"We Were Like Cartographers, Mapping The City": An Interview With Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
"We Were Like Cartographers, Mapping The City": An Interview With Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
"We Were Like Cartographers, Mapping The City": An Interview With Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
JOURNAL OF POSTCOLONIAL WRITING, 2017
VOL. 53, NOS. 12, 191207
https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2017.1296631
INTERVIEW
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is one of the most distinguished “Bombay Bombay/Mumbai; Indian
poets”, whose career spans six decades, from his first work Bharatmata: poetry in English; little
A Prayer (1966) brought out by the Ezra-Fakir Press he founded to magazines; The Beats; Arun
Kolatkar; modernism; Nissim
10 his recently published Collected Poems 1969–2014. His contribution
Ezekiel
to the Indian English language tradition has been far-reaching, not
only through his poetry itself, but through his role as translator,
anthologist, editor and critic. In this interview, conducted on April 20–
21, 2016, Mehrotra ranges over his extensive career, reflecting on the
15 transnational web of genealogies, associations and translations that lie
behind an “Indian poem”, on his friendship and artistic collaborations
with Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla and A.K. Ramanujan, on the break
that Indian writers and artists of his generation were trying to make,
and on the way his own poetry was inspired by the American Beats. He
20 also discusses his role in the little magazine/small press movement of
the 1960s and 1970s when he edited ezra and damn you: a magazine
of the arts, and co-founded the Clearing House collective.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was described by his close friend and fellow
poet Adil Jussawalla as the “firebrand” of the poetry scene in the 1960s
25 and 1970s (Kohli 1991, 139). A key figure of the little magazine/small
press movement, whose poems first appeared in Indian and American
little magazines, he published four collections of poetry and recently
brought out his Collected Poems 1969–2014 (Mehrotra 2014). He is also
an incisive critical voice, whose editions, anthologies and essays, such as
30 The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Poets (Mehrotra 1992),
The Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English (Mehrotra 2003) or
Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History (Mehrotra 2012), have been instru-
mental in shaping the field of Indian poetry in English and forcing us to revise the obvious
cartographies and linear genealogies of what is commonly known as “Indian literature”. The
35 Absent Traveller, his translations of Prakrit love poetry from the 2nd century AD (Mehrotra
1991) and Songs of Kabir, his “recastings” of Kabir (Mehrotra 2011), are recognized as
classics.
192 L. ZECCHINI
For a writer who lives between Allahabad and Dehradun – two places that feature promi-
nently in his poetry – but who fancied himself to be a Lower East Side poet in the 1960s and
1970s and also calls himself a “Bombay poet”; who once acknowledged that “to a poem, the
location – whether cultural, historical, geographical or fictive – is everything” (Mehrotra
2012, 168), the question of belonging, the location of literature and the geography of let-
ters are crucial preoccupations. In his preface to the Oxford anthology, Arvind Krishna
Mehrotra describes himself and other poets of his generation writing in English as “earlier
strugglers in the desert”. Something of that struggle comes through in the conversation
below, which also illuminates the vital bonds of friendship that connected many of the
“Bombay poets” to each other, and the unpredictable connections and constellations that
make up the worlds of “Bombay poetry”. As marginal, eccentric or off-centre as the Indian
little magazines of the 1960s seemed to be, they travelled to different worlds, especially
to America. And as some of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s statements from the magazines
damn you or ezra reproduced below demonstrate (see Figures 1 and 2), they also helped
forge countercultural affiliations and transnational conspiracies of “anti-poets”. The “worlds
of Bombay poetry” are also those of world literature, worlds imagined and reclaimed by
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and writers of his generation – all “bulimic” readers of literature
in translation – as their own. The Gujarati poet Prabodh Parikh (b. 1945) remembers that
the books arriving at the iconic Bombay bookshop Strand Book Stall were enough for him
to imagine conversing with André Breton or Jean-Luc Godard: “We were intoxicated by
imaginary homelands” ([1996] 2006, para. 5). And Arvind Krishna Mehrotra famously
acknowledged that ever since he was 17 years old, he had harboured the illusion that he
did not live in Uttar Pradesh but in New York (Mehrotra 2012, 113). New York, Iowa and
Allahabad, Douglas Blazek, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jacques Prévert and
Guillaume Apollinaire, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh and the central figures
of Arun Kolatkar, A.K. Ramanujan and Adil Jussawalla all make up the worlds of Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra’s poetry and his Bombay.
