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INTRODUCTION

This dissertation offers a prolific insight into the writings of Bombay group of poets in Indian
Writing in English. The poets taken into account for analysis are Dilip Chitre,Arun Kolatkar
and Eunice de Souza. It is a novice attempt to bring out a completely new dimension of the
urban landscape poetry which brings out the seriousness from the quotidian city life along with
the world of fear, anxiety and despair that it offers. Unlike the high-seriousness of pre-
Independence poets, these Bombay poets are transparently true to life, they are not Idealists
rather eccentric in their approach to life. They have not lived abroad but live or have lived in
the vicious atmosphere of Bombay struggling to come up with a striking individuality of its
own, an angularity in its gestures with a tone of defiance (or at least non-conformity).
I shall be looking at close quarters towards their features as Bilingual Experimentalist,
the post-modern aspects in their work, the influence of Marathi poets which has shaped their
poetry and the confessional nature of their poems.

And at the moment of contact, they do not know if the hand that is reaching for theirs belongs to a
Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Brahmin or untouchable or whether you were born in this city or
arrived only this morning or whether you live in Malabar Hill or New York or Jogeshwari; whether
youre from Bombay or Mumbai or New York. All they know is that youre trying to get to the city
of gold, and thats enough. Come on board, they say. Well adjust.
-Suketu Mehta ( Maximum City)

In Rushdies fifth novel, The Moors Last Sigh, he would expand on this idea: Bombay
was central, had been so from the moment of its creation: the bastard child of a Portuguese
English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian citiesall rivers flowed into its human sea.
It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators and everybody talked at once (Rushdie
1997:350). Situated centrally on the western Malabar coast of India, Bombay was once an
island fishing village included in the dowry of the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza,
when she married Charles II. Cities often live in our imaginations, their physical and social
architecture exercising real power by conjuring up fictions and myths. Bombay, it has been

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said, is not a city but a state of mind; a state of a young mans mind, exciting and excitable,
exuberant and effervescent, dynamic and dramatic.
There is no doubt that this port metropolis-with its self-conscious commingling of
cultures and commodities, fabulous wealth and unimaginable poverty, and teeming tensions
and transformations has provided writers with compelling literary material, particularly in what
has come to be known as the Bombay poets in English. Bollywood too has long projected
Bombay as a Janus-faced space of desire and disappointment, emancipation and exploitation.
In its polarities and contradictions, this vibrant city embodies both the promise and the betrayals
of Independence, enables encounters across classes, castes, communities, and genders in
hitherto unprecedented ways that gestured towards, without necessarily realizing, egalitarian
possibilities.

The political scientist Sudipta Kaviraj in his book Politics in India has remarked that
Democracy in the decades after independence had a clearly marked space of residence.The
city, Bombay and Calcutta, par excellence, had that mysterious quality, liberating and
contaminating at the same time . But unlike Delhi, Bombay isnt a city rich with history. Unlike
Calcutta whose cultural icons include Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, Bombay, devoid
of any regional character, could function as the urban archetype in early Hindi cinema. Bombay
makes news when terrorists attack the city or when Mukesh Ambani, the wealthiest man in
India, spends a billion dollars to erect a skyscraper for himself, or when the symbol of its
squalor, the slum, provides the backdrop for an Academy Award-winning film. But
nevertheless, it is in the realm of cosmopolitanism that Bombay has such symbolic importance
to India.
Bombay is where barriers crumble and this provided the terrorists with a good reason
on a November night in 2008 to siege the city for more than two days killing hundreds of people
in a place which represents what India can be-a place where people from all parts of the country,
speaking different languages, worshiping different gods, come together for the common
purpose of leading a better life. Two years later, the city continues to live on edge (Unlike Delhi
and Ahmedabad, to name two cities which have erupted into riots after experiencing targeted
violence, Bombay stayed calm. Mass retaliation is rare in trading cities). It is a city, Pico Iyer
relates, that is both beachhead for the modern and multi-cultured port, a haven of tolerance for
Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Christians, Sikhs, Jains, and others bound in a money-minded mix.
Its kindred spirits, he suggests, are those other island staging-posts of people, capital and

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modernity, Hong Kong and Manhattan. Bombay has become a self-conscious cocktail of
cultural heterogeneity:

On the one hand, the colonial authorities stamped the official public space with their representations
and encouraged the use and spread of the English language, Gothic and later other styles of
architecture, Western music and theatre. On the other, the native migrant communities developed
their own community cultures, their languages through their community associationsBy the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a distinct form of upper class cosmopolitan culture had
developed in Bombay as much as its opposite. (qtd.in Images of Transcendence and Survival by
Rohinton Mistry)

But what ultimately may tear the city apart some day is the threat within, the Shiv Sena.
In his novel, The Moors Last Sigh, the Bombay-born Salman Rushdie writes: Those who
hated India, those who sought to ruin it, would need to ruin Bombay. The people he had in
mind were the politicians whom Thackeray nurtured. The Shiv Sena has used thuggish force
to attack communities, businesses, and ideas that it abhors. The city is littered with examples
of businesses changing their names, altering their recruitment practices, and acquiescing to the
whimsical demands of the party, and its rival off-shoot, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (the
Maharashtra Re-creation Army). Most recently, Thackerays grandson went to meet the vice-
chancellor of the citys premier university and remarked that he was annoyed that the university
had included the Bombay-born Canadian writer Rohinton Mistrys novel, Such A Long
Journey, as part of its literature syllabus, since it ridiculed his political party and Marathi
culture. The vice-chancellor immediately withdrew the book from the syllabus, to the horror
of many of the citys residents.
Imperial architecture, panoramas of skyscraper-studded skylines, crowded streets,
overflowing trains, advertising billboards, throbbing nightclubs, Bombay often evokes the
hallmark of swapaner nagari,a city of dreams. Rohinton Mistry,in his film(adopted from the
novel) Such A Long Journey(1998) has described Bombay as A golden nest with no place to
rest. Milan Luthrias recent Hindi film, Taxi 9 2 11: Nau Do Gyarah (2006, hereafter Taxi)
examining representations of post-colonial Bombay, traces the simultaneous possibilities and
problems of Bombays reputation as the quintessentially modern city of India, the countrys
commercial display window. The city is crammed to the core and as they say even the
footpath has no space here. Being both a city of debris and a city of spectacle, Ranjani

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Mazumdar in her recent work on Bombay cinema demonstrates that Bombay claims the
fantasy of a lifestyle unblemished by the chaos and poverty that exist all around (ibid.,p.110).

Combining its regional and linguistic chauvinism with the broader projects of Hindu
nationalism, the Shiv Sena made significant political gains in the 1980s and
1990s, positioning Bombay at the center of a nation rescripted as a sacred, Hindu space, a
project culminating in and symbolized by the citys official name change to Mumbai(under
chauvinist pressure) in 1995. Bombay or Mumbai, the place has always enjoyed a unique place
in Hindi film lore and today in the genre of poetry too. But today, there has been a significant
change in the citys cinematic image. It is no longer conceived primarily as the cosmopolitan
urban space but imagined as a localized milieu inscribed with a regional flavor. The industrial
dynamics as well as the sociopolitical and economic events played a role in reimagining the
city. The city has been for centuries a focus for global trade around the Arabian Sea and beyond,
owing in large part to its endowment with one of the largest harbors in South Asia, and,
especially from the mid-nineteenth century, has long been attractive to a wide range of
migrants. The figure of the city as cosmopolitan is a constant feature in narratives of its recent
decline.
A particular kind of worldliness, cultural pluralism exists in Bombay. And perhaps this
might be the reason why Bombay inspires much literary faculty. Unsurprisingly, the Bombay
poem is preoccupied with the cosmopolitanism and the stories generated by migrants and
minority communities. Writers from minority communities within India like Salman Rushdie,
Rohinton Mistry(of Parsi background) Nissim Ezekiel(Jewish), Shama Futehally (from a
Muslim family)have found Bombay a familiar and productive, if not always congenial, space
to write about. Much of the romance about Bombay comes from the fact that authors have
found poetry and insight in its most charmless parts; chawls, crammed local trains, defiled
beaches, prostitutes, the monsoon rains et al. The absence of a picturesque landscape has never
dettered the readers curiosity to rejoice the artistic pieces. Even the dusty world of construction
and redevelopment has inspired bestsellers, like Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga. The
narratives do not attempt to erase the ugliness and despair of life in Bombay. Instead the fact
that Bombay thrives despite all its problems is what makes it both beautiful and inspiring to
our authors. And consequently, poetry and fairy dust are sprinkled over the citys most
maddening aspects, from water shortage to riots.


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The sordid side of Bombay has also served as happy hunting ground for the citys
chroniclers. The countrys financial capital is plagued by a surfeit of socio-economic issues.
The sleazy underworld, murderous husbands, corrupt administrationstheres a lot that is
askew in our urban landscape but when written about by the likes of Suketu Mehta (Maximum
City), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai Fables), S. H. Zaidi (Black Friday, Mafia Queens of Mumbai) and
Sonia Faleiro (Beautiful Thing), these dark stories are much more than depressing news items.
They become crazy mirrors reflecting the reality of this city with symbolism and insight.
Without literature, both fiction and non-fiction, to show us the possibilities contained in
everyday life in this city, Bombay would feel a lot less magical.

