idiom, the equivalent found by poets like Arun Kolatkar and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, to transpose the colloquial, familiar and rugged bhakti style and create a vernacular, is a form of ‘Americanese’ that matched its directness and informality. This transposition may in part be understood by the fact that Indian poets voraciously read American poetry, but also picked up American slang from films and, as I suggest below, from the blues and folk music. American modernists like William Carlos Williams had also created their own idiom and local form, wrested away and distinct from the British, thereby paving a way for linguistic and cultural emancipation in India. Kolatkar’s bhakti translations and his own poems undertake a conscious journey towards anti-style colloquial simplicity. This economy of words and means mirrors the journey towards dispossession of the devotee, but also the bare voice of the poetÁsinger. His poems are as close as you can get to a material immediacy. They constantly mix, like bhakti compositions, the metaphysical with the everyday, shedding superfluous words, ornate syntax, capital letters and punctuation. His translations of Tukaram, just like Arvind Krishna’s translations of Kabir, are hence as much indebted to a modernist aesthetics as to bhakti poetics to Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams as to the Tukaram, Namdev or Kabir families of texts. Both traditions invent an idiom close to the spoken language, concrete, musical and economical, that relies heavily on concision and condensation, and often cuts out predication and connectives. Kolatkar’s translations are also indebted to the blues and to his passionate interest in songs.8 For Kolatkar, bhajans (devotional bhakti songs) of which he would have weekly sessions with close friends and relatives, were directly related to folk music: ‘I can relate to it, perhaps because it’s an area where some of the world’s best poetry Á its bhakti poetry Á meets folk music. It’s people’s music, rather than musicians’ music, a joyous noise, and it’s for everybody’ he wrote in the unpublished book proposal on Balwant Bua sent to Penguin India in 1986.9 Balwant Bua was a real larger-than-life bhajan singer in the varkari tradition of bhakti singers who fascinated Kolatkar. The two met at least once a week for more than ten years. The absence of boundary between songs and poems (bhakti compositions were originally songs) and the strong influence of the blues tradition of black American folkcomposers, of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie and Joan Baez in the heyday of the American folk music revival, connect all these traditions. Kolatkar, like
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......................... issues of Jazz & Blues magazine, Richard Goldstein’s The Poetry of Rock, etc.). 9 The book in English was never completed, but the 1200-page Marathi manuscript on Balwant Bua will eventually be published by Arun Kolatkar’s Indian publisher, Pras Prakashan. 10 Kolatkar’s intense association with bhajans and folk music must be distinguished from the revival of the bhakti repertoire within Indian classical traditions during the same period. Kolatkar often expressed his distaste for trained characterless ‘bhavgeet’ singers. Many bhajan singers, he says, were ‘people who were out to zap you with what they thought of as their virtuosity’, in contrast to Balwant Bua: ‘I had met someone at last whose voice, though untrained, and with just that bit of a ragged edge to it, could still breathe life into a lyric of Tukaram or Kabir’ (unpublished Balwant Bua book proposal). 11 J. S. Hawley talks of ‘protean poetic identities’ (1988: 275).