Laetitia Zecchini (LZ): You have described your boyhood as uneventful, in a family
5 that wasn’t particularly literary. But you were “saved” after high school by the book-lined
study of your uncle in Allahabad, by your friendship with Amit and Alok Rai, and by
their uncle, Vijay Chauhan, who lived in New York and sent them copies of Village Voice.
I wonder if you could tell us about the person you were at 16 or 17, and what it was like
to discover these American magazines with poems like Ferlinghetti’s “Underwear” or
10 Ginsberg’s “America”.
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (AKM): When I began writing at 17 there was no literature I
knew that I could relate to, but then again I had not read very much poetry, except what was
to be found in school and intermediate college textbooks. So the early poems were written
in a vacuum, from a non-literary space. I was writing because words came to me and I liked
15 the linear patterns the Royal typewriter made on the page. I was then living with my uncle in
Allahabad and spent a lot of time looking at the bookshelves in his library, desiring to be a
book myself or at least to write one. I was 18 when in August 1965 I bought Penguin Modern
Poets 5 (Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and Corso 1963), which had the Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg
poems you mention. Gregory Corso was the third poet in it. Reading them after, say, “The
20 Solitary Reaper”, was a new experience. So the new experience was of writing that was not
of India. It was the American Beats. Poets usually grow up reading their own literatures
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of damn you 6: a magazine
corrections arts (Mehrotra,
of thebeen
may have inserted atRai, Rai,stage.
a later and Chauhan 1968).
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196 L. ZECCHINI
To come back, the issues of the Village Voice and the discovery of the Beats led the three
of us, Amit Rai, Alok Rai and myself, to start damn you in Allahabad. As you can see from
its six issues, and also from ezra, the idea was not only to publish poets from within the
country – in the beginning we didn’t know who the Indian poets were anyway – but also
5 from abroad (see Figures 1 and 2). Word of us spread on the little magazine grapevine and
soon we had people from England and the US sending us their poems. One of them was
Douglas Blazek.
I did not then know that Ginsberg had come to India and gone. I was too young, maybe
14 or 15 at the time. Arun Kolatkar, who was much older, got to know Ginsberg quite well
10 and they remained friends. I may not have registered Ginsberg’s India visit, yet the imag-
ination sloped towards some kind of internationalism. It took me a while to see myself as
an Indian poet. One was living in India, but in one’s head one was living somewhere else.
LZ: Do you think it’s possible to say that you are actually much more “worldly” from
Allahabad or from Dehradun than you could have been at the alleged center of the
15 literary world? As if it was from the so-called “margin” or from the “outside” that you
could speak to, or rather with, the world. I mean, you chose to stay in Allahabad . . .
AKM: You know, Laetitia, the categories of “marginality” and “centre” did not exist in
the 1960s the way they do now. Moreover, no one consciously sets out to be marginal.
Had I stayed on in America I would have been marginal in a much more severe way than
20
I ever could be in Allahabad, even though I was writing in English, a language which, in
the India of the 1960s, looked like it was on its way out. In Iowa City I found myself often
writing about Allahabad. In the poem “Continuities” I mentioned the musical names of its
roads – Thornhill, Hastings, Lytton – feeling nostalgic for home. Somewhere along the line
I realized that if I was going to write about Allahabad in Iowa City, then I may as well do so
25
in Allahabad. Since I draw my poetic sustenance from the things around me, the bountiful
goods of America, paradoxically, left me feeling starved.
LZ: Sorry to interrupt, Arvind, but when you left for Iowa City did you know that it
was going to be for two years? Did you not consider the possibility of extending your
30 visit and perhaps of staying on in America?
AKM: The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, for which I had gone,
was for nine months but at the end of it, in the summer of 1972, I did not really want to
come back. I knew that once I returned to India I would not have the opportunity to travel
again any time soon. It was hugely difficult to get out of the country in the 1970s, unless
35 you opted for an academic programme like a PhD. And I did not want to do that. So I
asked Paul Engle, the Program’s director, if there was any way in which he could help me
extend my stay, and he suggested that I take up an assistantship. That’s how I got to spend
two years in Iowa. In my second year I sat for the GRE [Graduate Record Examination] in
order to become a grad student, and paid in-state tuition, which was not very much, so it
40 all worked out. I attended the Translation Workshop and took a course in typography, but
wrote no papers or gave any exam. After the second year was over I packed my bags and left.