Sometimes,Indian Poetry in English reminds us of the Johhny Walker jingle: "Main
Bumbai ka babu, nam mera anjana/ English sur mein gaoon main Hindusthani gana".The
Indianness in English words is a very distinct feature that differentiates and familiarizes the
Bombay poets. The role of this one city is immensely significant in churning out some of the
great authors, not just Ezekiel, Gieve Patel, Eunice de Souza,Dilip Chitre,Arun Kolatkar, Adil
Jussawalla, Salim Peeradina but also Parthasarathy and Arvind Mehrotra who studied here.
Kamala Das rose to fame when she was in Bombay (it wasn't Mumbai then).

Living in a single place, or at least they seem to be, these poets in a sense are
stubbornly local in their temperament. Professor Vinayak Krishna Gokak at the symposium
on Poetry India,1974 held in Madras explained that poems should be composed about the
life that goes on around us embodying the stuff of every day. It would be the height of audacity
to advise a poet what he should or should not write about.

Modernism has often been viewed, in turn, as a Euro-American product, trans-national
only insofar as many modernist artists and writers were expatriates or exiles in Europe and in
the United States. But it is time to clear a space, as Amit Chaudhri had put it, for alternative
trajectories and genealogies of modernism outside of these Western filiations, beyond the
canonical period of high modernism (1910-1930) and to explore how modernism was
reinvented through displacement. Somebody again said that one must write poetry that is easy
to understand. If it is to be difficult, it should be difficult in the manner of the modernists. But
our Bombay poets do not talk about fundamental brain-stuff, although they deliver expression,
persuasion or revelation extracted from the trivial things in life. Several questions darken our

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mind when we chart out their unmapped territory; is it intuition? Is it the dreams of us that are
awake? Is it an expression of personality or an escape from it? What is it?

In the impersonal and almost callous society that is fast growing around us, we have
begun to experience loneliness in crowded cities. Sensitive people find it hard to live unless
they share their joys and sorrows and their ditties and dreams with like-minded people. As a
thirst-aiding center, the meeting of these Bombay poets provide great psychological relief to
desolate readers.
As we know modern Indian English-language poetry began to emerge at the end of
Second World War after the end of colonialism. The writers who came to be celebrated as the
pioneers of modernism wanted to liberate themselves from an overbearing literary culture,
breaking down from the Tagore Syndrome characterized by cultural nationalism, romantic
love, idealization of nature, metaphysics and mysticism and an ideal nation building. The poets
of the recent times with a different sensibility are trying to articulate the existential tensions,
anxieties and doubts of individuals sentenced to the solitude, ambiguity and anguish of the
post-industrial urban infernos. Dilip Chitre in his introduction to an Anthology of Marathi
Poetry,Volume I of contemporary Indian Poetry (1945-65) alludes to this experience as the
broken gestalt and shows with examples from Marathi poetry how the very cultures that broke
off violently from the tradition were the very cultures that had a deep-rooted sense of their
native ways of feeling because it was individuals in these cultures who experienced the deepest
trauma when the mechanized society enjoying the fruits of a mass civilization broke up their
sense of an organic inner life.
The modern poets were more open with its surprising attitudes towards such topics as
guilt, sexuality, ambition, memories of past rebellions, conflicts, shames, childhood and love
affairs and an assertion of an articulate but fractured self that they became part of the
confessional mode of poetry that started in America during the early 50s and 60s.Although
they were exposed in a big way to the experiments in contemporary Western poetry, as they
have either lived and studied abroad, brought up in urban centers, yet they refused to imitate
since they were well aware of the indigenous traditions that were rich in situations, characters,
symbols ,motifs and archetypes that could well serve as a source of metaphors for the conflicts
of modern life.

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The Bombay poets as a group tend to be marginal to traditional Hindu society not only
by being alienated by their English-language education but also, more significantly, by coming
from such communities as the Parsis, Jews and Christians, or by being rebels from Hinduism
and Islam, or by living abroad. There is no other authentic mentality for these poets except that
of the modern world and its concerns, which they may express or criticize but of which they
are a part, as are an increasing number of Indians.
The twentieth century suburb has often been the object of scorn and derision (
The Country and The City,12). The Bombay poets often include the whole urban landscape to
reveal the sin and squalid of the metropolis. The moral failings of city-dwellers are creatively
wrapped in satirical verses which scornfully brings out the disintegrity. The urban theory of
Heterotopia, coined by social theorist and literary critic Michel Foucalt in the 1960s, is
reflected in the works of these Bombay poets. A world off-center that possesses multiple,
fragmented and incompatible meanings, the contemporary transformation of the city displays
a profound redrawing of the contours of public and private space, bringing to the fore an equally
treacherous and fertile ground of conditions that are not merely hybrid, but rather defy an easy
description in these terms( Foucalt 6).The privatization of public spaces creates a camp-like
situation, a space where law is suspended as a result of which the society is disintegrated. The
space in the city is annihilated and the citizen reduced to bare life. Today, more and more
people are exposed to the conditions of bare life: the homeless, illegal immigrants, the
inhabitants of slums. The idea of shared or collective spaces can be traced in the Bombay poems
when the poet talks about the journey by a commuter in the local trains. They show how these
city-dwellers have embraced the brutality of the grotesque urbanism.
The haunting obsession of the nineteenth century: themes of development and
stagnation, themes of crisis and cycle, themes of the accumulation of the past, the big surplus
of the dead and the menacing cooling of the world, have been inculcated in the urban poems.
Bombay is a city in the midst of extensive social and spatial (re)construction. The border, the
boundary everything dissolves in this globally and increasingly interconnected metropolis.
After the Second World War in India that coincided with a feverish activity in translation
and unleashed a tremendous variety of cross-influences almost all of a sudden, writes the
bilingual Marathi-English poet Dilip Chitre, the 1950s and 1960s represented a fantastic
conglomeration of clashing realities (Anthology 5) that was particularly palpable in Bombay:
city of gold by the early 20
th
century and magnetizing city for migrants, gateway for India and
window on the West, dream city of cosmopolitan desire(Prakash 75) and unlimited

9

possibilities, mosaic of modern culture and communal mix. With the arrival of successive
waves of migrants, ethnic, caste, religious, and linguistic diversity has become a constitutive
aspect of the city. As early as 1832,visitors to the city remarked on its heterogeneity: In twenty
minutes walk through the bazaar of Bombay, my ear has been struck by the sounds of every
language that I have heard in any part of the worldin a tone which implied that the speakers
were quite at home (B.Hall cited in Kosambi 1986: 38). Bombay is certainly the most
composite, multilingual and multiconfessional of Indian cities, where Portuguese, British,
Jews, Parsis, Iraqis, Russians, Chinese, Persians but also Indians and refugees from the whole
sub-continent congregated and left their mark. Most Bombay poets are not originally from
the city and have precisely migrated there, uprooted from other states, small cities or rural
backgrounds (Dilip Chitre came from Gujarat, Arun Kolatkar from Kolhapur, a small town in
South Maharashtra, etc. The Progressive Artists Group which is the most influential school of
modern art in India and was formed in 1947 in Bombay is precisely a product of such
migrations and cosmopolitanism.
When many modern Indian poets started writing in the 1950s and 1960s, it was
the time for Beat poetry, sound poetry, visual poetry, concrete poetry, jazz poetry and
continuing surrealism; a time of openness to everything else that was happening in the world
and of feverish experimentation with all kinds of forms and mediums. Bombay poets engaged
with these new paradigms and with the internationalism of the avant-garde. They had all been
exposed to the modernist galaxy and often consciously placed themselves in this lineage. An
unpublished fragment by Arun Kolatkar reads as follows: I was born the year Hart Crane
killed himself / Nine years after Ulysses was burnt / three years after Auden published his first
collection / one year after Makovsky killed himself / I had my first tooth when / Dylan Thomas
published his first collection (Kolatkar Papers).
Bombay poets hence developed strong affinities with European modernism and the
counter-culture of the 1960s. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the Dadaists and Surrealists, William
Carlos and the contemporary Beats in the United States, but also anti-establishment little
magazines like Partisan Review ,Paris Review or Evergreen Review , which were read,
circulated and discussed, are the defining influences of a lot of modern Indian poems.
Over half the citys population of millions live in the gigantic slums of Bombay;
the richest urban center in India is also home to Dharavi, Asias largest slum. Overflowing
sewers, broken water-pipes, pot-holed pavements, rodent invasions, bribe-extracting public