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other Indian poets (e.g. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Adil Jussawalla) seemed to see himself much more like an anonymous craftsman than a trained virtuoso.10 Blues, bhakti and folk music are collective traditions that have evolved through oral transmission and improvisation, through the rugged and robust voices of poetÁsingers who constantly rework preexisting material. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, in his insightful introduction to Arun Kolatkar’s Collected Poems in English, sees the following parallels between blues and bhakti: ‘each draws its images from a common pool, each limits itself to a small number of themes that it keeps returning to, and each speaks in the idiom of the street’ (Kolatkar 2010: 30). Kolatkar’s texts, in which you always hear the speaking voice (its emotional labile surface, its silences, modalizations and interruptions), had to be spoken and addressed, often read out loud to a close circle of friends. ‘I’d be happiest if I could write poems, set them to music, sing them myself and still make a living’ (Kolatkar 1977), thereby also revealing that his aim is to write poems which would reach, like bhakti compositions, the ‘common man’ and non-reader of poetry. Kolatkar conflates the untrained and improvised voices of the American blues and folk singers with bhakti voices, using the same casual familiarity and slangy idiom, irreverence and ecstasy that we find in both traditions. Bhakti ‘poets’ and American blues performers in the first half of the twentieth century, but also, to a certain extent, the poets of the Beat Generation, were literal misfits. The figure of the loafer, tramp or pilgrim, homeless and out of place, challenging all social and literary orthodoxies, also connects these traditions. Tukaram hence becomes, in Kolatkar’s translations, a ‘madman’ (Kolatkar 2010: 304), ‘emigrant’ and ‘citizen of No Land’ (315), ‘enduring bum’ (310) and ‘wretched beggar’ (314). The language used by bhakti poets is also demotic because it corresponds to a relayed tradition which cannot be appropriated. For if the signature line at the end of the bhakti composition (‘says Kabir’, ‘tuka says’, etc.) grounds the text in a personality, this name is never the sign of a so-called authentic identity, closed on itself. The signature of the poem transmitted orally at different periods in time and by various disciples also served to federate a plurality of authors who recognized themselves in a name, in a community, in the transmission of a personal truth.11 The inclusive moving bhakti tradition weaves together a chain of memories, a chain of words, a chain of poets, and a socio-textual community whose repertoire cannot be linked to a singular author or to an original Ur-text. It is precisely this dissolution of petrified frontiers (between different versions of one tradition, between translations and so-called authentic texts, between different authors, languages and national traditions, between proper or improper linguistic registers and languages, etc.) that is exploited by contemporary poets and becomes a source of playful creativity.
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12 This might in part explain why Kolatkar published so little during his lifetime. His poetry had a huge gestation period before it was given its ‘definite’ form. To a certain extent, his work-inprogress was as malleable, unsettled and plural as, bhakti retellings, and was given countless provisional variants.
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In Kolatkar’s bilingual poetry, for example, there is no such thing as a source text. In his ‘own’ poems (not the bhakti recastings) it is often impossible to distinguish the original versions in Marathi or in English from their translations. Kolatkar often worked on a poem in the two languages simultaneously, producing countless variants in Marathi and in English:12 ‘writing one poem in Marathi after another in English / sometimes starting one in Marathi and finishing it in English / or vice versa . . . writing ten in one language / then a few in another / sometimes writing 3 altogether new poems / in an attempt to translate one poem / or indulge in cannibalism / or sometimes constructing one poem / out of material taken from 10 discarded poems’ (‘Making love to a poem’, Kolatkar 2009: 227Á8). Certain poems are supposed to be translated from English into Marathi by the author but never had an identifiable Marathi version; others are supposed to have been written in one language, lost and rewritten in the other language. Some poems are presented as translations but are complete recreations. There is no authenticity to go back to and no repatriation after an expatriation, no such thing as an unadulterated essence, source text or ‘authorized’ version to restore. The line is therefore also extremely thin between his poems and Tukaram’s. ‘I’ll create such confusion / that nobody can be sure about what you [Tukaram] wrote and what I did’ writes Kolatkar in the humorous ‘Making love to a poem’ meditation, published as an appendix to The Boatride (2009: 234). Though Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Dilip Chitre might not claim such confusion as plainly as Kolatkar, they also aim at obscuring the frontiers between translated texts and original poems, self and other. ‘My translations of Tukaram are as much a part of my life as a poet as my own personal work’ declares Chitre (Ramakrishnan 1995: 234). Until the end of the nineteenth century, Indian writers had always drawn upon the works of other writers: ‘This ultimate tribute to other writers does not, however, seem to have led to recognition of the individual authors’ ownership of their respective works. Ostensibly, any work that existed out there was meant to be available for others to retell it the way they liked, and claim the retelling as their own independent work’ (Chandra 2008). In the following passage from ‘Making love to a poem’, Kolatkar precisely blurs these questions of ownership, playing on issues raised by notions of authorship and originality, legacy and legality. He claims the right to use and recreate Tukaram, just like Tukaram has himself borrowed, cannibalized or scavenged Namdeo, the thirteenth-century bhakti poet from the varkari tradition. Namdeo transmuted in Tukaram is in turn digested and recycled by Kolatkar:
You got to have some English Tuka if you want to get ahead in the world . . . I’ll create such confusion that nobody can be sure about what you wrote and what I did . . .