It never even struck me that I should continue to live in the US, beyond the two years
I was there. Among other things, I had a permanent job back in Allahabad, and I was on
leave from the university. There were other reasons too, equally compelling. It is one thing
45 to imagine from Allahabad that you’re living in the US but quite another to be actually living
there. As I discovered, it’s easy to be an American poet in India but much harder to be an
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198 L. ZECCHINI
AKM: Since there’s nothing known as an “Allahabad poet”, “Bombay poet” was a nice
identity to have! But it was really about being associated with a group of poets. And we did
a lot of work together. I can’t see myself having any other literary identity. On the subject
of “Bombay poets”, we all had a different relationship with [Nissim] Ezekiel. Arun had
5 known Ezekiel from the very beginning. His first published poem in English appeared in
the inaugural issue of Quest in 1955,2 and Gieve’s first book of poems called Poems (Patel
1966) was brought out by Nissim – the only book Nissim ever published. But as I was telling
Adil only last week, for me Nissim was someone to rebel against.
LZ: You once declared that 100 years should have separated Ezekiel and Kolatkar.
10 AKM: I did feel this because they came at the world and at language from what seem like
opposite directions, but they were born just seven years apart. I never felt any closeness to
Ezekiel.3 Now I can see what he was doing, breaking out of the dead end that Sri Aurobindo
and Sarojini Naidu had got Indian poetry in English into. In the 1950s he would have felt
quite alone. There was no one he could have shared anything with. He was trying to arrive
15 at that very flat language . . .
LZ: And at a colloquial idiom . . .
AKM: Yes, trying to get away from the divine abstractions of Sri Aurobindo and the
ethnographic verses of Sarojini Naidu. “Bharatmata” appeared in 1966 when I was still a
student in Bombay. I can’t remember where I ran into Nissim, but I gave him a copy of the
20 poem, probably sold it to him for 50 paisa, which was the price. A month or two later, to
my surprise, I got a postcard saying that he would like to print the poem in Poetry India.
Now “Bharatmata” was everything that Nissim’s poetry was not, but he liked it enough to
offer publication in his magazine. It says something about him and his openness to different
kinds of verse. It was a huge moment for me.
25 LZ: You, Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre were influenced by the surrealists, the Beats
and the whole American counterculture, while Nissim seemed more into British poetry.
AKM: Very much so. In 1966 he represented the enemy, so to speak. But he was also the
first modern poet to come up with memorable lines like “My backward place is where I
am” from “Background, Casually” (Ezekiel 2005, 181). This was something you came to
30 appreciate only later.
LZ: So, Arvind, you arrived in Bombay in 1966 when you were 19 years old. What do
you remember of the city at that time?
AKM: What I remember, Laetitia, is what any young person going from a place like
Allahabad to a big city like Bombay remembers, which is a great sense of estrangement. I
35 often said to myself that were I to fall off the local train in an accident, no one will know who
I am, even notice my absence. I lived in Mulund in the house of a lady my parents looked
upon as their guru. I once even tried to run away from there and go back to Allahabad.
Without damn you and ezra, which I would carry around in a blue overnight case, trying
to peddle them, the loneliness would have been worse. Otherwise, of the cultural life of the
40 city, one remembers Samovar, the café in the Jehangir Art Gallery, where I mostly hung out,
and the magazines, particularly Tornado, the latter brought out by Pavankumar Jain, who
wrote in both Gujarati and English. In fact, the cover of ezra 4 with the paper mask was
Pavankumar’s idea (see Figure 3). He had a wonderful sense of design, whose chief element
was disruptiveness, shock. He took playfulness seriously. In the pages of Tornado he would
randomly
This stick
is a draft postage
version stamps, corrections
and additional railway tickets, anything
may have that came
been inserted to hand,
at a later stage. which made
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Figure 3. Two covers of ezra 4 (Mehrotra 1968). Mehrotra bought these paper masks from a local toyshop
in Allahabad and glued them to the covers, that were all different from each other.
no two copies of the magazine identical. There was also a connection with the Gujarati
poets, with Kriti for instance, a Gujarati magazine which had an English section. Then in
1969 you have Vrishchik.
LZ: When I first talked to you about this special issue, you suggested we find someone
5 to write an essay on “Bombay Poets – Baroda Painters”. So do you think you could tell us
about that connection, and perhaps talk about the importance of Vrishchik, which pub-
lished so much of your early poetry, and was sometimes illustrated by Bhupen Khakhar
and Gulammohammed Sheikh.