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servants, uncollected hills of garbage, open manholes, shattered streetlights are sewn together
in a patchwork quilt of lives and stories connected by chance encounters and shared experiences
in Bombay (Mistry 1991: 279)
This period which is sometimes described as a kind of Indian renaissance signaled
years of collective endeavors. The poets often formed small alternative presses and workshops,
countless journals and underground anti-establishment little magazines, like the cyclostyled
Shabda (literally word or speech) in Marathi started by Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar and
others in 1954 or Damn You: A Magazine of the Arts , started in 1965 by the poet Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra and modeled on the American publication Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts
, which rapidly became a temporary outpost of the American and European avant-garde
(King,23).
This renaissance affected all artistic domains. We thus find in the 1950s and 1960s in
Bombay the same creative symbiosis between the visual arts and literature that is a trademark
of Euro-American modernism. Amit Chaudhuri talks about the metropolitan flirtations
between artistic subcultures and the way Bombay poet-critics like Nissim Ezekiel, Arvind
Krishna Mehrotra, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel poached and encroached upon the territory
of painters ( Clearing a Space, 224). Many of the journals and little magazines published at
the time are meticulously crafted and designed works of art, edited together by painters and
poets (Vrischtik edited by the painters Gulam Sheikh and Bhupen Khakar,Shabda edited by the
painter Bandu Waze, by Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar and others) who not only worked together
but sometimes, like Gieve Patel or Kolatkar who trained as a visual artist at the J. J. School of
Art, were both painters and poets. Kolatkar thus designed the covers for a lot of little magazines
and collections:Shabda in the 1950s,Dionysus in the 1960s, all the covers of the small
publishing cooperative Clearing House later in the 1970s, etc. Poets, writers, painters, theater
and film directors gathered around the J. J. School of Art which became the nucleus for all art
activity (Dalmia 4) on Indias West coast but also around the Jehangir Art Gallery in the South
Bombay district of Kala Ghoda, where the Progressive Artists Group was formed, notably in
the Artists Aid Fund Center which Dilip Chitre evokes as follows: the place reminded me
more of an orphanage than an art gallery (Remembering Arun Kolatkar). They often lodged
together in small congested spaces and lived in self-conscious literary bohemianism(
Engblom 391)

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Throughout all the different representation of Bombay by different people, one thing is
very common. It is the tone of confession and sordidness. In the century that rolled past us
quite a handful of Indian poets who chose to write in English had their rendezvous with future
in this city uncontained by movie screen and epigramwhere it is perfectly historical/to be
looking out/on a sooty handkerchief of ocean/searching for God (lines 14-42) as poet
Arundhati Subramanion would qualify it in the poem Where I live. Despite its paradoxes,
Bombay is a city of dreams where nightmares lurk everywhere. It is luxurious and gritty; full
of promise, it is sure to betray. One may wonder if the almost proverbial Mumbai Muse has
been a coincidental myth or if the alchemy of this city is indeed at work.



















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Chapter One: 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

(Poems in English 1953-1967)

It is evident from the above mentioned lines that the Indian English poet taken for analysis
takes his imagination to a non-realistic poetic mode different from a superior kind of logical
and emotional communication; such poetry may be concerned with the irrational, with chance,
or with structures of art. Because experimental poetry foregrounds technique, new concepts
,or explores uncommon experience it usually neglects the common world and environment or
treats it in strange, unconventional ways (King, 23 ). Few artists remain pure experimentalists
for long; the fascination with techniques, fantasies, games and the subconscious is the product
of a period of an artists life which will eventually give way or be assimilated to a sense of
reality-if only in a preoccupation with ones difference or alienation from communal or cultural
perceptions of reality.
Kolatkar also led another life, and took great care to keep the two lives separate. Arun
Kolatkar was a visual artist by profession and he quickly established himself in this league
which, in 1989, inducted him into the hall of fame for lifetime achievement. His poet friends

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were scarcely aware of the advertising legend in their midst, for he never spoke to them about
his prize-winning ad campaigns or the agencies he did them for. His first poems started
appearing in English and Marathi magazines in the early 1950s and he continued to write in
both languages for the next fifty years, creating two independent and equally significant bodies
of work. Occasionally he made jottings in which he wondered about the strange bilingual
creature he was:
I have a pen in my possession
which writes in 2 languages
and draws in one

My pencil is sharpened at both ends
I use one end to write in Marathi
the other in English

what I write with one end
comes out as English
what I write with the other
comes out as Marathi. ( from Translations)

With the paperback revolution in the publishing industry after the Second World
War in India that coincided with a feverish activity in translation and unleashed a tremendous
variety of cross influences almost all of a sudden the 1950s and 1960s represented a fantastic
conglomeration of clashing realities (Chitre, Anthology 5) that was particularly palpable in
Bombay: city of gold by the early 20
th
century and magnetizing city for migrants, gateway for
India and window on the West, dream city of cosmopolitan desire (Prakash 75) and unlimited
possibilities, mosaic of modern culture and communal mix.

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By the later 60s English-language poetry in India had a handful of new classic
volumes, not necessarily published by Writers Workshop, and established significant writers
but it was gaining recognition from those with an interest in poetry and culture both in India
and abroad. By now the modern Indian English poets formed a sufficiently large group to have
different tastes, aesthetics, standards and styles. This partly reflected the rapidity with which
the poetry was evolving towards international standards as well as different notions of the art.
Their international standards could be gauged from The Progressive Artists Group
which is the most influential school of modern art in India and was formed in 1947 in Bombay
is precisely a product of migrations and cosmopolitanism. Not only were Jewish European
migrs largely involved in the development of the Progressive Artists Group (like the German
cartoonist Rudi Von Leyden or the Austrian painter Walter Langhammer who became the first
arts director of the Times of India), but the founding fathers of this group all come from
different regional, religious and linguistic backgrounds: F. N. Souza from Goa, K. H. Ara from
Hyderabad, M. F. Husain from Pandharpur in Maharashtra, S. H. Raza from Madhya Pradesh,
Sadanand Bakre from Baroda, etc.
All his life Kolatkar had an inexplicable dread of publishers contracts, refusing to sign
them. This made his work difficult to come by, even in India. Jejuri was first published by a
small co-operative, Clearing House, of which he was a part, and thereafter it was kept in print
by his old friend.,Ashok Shahane, who set up Pras Prakashan with the sole purpose of
publishing Kolatkars first Marathi collection Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita . Jejuri, a sequence
of thirty-one poems based on a visit to a temple town of the same near Pune,appeared in 1976
to instant acclaim,winning the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and establishing his international
reputation. But Jejuri has been a controversial poem for a variety of reasons. This poem is a
case in point when we deal with all the important questions of the expression of Indian
sensibility through an unusual perspective. Jejuri,thirty miles from Pune,has one of the most
prominent temples in Western Maharashtra and it is dedicated to the god known as Mallari
Martand.This Hindu deity, also known as Khandoba, is worshipped by people of all castes and
creeds. Divided into many small poems, Jejuri stands as a composite whole.
Only incidentally, though, is Jejuri about a temple town or matters of faith. The first
question that comes to our mind is: why does the narrator go to Jejuri? Is religious quest the
chief motive behind the narrators visit to Jejuri? At its heart,and at the heart of all Kolatkars
work, lies a moral vision, whose basis is the things of this world, precisely, rapturously

15

observed. So, a common doorstep is revealed to be a pillar on its side, Yes./ Thats what it is
; the eight-arm goddess, once you begin to count, has eighteen arms; and the rundown Maruti
temple, where nobody comes to worship but is home to a mongrel bitch and her puppies, is, for
that reason, nothing less than the house of god. The matter of fact tone, bemused, seemingly
offhand, is easy to get wrong, and Kolatkars Marathi critics got it badly wrong, finding it to
be cold, flippant, at best skeptical. They were forgetting, of course, that the clarity of Kolatkars
observations would not be possible without abundant sympathy for the person or animal (or
even inanimate object) being observed; forgetting too,that without abundant sympathy for
what was being observed, the poems would not be the acts of attention they are(Mehrotra,
Arvind Krishna.Arun Kolatkar,Collected Poems in English).
The thirty-six sections of Jejuri consist,like The Boatride,of varied and difficult to
analyze perceptions and attitudes of someone on a journey. Here it is an apparently skeptical
tourist who arrives in the ancient place of pilgrimage; at the end he is waiting with irritation
for a train so he can depart. The opening poem establishes themes of perception and alienation:

Your own divided face in a pair of glasses
on an old mans nose
is all the countryside you get to see. (lines 10-12)

At the end of the bumpy ride
with your own face on either side
when you get off the bus
you dont step inside the old mans head . (lines 22-25)
( The Bus, Jejuri)

Talking about alienation, Dileep Jhaveri in his essay Tradition-Independence-Metropolis-
Modernity-Freedom:Elusion and Illusion has rightly said, Truly in Bharat now we the poets
carry the mark of both disinherited children and strangers to ourselves and all.

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But one aspect of Jejuri which is very significant is, Kolatkars divine perspective which he
draws from everything that is before his naked eyes. He is struck by the faith of the pilgrims
who come to worship at Jejuris shrines as by the shrines themselves, one of which happens to
be not shrine at all (but nevertheless his divinity has a flip side to it):
The door was open
Manohar thought
It was one more temple.

He looked inside.
Wondering
which god he was going to find.

He quickly turned away
when a wide eyed calf
looked back at him.