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I say I’m his legal heir let ’em contest his will Tuka has left me everything everything he ever wrote is mine by right let ’em go to court and argue their case for a hundred / thousand years there are many who claim to be his legal heirs He himself was not above lifting whole verses whole lines when it suited him He won’t miss a thing and if he does he won’t mind and if he does what of it, he certainly won’t complain he dare not I can trace the ownership of some of this stuff to Namdeo (Kolatkar 2009: 234Á5)
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Like Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is true to the Indian tradition of transmission reflexivity and reinvention when he translates Kabir in a resolutely modern way, excluding and selecting from the Kabir corpus and using neologisms, slang and anachronisms (‘dreadlocks’, ‘bullshit’, ‘chromosomes’, ‘mascara’, ‘aftershave’, ‘Faber poets’, ‘Sing Sing’, ‘sucker’, ‘Fearlessburg’, etc.). He is also true to Kabir’s ‘rough rhetoric’ which sabotages passivity (Hess 1987):
To tonsured monks and dreadlocked Rastas, To idol-worshippers and idol-smashers, To fasting Jains and feasting Shaivites, To Vedic pundits and Faber poets, The weaver Kabir sends one message: The noose of death hangs over all. Only Rama’s name can save you. Say it NOW. (Mehrotra 2011: 25)
There is no point in preserving an unchanging canon (against its supposed adulterations) or in being true to an original text which is only a reconstruction. Poets transmit a shifting oral tradition preserved through renewal and alteration, since bhakti relies on ‘the logic of performance, not permanence’, making ‘productive use of uncertainty, ambiguity and lacunae’
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13 ‘The gods of mythology do not sweat, smell or sneeze, and the goddesses do not menstruate. But in folklore they do. They are embodied’ (Ramanujan 1999: 3).
(Novetzke 2008: 245). The recovery of bhakti Á which corresponds to that defining pattern of ‘homecoming’ after exile in modern Indian sensibility (Chaudhuri 2008) Á can hence never be a return to what was and used to be. Indian poets respond to Ezra Pound’s modernist appeal to ‘make it new’ by revisiting the past. But what was, as Edward Said has taught us, has been lost, displaced, pluralized and estranged. It must be reinvented from a distance, from an ‘out-of-place-ness’, a historical rupture or a different language (in this case, English), which also implies a confrontation with otherness (like Euro-American modernism) and prevents any attempt to restore or sacralize a pedigree. Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra offer a new performance, a contemporary telling (a word A. K. Ramanujan considered more appropriate than ‘version’, since there is no invariant implied) of the Tukaram and Kabir families of texts in this open-ended repertoire that eschews all exclusive appropriation. ‘What is god / and what is stone / the dividing line / if it exists / is very thin / at jejuri / and every other stone / is god or his cousin’, writes Arun Kolatkar in his 1976 collection Jejuri, whose name is drawn from a pilgrim town in Maharashtra (Kolatkar 2010: 53). These labile frontiers between gods, stones and men, between immanence and transcendence are characteristic of bhakti and of the ‘horizontal cosmology’ of popular devotion where the deity belongs to the immediate present, ‘is directly accessible to his followers, exists on earth here and now’ (Sontheimer 1997: 87). In a sense, the whole bhakti movement translates god, not only by ‘translating the language of spirituality from Sanskrit to the languages of the people’ (Devy 1993: 136), but also because bhakti, like folklore, is an alternative tradition that transposes, reflects and contests, reworks and subverts ‘great’ traditions13 while serving as a medium of self-assertion. Bhakti hence manifests the intimate correspondence between translation and transgression. By challenging the system of differentiation and exclusivity (of a language, a caste, a creed), the complex regulations of rituals, bhakti poets oppose the principle of contextualization, which A. K. Ramanujan considers the other defining principle, along with reflexivity, of Indian culture and is linked to the logic of castes and classes. This logic determines a context, a structure of reference, a ‘rule of permissible combinations’. Works of art are linked to a particular audience, performer and part of the day. Yet ‘bhakti defies all contextual structures: every pigeonhole of caste, ritual, gender, appropriate clothing and custom, stage of life, the whole system of Homo Hierarchicus (‘‘everything in its place’’) is the target of the irony’ (Ramanujan 1999: 48). The extraordinary modernity of these bhakti poets and their relevance for contemporary writers comes to light once we remember that the advent of modernity has often been understood as a movement towards decontextualization (‘one might see modernization in India as a movement from the contextsensitive to the context-free in all realms’ [Ramanujan 1999: 49]).