AKM: It seems that when one magazine folded another sprang up to take its place.
10 Vrishchik brought poets, painters, translators, art critics on a common platform, but we were
there as young rebellious individuals interested in similar things rather than as members
of a group. The similarity, I think, had a lot to do with our reverence for the unnoticed and
the overlooked, the commonplace and the kitschy. Take Arun [Kolatkar’s] “Irani Restaurant
Bombay”4 (“the cockeyed shah of iran”) and Bhupen’s early paintings and you can see the
parallels. One of Bhupen’s inspirations seems to have been the landscape pictures and por-
15
traits often found in Irani restaurants,5 but that’s not what I mean here. There is in Bhupen’s
Barber’s Shop a Welcome sign – “Wel-come” written in a semicircle – painted on the front
glass, which is precisely the kind of detail that Arun would notice too. Its equivalent in
“Irani Restaurant” is the cake decomposing “carefully in a cracked showcase”. The showcase
(without the crack) could have appeared in another of Bhupen’s paintings, Janata Watch
20
Repairing, and hung with watches rather than filled with stale cakes. In an early poem of
mine in Vrishchik, “Song of the Rolling Earth” (Mehrotra 1970), dated Bombay 1967, there’s
a reference to Zebra umbrellas and Wills cigarettes. Just to be able to name the familiar was,
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200 L. ZECCHINI
for us, to defamiliarize it. We were like cartographers, mapping the city, much as Google
Maps does. “Irani Restaurant Bombay” and Janata Watch Repairing, their very names, are
like landmarks in the cultural map of the period.
LZ: You also open “Song of the Rolling Earth” (Mehrotra 1970) with a quotation
5 from Apollinaire: “I believe I have found a source of inspiration in prospectuses . . .
catalogues, posters, advertisements of all sorts”.
AKM: This is what I meant, the random everyday things of the street: catalogues, posters,
advertisements, signboards.
LZ: And the poetic form of the catalogue, right? You’ve written about your first
10 encounter with Adil’s poetry, and your delight in discovering a poem from Land’s End
(Jussawalla 1962) which consisted largely of a shopping list.
AKM: I was struck by it because I did not know that a random shopping list could become
part of a poem. It is likely that the form of “Song of the Rolling Earth”, which is that of a
15 list, came from Adil. This was the break we were trying to make without realizing it. At the
same time, if I leave out Nissim, there was little to go against, at least for me. There was no
tradition that I was aware of. We almost thought of ourselves as the first poets. So if you are
the first poets in a language, where do you start? The Americans gave us a starting point.
Could it have been the same for Arun – for the English Arun not the Marathi? Incidentally,
20 we were not the only ones to look towards the Americans. Graziano Krätli has put together
the William Carlos Williams–Srinivas Rayaprol correspondence (Krätli forthcoming), where
with the very first letter he writes Rayaprol sends Williams two poems, wanting to know if
they are any good. “So, what do you say?” he asks. This was in 1949, when Rayaprol was an
engineering student in the US. He was 21 years old.
25 LZ: I had never thought of it that way, that you were writing from what seemed to be
a tabula rasa of literature. Now I’m just trying this out . . . But was it also about writing
on India as if India was any other place? See, I was wondering why you had called one
of your little magazines fakir, and also why Douglas Blazek calls you “dr Buddha” in
his letters (see Figure 4). As if you were also playing with the clichés about India in the
west: the fakirs, the holy cows, the whole “heat and dust” and religious imagery. So was
30
it also about writing about Indian streets as if, say, they were any other street, whether
in the US or in Europe?
AKM: Douglas Blazek says in the letter somewhere that he had never written to an Indian
before, and the Buddha is what he associated with India. These associations were certainly
not in my mind. I called the magazine fakir because I wanted to publish bhakti poetry.6 I
35 had already started doing some Kabir and knew of Arun’s Tukaram translations in Poetry
India7 (1966). Dilip too had been translating him.8 I would have liked to continue with
fakir. At the time, “fakir” did not look like a cliché; at least I was unaware of the exoticizing
aspect. The idea that we were living in an exotic place did not even strike us. The literature
was too young, and too new, and we were too much on the inside. We were largely writing
40 and translating for ourselves and for each other.
LZ: But you were also sending your poems to American little magazines, weren’t you?