It isnt another temple,
its just a cowshed.
(Manohar, Jejuri)

The first question that comes to our mind is: why does the narrator go to Jejuri? Is
religious quest the chief motive behind the narrators visit to Jejuri? Jejuri is conventionally
regarded as a quest poem. It is,undoubtedly,a presentation of modern urban skepticism
impinging upon the ancient religious tradition. The dilapidation of this tradition is shown by
using irony, differently and brilliantly. According to M.K.Naik, the thematic complex is much
larger and the poem is a conscious attempt to present in sharp contrast three major value

17

systems-viz. those of ancient religious tradition, modern Industrial civilization and-a value
system older than both these-the Life principle in Nature and its ways. The poem is full of
pictures of aridity and ugliness, decay and neglect, fossilization and perversion. The ironic
description in these lines makes it clear:
the little 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
(lines 1-4)
(Between Jejuri and the Railway
Station.,Jejuri)


Also The Priest skeptically views a priest calculating what he will get from the
tourists offerings. Kolatkar has shown the priests worldliness and greed. The tour bus stands
purring softly in front of the priest.
A catgrin on its face
and a live, ready to eat pilgrim
held between its teeth (lines 30-33)
(The Priest, Jejuri)
The above mentioned lines also inform us that in Kolatkars poems, inanimate objects
often form a parallel world constantly endeavoring to defeat human beings.
The discrepancy between appearance and possible reality, between the
commercialization of the ruined places of worship and what in the speakers view is divine, is
shown in the next poem, Heart of Ruin, about a mongrel bitch and her puppies in a ruined
temple: No more a place of worship this place/ is nothing less than the house of god. The
difficulty in knowing what has been seen and the way reality can be re-visualized, re-perceived,
is shown by The Doorstep:

18

Thats no doorstep.
Its a pillar on its side.
Yes.
Thats what it is.
(The Doorstep,Jejuri)

Arun Kolatkar has ridiculed the blind faith of the pilgrims by saying that almost every
stone at Jejuri is sacred because it is an image of some god. Kolatkar replied when asked by an
interviewer (The Indian Literary Review,vol.I,no.4,August 1978,pp.6-10) whether he believed
in God- I leave the question alone.I dont think I have to take a position about God one way
or the other. Thus, there is no limit to the number of stone images of the gods whom the
pilgrims can worship .This is an ironical way of denying the being of any god and doubting the
legitimacy of any conviction in the stories which have accumulated around the name of
Khandoba. It can be said that modernism offered a shimmering vision of escape from
everything conservative, traditional and limited:
Sweet as grapes
are the stone of jejuri
said chaitanya

he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods
(Chaitanya. Jejuri)
It is very difficult to decide at Jejuri what is a god and what is a stone because any stone a
pilgrim picks up may attest to be the image of a god.

19

In the poem Makarand,the protagonist prefers to smoke outside rather than entering inside
the temple premises, shirtless. He objects to the very act of worshipping a stone or bronze
image that supposedly represents a deity.
In the poem Between Jejuri and the Railway Station, Kolatkars proficiency as a visual artist
comes to the fore with remarkable sophistication. In contrast to the petrification of the spirit in
the temple town, the fowls do an astonishing dance. The typography which represents the
dancing puts the themes of dynamism and perception into visual terms. The dancing chickens,
like the butterfly and mongrel puppies, stand for a divine quality which the legends of Jejuri
represent but which has been lost among its ruins and commercialization.

The modern poets were born during a decade before or after the Independence. They were
neither a part of the freedom struggle nor its witnesses and were presented with this freedom
on a platter like toy building blocks ,mechano sets, jigsaw puzzles, crayons or coloring sketch
books. They were free to articulate that freedom even if they did not comprehend it. The grass
root relationship with tradition is a short statement in their poetry
Jejuri has evoked mixed reactions. It has been called a poem of extraordinary qualities
(Acharya. Jejuri. Kavi,28) ; a poem that depicts symbolically the tortured psyche of modern
man ( Shantinath Desai. Arun Kolatkaranchi Jejuri: Devanchi vasti. Pratishthan, 37) and
an X-ray vision of the enveloping dilapidation and the poets reaction to it
(E.V.Ramakrishnan, Jejuri, the Search for Place, Journal of Indian Writing in English, p.19).
Bruce King in his Modern Indian Poetry in English commented, Jejuri is, I think, less a
poem of skepticism and a poem about a modern wastelands loss of faith than a poem which
contrasts deadness of perception with the ability to see the divine in the natural vitality of life.
In Kolatkars hands the tradition of saints poetry takes the form.of an ironic parody of a
pilgrimage which while mocking institutionalized religion affirms the free imagination and the
dynamism of life. As a modern poet, Kolatkar shares some of his freedom of spirit at the same
time articulates it.

Acclaimed as a Bombay poet,Arun Kolatkar reflects on his childhood events on the streets
of Bombay, in the poem Crying Mangoes in Colaba originally published in Marathi as
Kolabyachi pheri, when he used to accompany his father to Colaba on ravivars (Sunday) to

20

sell mangoes. Upon translation, the poem still retains its native Marathi flavor; Mangoes are
called hapoos and paayriii in Marathi and they have secured their place in the English
translation as well. The poem is deeply autobiographical. In the collection Making love to a
poem Kolatkar talks about his views upon translating a poem. Written in a simplistic manner,
Kolatkar asserts:

Translating a poem is like making love
having an affair
Making love to a poem
with the body of another language
you may meet a poem you like
getting to know the poem carnally
getting carnal knowledge (I,lines1-7)

Arun Kolatkar says that he cannot translate a poem until he has got the feeling that he has
possessed it. Then he goes on to cite examples of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi.
For him, some of the finest poetry in India, or indeed the world, has come from a sense of
alienation. His bilingualism is perhaps what makes him a distinct figure in the realm of
contemporary poetry:
Ive written in 2 languages from the start
I was writing what I hoped were poems
switching from the one to the other freely
without asking myself whether I had
the right to write in either
and riding rough shod over both
or the qualifications
qualifications I knew I had none(II, lines 1-8)

21


First published in Debonair the Taxi Song is highly colloquial in tone perhaps because
Kolatkar was highly influenced by American popular music. He said that gangster films,
cartoon strips and blues had shaped his sense of the English language and he felt closer to the
American idiom, particularly Black American speech, than to British English. He mentioned
Bessie Smith,Big Bill Broonzy and Muddy Waters- Their names are like poems, he said- and
quoted the harmonica player Blind Sonny Terrys remark, A harmonica player must know
how to do a good tox chase. One reason why the poet liked blues was that the musicians were
often untrained and improvised as they went along. He dwelt on the musics social history;
how during the Depression blues performers moved from place to place, playing in honky-
tonks, sometimes under the protection of mobsters. He remembered the Elton John song Dont
shoot me, Im the only piano player. In the concerned poem, Kolatkar represents a typical
Metropolitan life devoid of any humane bond between yesteryears bosom friends. The urban
energy has turned its denizens into automated beings and friends have turned into sceptic
strangers reluctant to help each other at the time of crisis. Using the first person narration,
Kolatkar in a dialogic manner asks :

from colaba to dadar
you think i aint gonna pay you
after all that trouble
well thats where you are wrong
cause Im gonna pay you double.(lines 10-14)
In his Kala Ghoda poems which appeared after decades of winning the Commonwealth Prize
for poetry for Jejuri,Kolatkar sharpens and renews the experiences of our very familiar world.
Most importantly,he lends you an alternative eye to see into the life of apparently irrelevant
things. Kala Ghoda is the crescent that stretches from the Regal Circle to the University of
Mumbai. In this collection, particularly, Kolatkar explicitly uses the Bombay landscape; from
the iconic Max Mueller Bhawan to a petty roadside stall,every nook and corner of the city
forms Kolatkars imagination. Enchanted by the ordinary, Kolatkar made the ordinary

22

enchanting. Which is why,however familiar one may be with his work, its always as though
one is encountering it for the first time.

With a concentration of centers like the National Gallery of Modern Art,the Prince of Wales
Museum,the Jehangir Art Gallery,the Bombay Natural History Society,the David Sassoon
Library and the University,this place is a hub of cultural activity. Over the years Kala Ghoda
has come to be instinctively identified with its festival, an interactive cultural mlange that
spreads from November to January every year which brings works in the field of
music,dance,theatre,film,and art from across the country for Mumbaikars.
To express the appearance of trifling that is made to appear having some effect on the
poem,a few examples are taken from Kolatkars work.For e.g the Lund & Blockley shop at
Colaba,the neighbourhood of Byculla in South Mumbai etc. Also the morning breakfast menu
served at some food joint in Kala Ghoda is recalled by Kolatkar in an overt manner in the poem
Breakfast Time at Kala Ghoda:
They are serving khima pao at Olympia,
dal gosht at Baghdadi,
puri bhaji at Kailash Parbat,

aab gosht at Sarvis,
kebabs with sprigs of mint at Gulshan-e-Iran,
nali nehari at Noor Mohamadis,

baida ghotala at the Oriental,
paya soup at Benazir,
brun maska at Military Caf,

upma at Swagat,

23

shira at Anand vihar,
and fried eggs and bacon at Wayside Inn.