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The recovery of bhakti today thus signals the fact that it is less a desertion of the sacred which is manifest in contemporary Indian poetry, but rather like bhakti itself, its translation and displacement, its revelation as off-centre, plural. The sacred does not manifest itself in allotted spaces but can be translated and experienced. It resides in the most humble and peripheral spaces, in what many may consider too familiar, but also in a this-worldly language, the language of the everyday. In bhakti poetry anybody can have access to or mediate God: ‘what song / suits which hour / o lord / i’ve no idea’, writes Kolatkar in a translation of Namdev (‘if death’s’; Kolatkar 2010: 157). Kolatkar’s translation of a Janabai composition ‘i eat god’ takes the fusion of the devotee with the divinity a step further while showing that the divine is indeed within, without and all around: i eat god i drink god i sleep on god i buy god i count god i deal with god god is here god is there void is not devoid of god jani says: god is within god is without and moreover there’s god to spare (Kolatkar 2010: 159)
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Contemporary poetry revives this spirit of popular devotion and of devotion as participation. It is a poetry that reflects here and now the presence of the divine, that ‘de-statufies’ it and sets it in motion. Gods naturally belong where men and women work, live, interact, sleep, love or cook and in Kolatkar’s poetry they are addressed with the same familiarity, tenderness, desire, cunning, drama, anger, conversational tone and slangy idiom than in bhakti compositions. Compare, for example, a few lines from Kolatkar’s recasting of a Janabai poem: ‘god my darling / do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law / i will feel lonely when she is gone / but you will be a good god won’t you’
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(Kolatkar 2010: 161) with another text by Kolatkar, an English version of a Marathi poem published in the 2003 Chirimiri collection. In this poem, a prostitute on a pilgrimage to Pandharpur addresses the popular Maharahstrian deity Vithoba and his consort Rakmai and asks them to ‘move over’ and ‘step aside’ so she can be photographed between the couple: ‘Make room for me between the two of you . . . Come close to me, Vitthoo my dear, / and put your arm around my shoulder. There, that’s better’ (Kolatkar 2010: 109). The plasticity of frontiers is actually performed, in some of Kolatkar’s poems, by the plasticity of the written word itself and the irregular layout of the verse on the page. The orderly, contextual and hierarchical segmentation of the world, where everything is in its adequate and appropriate place, is systematically subverted. Epiphanies bloom from the transgression of frontiers, from the immanent and chaotic present. The sacred does not reside in the ‘gold gods in tidy rows’ (italics mine) which another poem from the long Jejuri sequence discloses (Kolatkar 2010: 63), but in impermanence, transgression and decontextualization:
What has stopped you in your tracks and taken your breath away is a sight of a dozen cocks and hens in a field of jowar in a kind of harvest dance. The craziest you’ve ever seen. Where seven jump straight up at least four times their height as five come down with grain in their beaks.
(Kolatkar 2010: 67Á8)
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This poem also graphically represents the feverish experimentation with words characteristic of bhakti. The sacred is here almost literally translated and transported in an ecstatic language that shatters all boundaries, as well as in the material immediacy of a modernist concrete poetry where words become images. The dance of cocks and hens is also the choreography of letters. Devotion is here literally performed through language. ‘In translating Tukaram, we are not merely transposing poetry but recreating a dramatic ritual of ‘‘possessed’’ language’, writes Dilip Chitre (1991: 313). Bhakti poets and contemporary poets celebrate the power of the word to cross over, circulate and renew the world, but also to outlive the artist. They celebrate shabda, the spoken word and speaking voice, which they oppose to the dead letter of inalterable texts; the inclusive name of the poetÁdevotee in the signature line of the poem, and the direct absorption in the name of God which is endlessly recited by the bhaktas. Both medieval and modern poets make ‘language a shared religion and religion a shared language’ (Chitre 1991: xxvi).