And there must also have been a form of exhilaration in realizing that you were doing
the same stuff as the Americans were, which did not correspond to what they must have
expected of Indians.
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Figure 4. Letter from Douglas Blazek to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, August 20, 1967.
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202 L. ZECCHINI
AKM: It’s true that the American-mimeographed little magazines published a lot of my early
poems. The poems looked American all right: they were in lower case, used little punctuation
– all the 1960s mannerisms. Those guys in India are just like us, the Americans would have
felt. It also possible that they liked everything that came with an Indian stamp on the envelope!
5 LZ: Arvind, you told me at the end of our conversation yesterday that you wanted to
return to that Apollinaire quotation . . .
AKM: The Apollinaire quote actually ties in with the string of quotations on the inside
back cover of Pomes, Poemes, Poemas, that Vrishchik brought out as a special issue (Mehrotra
1971). The quotes were from William Blake, Kierkegaard, Mallarmé, Octavio Paz, Breton,
10 Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, and something from the Chronique des arts. I think what
I was trying to do was to create for myself an idea of literature. As you can see, there was
no quotation from any Indian work. I was really quite ignorant.
LZ: Were you not also entering into a dialogue with all these writers, placing yourself
in a common genealogy?
15
AKM: Well I suppose so. Creating your own literary ancestors and a context for what
you’re doing. Perhaps the list Arun makes of the books he was reading from the 1950s to
the 1970s could be looked at in the same way. He read in both English and Marathi, but
European and American authors far outnumber Marathi ones.
20 LZ: There’s also Lust for Life, Irving Stone’s ([1934] 2001) biographical novel about
Van Gogh, which Raza and other Indian artists mention as an important book in the
1950s and 1960s, and which also appears in Arun’s bibliographical chronology.
AKM: These books provided us with a frame in which to see our work. We were trying
to create non-Indian genealogies for ourselves. I mean they were largely non-Indian, not
25 entirely. Which brings me to Amit Chaudhuri’s (2008) essay “Poles of Recovery”, because
the recovery was also taking place.
LZ: If I remember right, he is talking about the twin movements of disownment and
recovery, exile and “homecoming” which are characteristic of Indian modernity, and of
course you and others were also starting to work on your translations and “recastings”
of bhakti poetry in the 1950s and 1960s.
30
AKM: There was only one issue of fakir but Vrishchik brought out a medieval poetry
number devoted to translations of bhakti poems.9 I think what might have attracted us to
these poets is what attracted me to the Beats: the outspokenness, the transgression, the free
thinking, the upturning of social norms, the use of everyday speech. But to come back to
our discussion yesterday; there was something else that we were reading at the time, and
35
that was Jacques Prévert. The Penguin translation, by Ferlinghetti as it happens, was the
one we all read (Prévert 1958). A poem in it, “At the Florist’s”, begins:
A man enters a florist’s
and chooses some flowers
the florist wraps up the flowers
40 the man puts his hand in his pocket
to find the money
the money to pay for the flowers
but at the same time he puts
all of a sudden
his hand to his heart
Thisand
is ahe falls.
draft (99) and additional corrections may have been inserted at a later stage.
version
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204 L. ZECCHINI
LZ: Yes, give me a minute. Here is the passage:
Sometime in early 1967, in a Colaba Causeway bookshop in Bombay, I first set eyes on
Arun Kolatkar. [ … ] The man in the Causeway bookshop, with his long hair, drooping
moustache, large slightly hooded raptorial eyes, and distinctive clothes – five-pocket jeans,
round neck t-shirt, white khadi bundi, fitted the image I had of Kolatkar, but before I could
5 gather the courage to walk up to him and introduce myself he was gone. I must have met
him soon afterwards, and either on that occasion or later I asked him for a contribution
for damn you. He said I should come home with him, and we took a taxi from wherever
we were in Flora Fountain to his flat behind the Colaba Post Office, where he lived with
his first wife Darshan. It was here, without any fuss, that he gave me the manuscript of
“The Boatride”, each section on a separate sheet and typed in capital letters, which is how
10 it appeared in damn you 6 in 1968.