For,yes,its breakfast time at Kala Ghoda
as elsewhere
in and around Bombay (lines 1-15)

In Arun Kolatkars poetry,we see another face of this much-touted art district of Bombay.
The life at the peripheries slowly starts coming to the fore and Kolatkars vision indeed catches
it in its characteristic acts. There is a resurrection of the rubbish,the outcastes,the thrown-away.
Thus lepers,blind men,rat-poison men,potato peelers,street cleaners,shoeshine
boys,dogs,crows,old bicycle tyres,charas pills,kerosene,lice,shitin their veritable third world
make their presence felt in Kolatkars Kala Ghoda. Its not just to the sights of the third world
that Kolatkar draws you but its music,smells,tastes and feels as well. Sometimes its music
comes upon us with a bang and a boom as is expressed in The Boomtown Lepers Band :
Trrrap a boom chaka,shh chaka boom tap. (lines1-2)
During his drinking days,Kolatkar had had his run-ins with the police, being picked up for
disorderly behavior on at least one occasion. Years later, he recalled the jail experience in Kala
Ghoda poems:
Nearer home,in Bombay itself,
the miserable bunch
of drunks,delinquents,smalltime crooks
and the usual suspects
have already been served their morning kanji
in Byculla jail.



24



Theyve been herded together now
and subjected
to an hour of force-fed education.
(VI,lines 1-9)

Kolatkar is aware as a visual artist that a slight manipulation of sight lines, of angle of
vision,can defamiliarize and turn into art what is normally regarded as dull, common place
reality. In the poem Temperature Normal.Pulse,respiration satisfactory published under the
Hospital Poems, we can see Kolatkar experimenting with the subject matter:
i lean back in the armchair
and Bombay sinks

the level of the balcony parapet rises
and the city is submerged

the terraces the chimneys the watertanks the antennas
everything

the whole city
gone under (lines 1-8)



25

By reproducing conversations heard in a restaurant in Three Cups of Tea, Kolatkar
introduced the Bombay urban vernacular, the language of the Indian poetry: A lawyer walks
into Wayside Inn/ softly humming Aasamaa pe hai khuda/ .In Irani Restaurant Bombay,he
introduces seedy restaurant interiors and the bazaar art on their walls:
the cockeyed shah of iran watches the cake
decompose carefully in a cracked showcase;
distracted only by a fly on the make
as it finds in a loafers wrist an operational base.


dogmatically green and elaborate trees defeat
breeze; the crooked swan begs pardon
if it disturb the pond; the road,neat
as a needle,points at a lovely cottage with a garden.

the thirsty loafer sees the stylized perfection
of the landscape,in a glass of water,wobble.
a sticky tea print for his scholarly attention
singles out a verse from the blank testament of the table. (lines 1-
12)

As a Bombay loafer himself, someone who daily trudged the citys footpaths, particularly
the area of Kala Ghoda, Kolatkar is familiar with the locality too well. The view from a
restaurant rather than a restaurant interior is the subject of Kala Ghoda Poems. On most days,
around breakfast time and again in the late afternoon, after the lunch when the crowd had left,
Kolatkar could be found at Wayside Inn in Rampart Row. Sometime in the early 1980s,the idea
of writing a sequence of poems on the street life of Kala Ghoda, encompassing its varied

26

population (the lavatory attendant, the municipal sweeper, the kerosene vendor, the drug
pusher, the shoeshine, the ogress who bathes the baby boy, the idli lady, the rat-poison
man,the cellist,the lawyer), its animals (pi-dog,crow), its statuary (David Sassoon), its
commercial establishments (Lund & Blockley) and its buildings (St Andrews church,Max
Mueller Bhavan, Prince of Wales Museum, Jehangir Art Gallery) ,began to take shape in his
mind.
Being a bilingual poet Arun Kolatkar translated the Marathi poem Main manager ko
bola,part of a sequence of three poems all written in 1960,into English and titled the sequence
Three Cups of Tea published in Arun Kolatkarchya Kavita (1977).

main manager ko bola mujhe pagaar mangta hai
manager bola company ke rule se pagaar ek tarikh ko milega
uski ghadi table pay padi thi
maine ghadi uthake liya
aur manager ko police chowki ka rasta dikhaya
bola agar complaint karna hai toh karlo
mere rule se pagaar ajhee hoga
The second poem is a translation of the first:
i want my pay i said
to the manager
youll get paid said
the manager
but not before the first
dont you know the rules?
coolly I picked up his
wrist watch

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that lay on his table
wanna bring in the cops
I said
cordin to my rules
Listen baby
i get paid when i say so (lines 1-14)

The language of the first poem is Bombay-Hindi; that of the translation is parody
tough-guy American speech. Occasionally, Kolatkar translated his Marathi poems into English,
but he mostly kept the two separate. His early Marathi poems are what he calls cluster bombs,
densely packed with sounds and metaphors. He created two very different bodies of work of
equal distinction and importance in two languages. He drew his work on a multiplicity of
literary traditions. He drew on the Marathi of course, and Sanskrit, which he knew; he drew on
the English and American traditions, especially Black American music and speech (cordin to
my rules/listen baby/I get paid when i say so); and he drew on the European tradition. He drew
on a few others besides. As he said in an interview once, talking about poets, Anything might
swim into their ken.Kolatkar was evolving towards a conscious style less poetry using
colloquial, common speech. Dilip Chitre has suggested that such poems might be regarded as
an Indian equivalent to the neo-Dada, humorous pop poetry of the 1960s.Dada or Dadaism was
an art movement of the European avant-garde in the early 20
th
century born out of negative
reaction to the horrors of World War I. The movement was begun by a group of artists and
poets who rejected reason and logic, giving more importance to nonsense, irrationality and
intuition. Neo-Dada is exemplified by its use of modern materials, popular imagery and
absurdist contrast. Kolatkar was also influenced by the poet and bhakta Tukaram and dedicated
a few verses to him in his collection Translations. His early verse in both English and Marathi
often seems surreal; it is obscure and difficult to interpret, but consists of projections of sexual
desires and anxieties into sinister, extraordinary, irrational images.
Kolatkar calls the now Mumbai, a city without soul. In The Shit Sermon he
describes the city as:
Shit city, he thunders;

28

the lion of Bombay thunders,
Shit City!

I shit on you.
You were a group
of seven shitty islands (lines 1-6)

He feels that the city gets more and more unrecognizable with each passing year. It
is with an ironical eye that Kolatkar looks at the cement- eating, blood-guzzling Mumbai of
the present. When he says he finds himself cast in a role that he detests, that of an observer, a
spectator, the irony in his words only intensifies the pain that this poet feels about the slow
disintegration of a city/ I cared about more than any other (David Sassoon). It is this care
and love for Mumbai,which really provokes his bitterness about the soulless way in which the
city keeps changing. Despite all this bitterness, Man of the year, the penultimate poem in the
collection, reveals Kolatkars insatiable longing to remain in this world, and his despair that
time is running out fast:

But nobody knows better than I
that time
is one thing Im running out of fast,

and my one regret is going to be this:
to leave this world
so full of girls I never kissed. (lines 10-15)

By taking an odd, non-committal tone and by bringing in unusual perspectives
Kolatkar turns the commonplace into an aesthetic experience, using the ordinary as the basis
of art. Compared to poetry as it is being written elsewhere, landscape is sparingly used by the
modern poets in Indian poetry. For instance, there is no one like A.R. Ammons whose poetry
gives the impression of subsisting solely on the beaches and rural fields of New Jersey. No one
like Seamus Heaney whose poetry derives its strength from the Irish countryside. Although the
Bombay poets here ignore the countryside, unlike Jayanta Mahapatra and Keki N. Daruwalla.
Needless to say, urban landscape relates the human reality providing glimmerings of the view
of stony city life.

29

Ironical juxtaposition of different cultural quotients, multi-lingual wanderings, unpredictable
imagery, and continuity of themes are characteristics of Kolatkars poetry. Nothing could
escape the poets alert eyes and even the beggar women of Bombay have found their safe haven
in his collection The Barefoot Queen of the Crossroads. Kolatkar reveals that art is made by
the reality. Kolatkars mode of perpetuating a single theme to the length of entire books has by
now become familiar to his readers. All his three books in English, Jejuri, Kala Ghoda Poems
and Sarpa Satra are evidence to his meditative mind, as are his Marathi works,Droan, Bhijki
Vahi (won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2004)and Chirmiri. Perhaps it is the same
unwillingness to let go easily that makes Arun Kolatkar the poet of our times,who belongs,and
wants to always belong to everything that is a part of our age.
Jejuri offers a rich description of India while at the same time performing a complex act of
devotion,discovering the divine trace in a degenerate world. Salman Rushdie called it
sprightly,clear-sighted,deeply felta modern classic. For Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,it
wasamong the finest single poems written in India in the last forty years. Jeet Thayil
attributed its popularity in India to the Kolatkarean voice: unhurried,lit with
whimsy,unpretentious even when making learned literary or mythological allusions. And
whatever the poets eye alights on-particularly the odd,the misshapen,and the famished-
receives the gift of close attention.