My only wealth Is the name of Hari. I don’t bury it in the ground, Nor sell it for cash. It’s my farmland And my garden patch, My object of worship And my place of shelter. It’s everything I have, Everything I’ve saved up. Rob me of the name And you clean me out. The name is my brother, My own flesh and blood; When I’m dying It’ll be by my side. As to a bag of coins Is precious to a beggar, So, says Kabir, Is the name precious to me. (Mehrotra 2011: 61)
If poets today recognize themselves in a moving tradition that is characterized by heterodoxy, plurality and inappropriateness (both in the sense of
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14 This angularity to the nation and dissidence to mainstream culture distinguishes, to some extent, postindependence antiestablishment writers and artists from the preceding generation of pre-independence poets for whom the ideal of the nation and a certain form of cultural nationalism were important. Poets like Kolatkar, Mehrotra, Chitre and Jussawalla are freed from the idea of nation-building and seem, like Kabir (who ‘slipped through the fingers of both Islam and Hinduism’ [Mehrotra 2011: xx]), to target the divisibility of truth, the equation between Indianness and an exclusive, intangible prescribed identity. 15 See for example Novetzke (2008) on Namdev and the battle over the saint’s legacy. The book also shows how identity in Maharashtra is tied closely to the remembrance of historical figures like bhakti saints, who are projected as symbols of India’s glorious Á often
being deviant or improper and impossible to appropriate), this recognition has a political significance and a contemporary relevance. The fact that bhakti ‘saints’ are also remembered as marginal, marginalized and persecuted figures, who had to resist Brahmanical oppression and struggle to make their voice heard, is in some way related to what some writers have been witnessing for the past thirty years in India with the aggressive Hinduization of the cultural and political landscape. Contemporary poets refuse to be holed up in neat religious, linguistic or national categories, often placing themselves at an angle with majoritarian and nationalist forms of belonging.14 This position of self-conscious marginality seems to connect medieval bhaktas with modern poets. Hindu nationalists have been trying to restore an IndianÁHindu essence that has been ‘sullied’ by successive ‘foreign’ invasions, to homogenize the space of the Indian nation, its language, history and traditions, to purge them of every supposed exogenous, ‘improper’ or inauthentic element, thereby inventing frontiers and trying to draw Kabir, for instance, over the line from Muslim to Hindu. The great figures of tradition (be it Kabir or the Maharashtrian icon Shivaji) are hence constantly labelled and transformed into sites of religious and ideological struggle, different factions struggling for an exclusive right over one meaning or one reading. Bhakti is often also cleansed of its radicalism, brahmanically sanitized, sanskritized or domesticated like other marginal, heterodox or non-Brahmin elements of Indian culture.15 Contemporary translations of Kolatkar, Mehrotra or Chitre, by recovering the transgressive, irreverent and demotic voice of bhakti, precisely resist such purgative nativist endeavours and ideological appropriations. Nativist Hinduness, in the nationalist agenda, is always associated to the dominant culture and religious majority. By opposition, all those who are not ‘sons of the soil’, members or voices of the majority, seem to be outside of the Indian nation, anti-national and anti-democratic, the target of hatred and violence. ‘Hinduism and the ‘‘mainstream’’; how frequently are these words juxtaposed, and made synonymous with each other . . . For years now, the BJP’s satellites of the far right have imposed a violent, if illegal, ban on imagined offences to the Hindu religion, and abused and harassed artists and writers for their supposed transgressions’ (Chaudhuri 2008: 162Á3). Many contemporary Indian artists and writers share Chaudhuri’s distress and express their shock at the cultural fundamentalism and policing of intellectual territory which is taking place in India. Adil Jussawalla, for instance, in an article entitled ‘The hushing finger’, grieves over the silencing of oppositional voices under communal or casteist pressure, the climate of fear and censorship which is ‘traditionally very much part of India Á witness the persecution of writers like Dyaneshwar, Tukaram and Kabir’ (Jussawalla 1991: 73).
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Hindu Á past. On the contested appropriations of bhakti, the polemic between Dharmvir, ardent proponent of the Dalit cause, and the Brahmin critic Hariprasad Dwivedi is telling. Dharmvir vehemently accuses Brahmin critics of bringing Kabir back into the HinduÁ Sanskrit tradition, of purging him of his low-caste origins, roughness and heterodoxy (Horstmann 2000, 2002).