AKM: Arun wrote “The Boatride” in 1963 and he could have given it to Quest or to
Poetry India, where Nissim I am sure would have gladly published it. But it seems he was
waiting for me to turn up. It was his first major poem, the culmination of his early work,
and it led directly to Jejuri. That’s why he wanted it to be the last poem in The Boatride and
15
Other Poems (Kolatkar 2009).13 You can now see the pattern: “The Boatride”, followed by
Jejuri, Kala Ghoda Poems (Kolatkar 2004a) and Sarpa Satra (Kolatkar 2004b). When I was
editing The Boatride and Other Poems, it struck me that I had started out my life as a poet
in the 1960s, when one of the things I did was publish “The Boatride” in damn you (see
Figure 5). And in 2004 I was editing, at Arun’s request, The Boatride and Other Poems. I
20 found this to be a little unsettling. It’s as though I’d dedicated my life to Kolatkar’s cause.
Which in a way I had. And I’d do it again.
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Figure 5. Cover and first inside page with Jejuri title of damn you: a magazine of the arts 6 (Mehrotra, Rai,
Rai, and Chauhan 1968).
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Notes
1. A long poem that Arvind Krishna Mehrotra first published in mimeographed form.
2. The magazine Quest, “A Bi-monthly of Arts and Ideas”, sponsored by the Indian Committee
for Cultural Freedom and edited by Nissim Ezekiel, was one of the most influential English-
language magazines devoted to cultural, literary and political matters in post-Independence
India. See Graziano Krätli’s article in this special issue of “The Worlds of Bombay Poetry”.
5 3. See the interview with Adil Jussawalla in this issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.
4. See this issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for Vinay Dharwadker’s translation of
Arun Kolatkar’s poem (“Irani Restaurant”) from Marathi into English.
5. See the opening text of this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (Arun Khopkar’s
essay “Footloose and Fancy-free in Bombay: A Partial View of the 1960s and 1970s”) for an
10 evocation of the Irani restaurants of Bombay.
6. Many different forms of medieval devotionality are known as bhakti, which first emerged in
South India around the 6th century before spreading to the rest of India. Bhakti represented
a compelling and non-exclusive movement of popular devotion, which included men and
women from all castes, classes and stages of life. Bhakti “poets” such as Tukaram, Namdev
15 or Jnandev from the Marathi tradition, or the 15th-century Kabir from North India rejected
Sanskrit in order to produce extraordinary compositions and devotional songs in the
vernaculars.
7. The remarkable first issue of the journal Poetry India (Ezekiel 1966) included translations
of Vedic hymns from Sanskrit by P. Lal, translations of Tamil classical love poetry by A.K.
20 Ramanujan, Marathi translations of Mardhekar by Dilip Chitre and of Tukaram by Arun
Kolatkar.
8. Dilip Chitre’s translations of Tukaram later appeared in book form (Chitre 1991).
9. See Gulammohammed Sheikh’s interview in this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial
Writing.
25 10. Reference to a poem by Arun Kolatkar: “My name is Arun Kolatkar/I had a little matchbox/I
lost it/then I found it/I kept it/in my right hand pocket/It is still there” (Kolatkar 2010).
11. See Gulammohammed Sheikh’s interview in this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial
Writing.
12. One of the most iconic bookshops of Bombay. See Arun Khopkar’s opening essay of this
30 special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for an evocation of Strand.
13. The Boatride and Other Poems (Kolatkar 2009), edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and
brought out by Ashok Shahane’s Pras Prakashan, draws on uncollected and unpublished
poems by Arun Kolatkar, and was published posthumously.
14. Part of Kolatkar’s unpublished papers. Quoted in Zecchini (2014, 72).
35
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
40
Laetitia Zecchini is a research fellow at the CNRS in Paris, France. Her research interests include
contemporary Indian poetry, the politics of literature, postcolonial criticism and issues of modernism
and cosmopolitanism. She has co-translated Arun Kolatkar and Kedarnath Singh into French, and
is the author of Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Moving Lines (2014), which aims at
telling a story of modernism in India through a particular poet, Arun Kolatkar, and a particular time
and place, the ebullient post-Independent Bombay scene from which his poetry is inseparable. She
recently co-edited two journal issues (for the Revue de littérature comparée, 2015 and for Littérature,
45 2016) on questions of Indian literary history, and is starting a collaborative project on writers’ organ-
izations, free speech and the All-India PEN Center.
This is a draft version and additional corrections may have been inserted at a later stage.
Please check the final published manuscript online: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjpw20/53/1-2
RJPW 1296631 CE: ####### QA: #######
Revision
1 June 2017 Coll:XX QC:#######
50
This is a draft version and additional corrections may have been inserted at a later stage.
Please check the final published manuscript online: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjpw20/53/1-2