Through his Bombay poems, Kolatkar brings into fore two very different dimensions of the
same city. On the one hand, industrialization has polished the central part of the city making it
a desirable end for most of the citizens whereas the reality of the cityscape is preserved among
the impoverished masses. Modern Indian poetry is sustained by the continuing breezes from
the West- which now means Europe as well as America. Today in the Indian situation, poets
cannot afford to ignore the temperature of the environment in which they live and their poems
are born. The Tagore Syndrome of immortal touch of poetry,the cosmic play and the ineffable
joy of the verses are long gone. The modern poets stir the backyard gutter of urban vulgarity
and bathos and pathetic futility, and imitate the modernist techniques of allusiveness, clowning,
multi-linguism and facetiousness to communicate his sense of nausea and disgust. Following
the tradition of Eliot, Kolatkar is definitely disillusioned in the post-war society where the
society has turned into a wasteland. The irregular pace of the verse was chosen deliberately
being suited to the given times and climes of the society and the interpretation of the poets
mood. The poems are numbered but not titled properly; no rhymes, no capital letters, no

30

punctuation marks; no clutching at false hopes, no spouting forth cheap sentiment; it is the
moan of disillusion,naked and un ashamed. In the prefatory note to his The Night is Heavy
(1943) Krishnan Shungloo wrote thus,summing up the predicament of a suffering poet:

in courting life
i have wedded despair
i too have rooted in flesh and spirit
crucified my love on a harlots bed

fraulein i mean
men and women wearing the mask of life
the dead souls of our civilization


we are the gods jest
the cryptic joke
we doubt and have no answer ( lines 5-12)









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32

CHAPTER TWO: DILIP CHITRE

Dilip Chitre was a noted and influential bilingual poet and translator who worked in Marathi
and English. His literary output in both languages has been sizeable. His versatile creative
practice extends to painting and filmmaking- activities that he saw as seamless extensions of
his poetic sensibility. Poetry, he wrote has been the mainstay of my creative practice for
more than fifty years and it could be my way of wrapping up my life. A prolific poet in
Marathi,Dilip Chitre has published less in English. He was one of the earliest and the most
important influences behind the famous little magazine movement of the sixties in Marathi.
He started Shabda with Arun Kolatkar and Ramesh Samarth.Nevertheless, he privately
published two hundred copies of Ambulance Ride (1972), his first volume of English poems-
Travelling in a Cage- did not appear until 1980.
His poems are mostly autobiographical and, while in a variety of moods ranging from
the lyrical and meditative to the incantatory, reflect what a continuing crisis of his inner life
seems. Influenced by the great Marathi Bhakti poet Tukaram, but himself a rationalist with
mystic learnings, Chitre creates a large, intense world from his emotions, especially his
obsession with sex, madness and death. There is in his work, as is shown by the poem Prayer
to Shakti, a Blakean Romanticism which celebrates living intensely, excessively, and being
open to experience, as a desire to be one with the universe. Not surprisingly, often such poems
develop from free associations, use incantations and invocations which bring the sub- or
unconscious into view. Chitre writes in cycles of lyrics which often have their significance in
the sequence rather than in any individual poem.
Marathi is my given mother tongue. English is my favourite other tongue. They don't
divide me. I will not cohere without either of them says Dilip Chitre in an Interview with The
Indian Express (1998). Being a bilingual poet Chitre believed his bilingualism has baffled
critics. A bilingual writers literary orientation is assumed to be like the erotic orientation of
a bisexual-dangerously ambiguous and oblique, he said. Somehow on either side of the
language divide, ones loyalty to ones audience is held suspect. Such suspicion
notwithstanding, he has earned for himself as a writer of stature in both languages.
On the symposium held in Madras on Poetry India in 1974, Chitre delivered a lecture
on A Home for Every Voice where he said Iam a disturbed poet trying to disturb my fellow-

33

poets and not a theoretician or dialectician pontificating or expounding. As a Marathi,Chitre
was remarkably close to his culture. He feels that an ongoing crisis has affected the very special
ecology of culture. The functional plurality of cultures is besieged and overpowered by an ethos
unlike his own, historically younger and ideologically impatient. Chitre further spoke, We
poets must perceive our ecology and our habitat in terms of language and all that language
feeds on. We should be shaken by the continuous erosion of local and regional colour,the dying
of dialects, the termination of oral traditions, the withering of folklore. The impending
disintegration of tribal culture in Indias heartland is no less serious than the annihilation of
rain forests or the widening holes in the ozone layer. Our bio-diversity is expressed in ethnic,
linguistic, and cultural terms. This made us open to the world. We translated the world into
India just as we transformed ourselves with the help of tribal traditions. As mentioned earlier,
influenced by the Bhakti poet Tukaram, Chitre is of the opinion that, Bhakti,I believe, was
our equivalent of Renaissance Humanism and it is Bhakti upon which our modern polity and
worldview can be founded. The inclusive spirit and the open mind that is free of xenophobia
and cultural prejudice is ever ready to participate in a larger world and regards life not as a
moveable feast but as a liberating and self-renewing experience of pilgrimage.
Chitre seems to ask the following questions to his audience, has the story of Indian
poetry been any different in the last half century? Or is it also a story of a kind of republic in
the making, a levelling of iniquitous hierarchies and dominant traditions? Do we take an
inclusive and pluralistic view of poetry created in India during the last fifty years or are we
members of a parochial elite who have excluded a large number of their own contemporaries
on the grounds that they are not our equals simply because they are not identical with us?
The poet is definitely disturbed by these questions even though they may seem nave,
plebian, or irrelevant.
Chitres first collection of Marathi poetry, Kavita, was published in 1960, followed by
Kavitenantarchya Kavita eighteen years later. His collected Marathi poems,Ekoon Kavita,
appeared in three successive volumes in the nineties, the first volume winning the prestigious
Sahitya Akademi Award in 1994. The year 2008 saw the publication of two important Chitre
collections: Shesha, a volume of new and selected translations from Marathi, and As Is Where
Is, a book of new and selected poems in English.
Chitre always viewed the writing and translation of poetry as part of a continuum. His book,
Says Tuka, is a well-loved and much-acclaimed rendition in English of the haunting poetry of

34

the 17th-century mystic of Maharashtra, Tukaram. It won the Sahitya Akademi award for
translation in the year 1994 (making him the only poet to have won awards for both poetry and
translation in the same year).
He is aware that his ongoing translation of Marathi saint poets (which he began at the age of
16) has a certain subversive canonical significance. I realized, he says in an interview with
The Indian Express (1998), that literature of the West had so overwhelmed us that we seemed
to think that literature was invented there and that we are practitioners of a European art. This
isn't true. We had begun to define ourselves in terms of others. The West was ignorant of our
languages. They thought Marathi was a dialect of Hindi this about a language that is among
the 20 most spoken languages in the world and has a literature that has existed continuously
for 700 years. I took this as a passport to the literary world. I had to show them who my
Shakespeare, my Racine, my Dostoevsky were.
Additionally, translation has meant its own unique challenges and rewards the inheritance of
a complex cultural space. More than three decades of translating Tukaram, wrote Chitre,
have helped me to learn to live with problems that can only be understood by people who
often live in a no-man's land between two linguistic cultures belonging to two distinct
civilizations.
The eight poems in this edition are from Shesha, a selection from Chitres oeuvre in Marathi.
Garnered from a period that spans several decades (from the 1950s to the first decade of the
new millennium), they reveal different facets of Chitres art from the poetry of love to the
poetry of metaphysical reflection, from the poetry of eroticism to the poetry of lyrical elegy,
from the poetry of nostalgia to the poetry of trenchant critique.
One of my personal favorites, says Chitre, is At midnight in the bakery at the corner which
uncovers a deeply subtle and sensual longing. There are no broad political strokes in this poem
of loss and sadness, only an aching memory of the way things were in a world before the lines
between faiths and communities grew inflexible and unforgiving. The passing of an old order,
of a warmer, more innocent history is poignantly evoked in the last line: When the bread
develops its sponge, the smell / Of the entire building fills my nostrils. ( lines 16-17)

Namdeo Dhasal, a quintessentially Marathi Dalit poet, was Dilip Chitres mentor throughout
his life. Raw, raging, associative, almost carnal in its tactility, Dhasals poetry emerges from

35

the underbelly of the city- its menacing, unplumbed netherworld. For Dhasal and for Chitre
too, Bombay is a world of pimps and smugglers, of crooks and petty politicians, of opium dens,
brothels and beleaguered urban tenements. The poetic world of Dilip Chitre can be described
as that of Bombay without her make-up, her botox, her power yoga; the Bombay that seethes,
unruly, menacing yet vitally alive, beneath the glitzy mall and multiplex, the high-rise and
flyover. The Bombay of the non-gentrifiable, the untamable, the non-recyclable.
It is a peculiar characteristic of the Bombay poets that they are often concerned about the
communal clashes which is predominant in India. The reason may be attributed to the very
nature of power politics prevalent in and around Maharashtra; the Shiv Sena crusade with its
parochial set of principles. Even Dilip Chitre feels that the real crisis in contemporary Indian
culturewhere any dissent can be seen as an act aimed at hurting sentimentsis that few of
us are prepared to celebrate the heterogeneity of our cultural heritage. Politicians have always
exploited religion and sectarian faith to create law and order problems. Today, they only need
to announce that their followers sentiments are hurt and we all understand the not-so-veiled
threat to take the law into their own hands. The Staterepresenting the political will of the
peopleis only too glad to clamp down bans, tighten censorship, and muzzle dissent. It only
increases the States own power over the individual citizen and the minorities. Via politics,
religion has wreaked havoc in India since independence. Revivalists and atavists have
succeeded in taking us back to a mythologized past which should have become increasingly
irrelevant to our public life since we embraced our present Constitution. If the executive gives
in to populist pressures and violent threats to any minority, and if even the judiciary succumbs
to majority public opinion, all minority opinion and individual expression is doomed to go
forever underground in this country. His appeal goes to all the secular-minded poets and writers
to unite against communalism. Through his Marathi poetry, he wanted the minorities to raise
their voice; the real world itself is a cluster of probabilities and alternate pathways that we
must find diversification of art-forms and diversity of poetic genius, the natural law governing
poetry.
As an acute observer, such conditions were bound to bother him. At the ripe young age of 16,
Dilip Purushottam Chitre made a decision that would change his life forever. He decided he
wanted to live as a poet and artist. It could not have been an easy choice. He admits to vague
premonitions of it being difficult, and admits it proved hard at times. And yet, after over fifty
years of living that life of poet and artist, he stands by it, refusing to have it any other way.
Chitre considers himself a pluri-lingual like many other South Asian writers. Kolatkar,