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In 1985 a well-known critic and one-time modernist champion in Marathi, Bhalchandra Nemade, targeted Kolatkar’s Jejuri and other Indian writers in English on the grounds that his work was parasitical, aping the West, sponging on a ‘foreign’ language and culture, lacking a homogeneous tradition. If this article has often been quoted and the argument hackneyed, what is more surprising and appalling is that the Indian nation is likened to a text which must be read literally, rather than interpreted, imagined or invented diversely and humorously: ‘the India we know is misinterpreted’ in Jejuri (Nemade 1985: 34). Against this cultural chauvinism and straitjacketing of ‘Indianness’, contemporary poets demonstrate that no text escapes translation; no tradition, however sacred or sacralized, escapes interpretation and deterritorialization; no identity escapes historicity; that there’s no such thing as an illegitimate reading of India; that what is known is constantly estranged by the inexhaustibility of the sensible world and the defamiliarizing power of literature. Dilip Chitre in his essay ‘Life on the Bridge’ (published as an appendix to his Tukaram translations) connects bhakti poets and Bible translators in medieval Europe who were burnt for heresy: ‘a watchdog orthodoxy ensures that all sacred language is kept out of the reach of worldly vernaculars and ‘‘vulgar’’ interpretations.’ St Jerome, Erasmus, Luther and many others had to face the accusation of heresy. In Marathi, all the bhakta poets . . . were considered heretics by the Brahmin watchdogs of the Vedas’ (Chitre 1991: 394). By translating and re-singing bhakti texts in everyday slangy English, contemporary poets assert the heterodox nature of literature and show that translation is linked to plurality: ‘the plurality of messages and messengers, of texts and contexts, and most importantly, to the plurality of interpreters and interpretations’ (Chitre 2003: 47). Wendy Doniger’s preface to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir also highlights the iconoclasm of translations and of contemporary bhakti recastings. She argues that the English used by the poet to translate these compositions has the same ‘shock effect’ that Kabir’s upside-down language and rejection of Sanskrit must have had for his medieval contemporaries. By re-singing bhakti texts in slangy, Americanized idiom and uprooted language, Mehrotra and Kolatkar superbly challenge both nativist ideologies and religious, cultural or linguistic chauvinisms. The sacred can be translated in the most humble of places, and in the most marginal or secular of languages. It is worth remembering here that English has also often been considered as the outcast and outsider language in India. In an article written in the 1980s Homi Bhabha demonstrates precisely that, by taking issue with an earlier essay arguing that the ‘failure’ of Indian poetry in English must be read as the inability of English to encompass an ‘authentic’ Indian tradition. The complex multilingual and multicultural identity of urban Indian cultural life is being denied in favour of a strict hierarchy of historical, cultural and
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linguistic descent: ‘when such a spirit is aboard, the Indo-Anglian tradition always becomes the outcast’ (Bhabha 1984). By translating bhakti compositions in English, Indian poets celebrate both a moving tradition and a displaced language that has distanced itself from its original model, has been set in motion and pluralized. Identity cannot be cleansed of its so-called exogenous or improper elements, neither can language be hygenized, made to conform to a fantasized purity (Sanskrit for Hindi or Marathi, British English for English in India, etc.). History makes the nation move, subverts rigid, univocal frontiers and territories, exclusive appropriations of a lineage, a language, a narrative or a geographical space. Far from considering that every kind of distance away from a supposedly original state is a corruption, this estrangement, lifegiving and foundational impermanence is formidably creative. There’s no such thing as an innate tradition or idiom that would have been corrupted, from which a nation would be ‘estranged’ or that would estrange a nation, no unadulterated essence, engrained in radical frontiers, to restore. What is is never what used to be, but always what broke away from and what continues to evolve. The recovery of bhakti by contemporary poets not only exposes the porosity of languages and traditions, the overlapping and creative confluence of Euro-American modernism and devotional medieval Indian traditions, but also foregrounds a model of collective creation and of identity as an open-ended process of translation where the question of origin and national belonging seems irrelevant. In Kolatkar’s ‘Making love to a poem’ meditation that precisely explores issues of multilingualism, identity and translation, the bilingual poet presents a series of alternatives, all starting with the word ‘whether’, without selecting any of them. He makes of this position of openness and non-belonging a condition of creativity and hospitality but also of dissent. For Kolatkar shows that, in the Indian context, frontiers between languages, between outsiders and natives, minorities and the rest, are a matter of purity and hierarchy.