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Nagarkar, Vilas Sarang and Damodar Prabhu are what he would call his contemporary Anglo-
Marathi writers. There are Anglo-Bangla, Anglo-Malayalam and Anglo-Oriya poets, among
his contemporaries. Their individual histories as bilingual writers are very different though, if
that matters. Most Bombay poets are not originally from the city and have precisely migrated
there, uprooted from other states, small cities or rural backgrounds (Dilip Chitre came from
Gujarat, Arun Kolatkar from Kolhapur, a small town in South Maharashtra, etc.). When they
were born or brought up in Bombay, they often come from religious minorities who, at one
point in time, also found refuge in the city,like Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel who are Parsi
or Nissim Ezekiel who was Jewish.
Better known as a Bombay poet,Chitres Bombay poems reveal an alienation and attempt to
use poetry as a means of holding together an otherwise fragmented reality. Bombay is a symbol
of the modern Indian chaos resulting from contact with the West and of mans estrangement
from a manmade world. His early poems in Marathi were written between the age of 15 and
21. They begin with his experience of uprooting from his native place Baroda. Chitre has been
writing poetry seriously since the age of about 16, when he took the momentous decision to
live as a poet and an artist. He had an ambiguous intuition it was not going to be an easy life.
It did prove very difficult indeed, at times. However, his curiosity and the realm of human
experience made his life an exciting adventure and he was rewarded, from time to time, by
revelations that constitute the fundamental aspect of his work, the insights that made it
worthwhile to be a poet and an artist. He entered Bombay when he attained puberty.
Simultaneously, Bombay entered his poetry. Being a precocious reader, his grounding in
literature was wider and deeper than his academic upbringing, and often at variance with it.He
was passionately interested in music, photography, drawing, and painting since the age of 10.
In Bombay, he had opportunities to mingle with artists, musicians, film technicians and
photographers much older than himself.
He met Pandit Sharadchandra Arolkar, an outstanding vocalist of the Gwalior Gharana at age
16. He was a daily visitor to his home in Shivaji Park until he left for Ethiopia. He was a
profound influence on Chitres ideas of art, not just music. Bombay figures in his early Marathi
and English poetry in different ways and at several levels. He perceived the metropolis in
juxtaposition with primordial nature as perceived in his childhood. There was a discord. There
was a sense of manmade alienation that haunted him.

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Though most of his early poetry is metrical and sometimes stylized, it was spontaneous and
unpremeditated. The big city's polyphony, its cacophony as well, its many human voices and
points of view, made him move towards more accommodative, open-ended, cadenced free
verse and the rhythms of colloquial speech. His early poetry was sensuous, erotic, and exuded
a kind of sexuality that was instinctive and natural to him in his youth. Yet, he felt he was being
robbed of his youth itself by the big city where human values come to die, lured by its opulence
and glitz. In the poem At midnight in the Bakery at the Corner, Chitre deals with this very
issue of sexual advances by his friends wife in an oblique manner. Although he refuses at first
but towards the end, he succumbs to the call of bodily instincts. The underlying meaning of the
poem is veiled by an apparent discussion on childhood nostalgia, the poet getting drunk after
his friends left for the Gulf countries. Its only at the end that a vague suggestion is made when,
The wife of the Pathan next door enters my room
Closes the door and turns her back to me
I tell her, sister, go find somenone else (lines 13-15)

In the poem Ode to Bombay Chitre brings out various facets of the city; the crowded
apartments, human beings turned into mindless machines, the ambivalent positioning of the
temple and brothels on the same street, communal murders and riots. He says, before he dies
shall dedicate a poem to this city but the decaying nature of its existence forces him to tersely
terminate the verse;

Once I promised you an epic
And now you have robbed me
You have reduced me to rubble( lines 19-21)
Chitre dared to face an ugly world, he refuses to aestheticize it in his poetry. Bombay became
for him a map and a metaphor for the larger world. It prepared him for all the later big cities in
his life: Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris, Moscow, St.
Petersburg, Berlin, Tokyo and Hong Kong, for example. All of them had something of
Mumbai in them. Cities in his work connect with all the major themes of life and death,
though the countryside is equally present.

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Dilip Chitres poetry is characterized by an easy, fluent, unpunctuated line, a ruminating
manner that lingers lovingly over both the sunlight and the shadow in his moods and insights
that flare like matches in a dim-lit vault. His black moods never weigh heavy on the reader,
but drift away like cloud shadows. Some of his poems are charged with a storming energy,
e.g. Scattered the Mind which manages to convey, not to the mind, but to the gut as it were,
the seething chaos of the Indian scene. The torn and blistered railway lines metaphorically
casts a blight on the subcontinent. He has a sharp eye and nose for the sights and smells of his
native city, Bombay. In the poem he calls the city a garbled relic because it carries the
legacy of a long European tradition. Bombay was handcrafted by the Britishers and they
played an instrumental role in shaping and showing the way to modernism. Recalling the
days of Raj, Chitre says the city still lures the citizen with the Englishmen clubs and
concubines and the jokes they entertained. The English dignity is represented by Victoria
Terminus in the poem Bombay boulevard:
only in Bombay
some English dignity remains
Victoria Terminus
that gothic foundation of our modernity
still stands majestically(lines 6-11)
The poem also takes us back to one of the most controversial periods of independent Indias
history, the Emergency (1975-77) when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi unilaterally had a
state of emergency declared across the country. For much of the Emergency, most of
Gandhis political opponents were imprisoned and the press was censored. Several other
atrocities were reported from the time, including a forced mass-sterilization campaign. There
was destruction of the slum and low-income housing near the suburbs of Bombay and the
Jama Masjid area of Old Delhi. All these hitches in the countrys history have been briefly
mentioned by Chitre in this poem. For him, Bombay is a shrinking island crowded by
smugglers and displaced bastards. Now these displaced bastards could be the migrants from
different communities sharing the same space with the native population,we dont know.The
shimmering glow of modernity is juxtaposed with the reality of the native squalor filled by
the voices of coolies and poets.

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Chitre, who lived in Ethiopia for four years and in America where he joined the International
Writing Program of the University of Iowa in the US as an invited Fellow, uses the
schizophrenic search for identity as a source of his poetry. The collection Travelling in a
Cage is a remarkable long poem of 17 sections. In these poems written while in exile the
poets relationship to the new country becomes a metaphor for his relationship to himself, its
possibilities and defeats. The poems have movements of despair and a lingering nostalgia. In
fact, Travelling in a Cage is one long, over-the-shoulder look at his past. In Poem in Self-
Exile Chitre compares the harlots walking the streets of America, incredibly erotic and
street-wise sexy to the prostitutes of Bombay. In the West people, although rich, are
conscious about what they eat unlike in India where eating without counting the calories has
always been the approach. He writes that he feels obsolete in such an exotic part of the world.
With an introspective mind, nostalgia for the past normally leads to a search for roots.
Feelings of alienation and unrelatedness result from the conflict between two cultures, two
sensibilities, two conceptual structures ( King,177)
The River Indrayani at Dehu is dedicated to the Bhakti saint Tukaram whose native place
was Dehu. Indrayani river originates in Lonavla, a hill station in the Sahyadri mountains of
Maharashtra. The river assumes an emotional significance for Chitre because it has preserved
the ashes of Tukaram. Chitre calls it a River of loss and gain.
Drawing from the Japanese poetic tradition, Chitre wrote a haiku that normally consists of
three phrases. The Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti achieved its goal when Bombay State was
reorganized on linguistic lines on 1 May 1960.Gujarati-speaking areas of Bombay State were
partitioned into the state of Gujarat. Maharashtra State with Bombay as its capital was formed
with the merger of Marathi-speaking areas of Bombay State. In the poem Haiku in the
Memory of Dadar Beach Circa 1957 Chitre through the juxtaposition of the images of
butterfly and a sunset subtly talks about the long battle fought along communal lines in
Maharashtra.
Horniman Circle Gardens, a large park in South Mumbai, has a poem dedicated to it called
Horniman Circle Garden Circa 1964. The park is situated in the Fort district of Mumbai, and
is surrounded by office complexes housing the country's premier banks. Designed to be a large
open space with grand buildings in the middle of the walled city, the area had been known as
Bombay Green in the 18th century, while the area around it was called Elphinstone Circle.
Following India's independence in 1947, the area was renamed in honor of Benjamin