. . . whether it’s only a reflection of cultural schizophrenia creative schizophrenia split personality whether I’m just one poet writing in 2 languages or in fact 2 poets writing in 2 different languages . . . whether I wipe my arse with one eat with the other use one to wipe my arse one to eat with or whether my use of 2 languages can be likened to the way I use my 2 hands relegating one to minor jobs or certain taboo functions . . . Will the real Ramanujan please stand up There are several of them as you know
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A. K. Ramanujan is a legion rather than an individual There is a multitude of Ramanujans the poet of course, the translator, the folklorist . . . I don’t claim to know all of them . . . (Kolatkar 2009: 229Á36)
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Is Kolatkar a Marathi writer, an English writer? What is the original text? What is the translation? Is Kolatkar one, two or many? What lines separate Tukaram’s poetry and Kolatkar’s? Which is which? What is his, what is mine? Indian poets foreground a model of translation and belonging that could be viewed as metaphoric, if we remember the meaning Paul Ricoeur assigns to the metaphor. The metaphoric dimension of language does not resolve the tension between identity and difference and represents the process through which language is given the power to refashion and rediscover reality. The metaphoric ‘is’ thus means both ‘is not’ and ‘is like’ (Ricoeur 1975: 10Á11). Bhakti recastings are both (like) bhakti texts and (like) contemporary poems, both Kabir’s or Tukaram’s and Mehrotra’s or Kolatkar’s. Translation, in a sense, is an exercise in relation but also in impropriety or dispossession. For if the metaphoric ‘is’ simultaneously means what is, ‘is not’ and ‘is like’, it is also that we do not adhere completely to who we are, to what exists, or what is said. What is is never circumscribed by what we say and by how we interpret it. It both is and is beyond, familiar and strange. Reality is inexhaustible, inexhaustibly plural, and open to a myriad of interpretations. Hovering over boundary lines and affiliations, Kolatkar’s whole work refuses to be circumscribed and defined once and for all. He sabotages all the questions of ‘propriety’ and ‘property’, in the sense of what is proper, what is mine, against the nationalist politics of expurgation of what is not deemed authentically Indian. There is no ‘real’ Ramanujan, no ‘real’ Kolatkar, Kabir or Tukaram, no ‘real’ authentic Indianness, language or tradition to restore or preserve. Bilingual writers like Kolatkar show that you can become a Marathi poet (and even a bhakti poet!) while writing in English (‘I become a Marathi poet using an AngloSaxon instrument’ declares Chitre [Ramakrishnan 1995: 235]) and claim the lineage of modernism while writing ‘devotional’ songs in Marathi. By translating and revitalizing bhakti into English, contemporary Indian poets share in an unbroken tradition and mediate between their different selves, languages, temporalities and national affiliations. Celebrating disowned and dis-originated voices, they subvert the politics of identity and the quest for origins. They expose the simultaneous confluence of local and global paradigms, of Indian and western transactions, and blur the frontiers between what is ‘native’ and ‘alien’, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’, ‘regional’ and ‘cosmopolitan’. They invent a distinct voice for modernism in Indian
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poetry that mixes derision and celebration, scepticism and faith, dissent and reverence, the metaphysical with the everyday. Finally, they show that poetry is always forged through the lens and voice of otherness; that poets always write in a foreign language. ‘To create a poem means to translate from the mother tongue to another language . . . No language is the mother tongue. For that reason I do not understand when people speak of French or Russian poets. A poet can write in French but he cannot be a French poet . . . Orpheus exploded and broke up the nationalities so wide that they now include all nations, the dead and the living’ (Marina Tsvetayeva in ‘Making Love to a Poem’, Kolatkar 2009: 202) Revised version of the article: December 2011.
Acknowledgements
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I am grateful to Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Ashok Shahane for their generosity, time and friendship, for sharing their intimate knowledge of Arun Kolatkar’s work and for the impressive amount of material which they made available; and to Soonoo Kolaktar and Ashok Shahane for permission to quote from Kolatkar’s unpublished work. I also thank the two anonymous reviewers of this essay for their insightful recommendations. R e f e ren c e s
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