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Horniman, editor of the Bombay Chronicle newspaper, who supported Indian independence.
In the poem,Chitre talks about the strong sweep of stately building faades that blurrs our
vision. The poem doesnt have much depth. Lovers retreating on the green bench without any
cares for the society, the dense cluster of buildings on the periphery is what the poem deals
with.
In the poem The view from Chinchpokli, Chitre approaches the city from unexpected angles.
The quotidian life of the commuters, Chitres own routine confrontation with the filth and
squalor of the surroundings have built up the whole poem:
While my unprivileged compatriots of Parel Road Cross Lane
Defecate along the stone wall of Byculla Goods Depot. (lines 4-5)
To keep his mind occupied and cast off the dirt, the author takes up a morning newspaper and
walks towards a crowded bus stop. He breathes in the toxic gas released by the Bombay Gas
Company. Forming a chain of junctions, he takes us from one point to another; starting from
Chinchpokli and Nariman point via Victoria Gardens Zoo through the zig-zag road that leads
to the Institute of Art, Anjuman-e-Islam, The Times of India office, Bombay Municipal
Corporation, Victoria Terminus, the Bombay High Court and the University of Bombay, his
days journey finally halts at Chinchpokli again. We are being given a brief tour of a part of
Bombay in this poem. Chinchpokli hosts various Hindu temples, Jain temples and Mosque.
The fact that Bombay is the muticultural metropolis of India is evident in Chitres poems. As
Chitre didnt aestheticize the ugly part of Indias democracy, Chinchpokli is presented as a
locality infested with cockroaches and spiders, hooligans and drunkards plotting seductions
and rape.
Bombay entered into Dilip Chitres life early and artlessly. The Island City lodged itself deep
into his childhood consciousness and opened the world around him to the enchantment of its
imaginations, inviting many, like himself, to live its fictions and make its pleasures and
torments his own. Bombay was an idea, a figure of myth and desire for him. Stored in words,
images, and interpretations Chitre decided to experience the idea of this city through his verses.
He generates his poetry both as a migrant and a minority. The last decades of twentieth century
saw a colossal development in architecture and urbanism together with the transformation of
the personal space,mostly in urban areas.

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The poem The view from Chinchpokli can be interpreted using Foucalts theory of
Heterotopia which he used in a lecture for the architects in 1967. The contemporary
transformation of the urban spaces exhibits a profound redrawing of the contours of public and
private spaces. Pointing to various institutions and places in the poem, Chitre is bringing to the
fore the changes that have taken place over the years in Chinchpokli. The sameness of the
everyday society has been altered. He writes the wall of India cracks open marking the end
of public space; private life becomes public life. In a city of over 20 million people, space is
understandably at a premium in Bombay. Multi-level tenements with single small rooms,
which usually accommodate a whole family, often with a shared bathroom for each floor.
Heterotopia is an inclusive characteristic of the polis-the ideal of the city state. There's little
privacy in such adjustments.
In the poem Father Returning Home the main message lies in the alienation of the individual
in a modern society, as illustrated in the father of the title who appears as a tired, poor, shabby
old man. In this way the poem taps into a common theme of modern literature the world over.
Much of the poem is taken up with a visual description of this man, all of which emphasizes
his loneliness and world-weariness. We first see him among other commuters on the train
journey home where he sits with his wretched belongings, alone in a crowd. In a particularly
striking image, he is described as 'getting off the train/Like a word dropped from a long
sentence. This gives a sense of his irrelevance in this society, which like the train goes on
unheedingly without him. Yet, although so downtrodden and so easily ignored, there is a hint
of an indomitable spirit within him when it is said that in spite of his muddied chappals, or
sandals, he still hurries onward. Significantly, it is not only the outside world but also his own
home which appears as a wholly unsympathetic environment; he is given stale things to eat,
and his sullen children seem to largely ignore him. Devoid even of family companionship, it
is little surprise that he retreats to contemplate/Mans estrangement from a man-made
world (lines 15-16). This is the one time that the poem directly states its central message. The
depiction of this mans estrangement not only from society at large but also from his own
family lends the piece a double piquancy.
The poem, then, conveys an overwhelming sense of the sordidness and bleakness of one mans
life. There seems to be little route of escape for this unfortunate character except, it seems,
in the inner recesses of his own mind where he can dream himself away from the present time,
into the refuge of the far past or the distant future, with his ancestors and his grandchildren.
The poem thus plays up the contrast between this mans frail and shabby exterior and the rich,

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teeming inner life that still pulses within him. Despite all external setbacks, it seems as though
the mind can never be quite conquered. In fact, the final image of the poem is that of
conquerors; the man dreams of the hordes of the ancient invaders of India, coming down
through the Khyber Pass. This rich, romantic, inner life is what continues to sustain him through
his uninspiring day-to-day existence in the modern world.
Not many but few of Dilip Chitres poems are autobiographical.In the poem Frescoes he
talks about his childhood in Baroda then called Varodara. He has no inhibitions to talk about
the strong sexual longings and the little girls with whom he used to spend his summer
afternoons in the terrace in his teenage years. He also tells us how he secretly relished reading
pornographic books with his friends. In retrospect, after sixty years,he suddenly becomes aware
of revealing these details to his readers and asks whether it is appropriate to let such things out.
Also The House of My Childhood recalls the house that still stands on the grey hill but with
his grandmothers death all the furnitures are gone and the birds have died. Nevertheless, in his
mind he could still hear the echoes of the bird cries and his grandmothers voice even after the
city is physically erased. Seasons have passed by but the reminiscence still lingers in the rooms
of the empty house.
Chitres poetry expresses an intensely subjective, inner world. Through the physical and social
world he gathers an idea for his poems to develop. The expression and liberation of the self is
brought up to date, made Indian, made psychological, as the poetry expresses intense emotions
of desire, frustration, self-consciousness. When asked in an interview that does he feel the same
enthusiasm for the genre after fifty years of being a poet, Dilip Chitre replied:
Poetry expresses one's perception of life and one's interest in its unfolding. Although much
of my work focuses on anxiety, doubt, anguish, pain and suffering, it has never pre-empted joy,
satisfaction, peace and a sense of fulfilment. Tragic and ironic modes of experience combine
or alternate with comic, absurd, or outrageous attitudes to one's own passage through life. I will
stop writing when I can't; or it would be more correct to say I wouldn't begin to write unless I
felt I was ready to take the plunge again. 50 years seem small when one feels and thinks with
the same intensity and perhaps with sharper focus. My best is still to come, though my worst
is not yet over. That is my way of looking at it



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Chapter 3- Eunice De Souza

Since the end of World War II, there has been a visible stir everywhere- partly the rustle of a
new hope, and partly the stutter of a new despair. A global war spread over several years is
apt to liquidate a whole generation- the middle generation. And a new generation comes up
with a striking individuality of its own, a sharpness in its features, an angularity in its
gestures, tone of defiance (or at least of nonconformity) in its speech, a gleam of hope in its
eyes, - a new ardor perhaps, and even new rhythms and nuances and acerbities of speech.
There is a new poetry in India- it could also be called the poetry of protest. It could be the
poetry of escape too.
Eunice de Souza, the Indo-Anglian poet is, no doubt, knotted in this particular and
peculiar perplexity. A Roman Catholic Goan brought up in Pune, and now Head of the
Department of English at St.Xavier's College Bombay and a cross-representation of Bombay
poets, Eunice doesnt readily take up the urban landscape so much in her poetry instead she
strives for self-expression of her childhood among the Goan community of Poona which for
her had been a hell. She provides scathing snapshots of her own community is suburban
Mumbai. Bruce King in the book Modern Indian Poetry in English says, the subject of her
satires are the church, marriage, Catholic motherhood, Indian colour prejudice, sexual
prudery and hypocrisy, Goan vulgarity and the alienation felt by many Goan Catholics
towards Hindu India. In the poem Conversation Piece this aspect of her poem is evident:
My Portuguese-bred aunt
picked up a clay shivalingam
one day and said:
Is this an ashtray?
No, said the salesman,
This is our god.
In such poems de Souza has mapped a society in which she grew up and which she feels
made her what she is now. The poem De Souza Prabhu rejects her past and alien mixture of
names and language, but claims that she belongs with the lame ducks ever since she heard

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her parents wanted a boy. Being a convert, de Souza received the best of both the values.
She is infact a Catholic Brahmin! In this given poem, she criticizes the dominant viewpoint of
all the religious doctrines; the need for a male child in the family.
Eunice de Souza is related to the group of young poets like Manohar Shetty and Melanie
Silgardo who associate themselves with Bombay and Ezekiel. All these poets share a
common Goan Catholic background. A quintessential de Souza poem is an intensely
concentrated, highly charged verbal utterance. The combination of ferocious economy and
urgency makes it a pressure-cooker experience; the hiss and steam linger on even after the
page is turned. This is particularly true of the poems in her first book, Fix (1979), which seem
to scorch the page with their acid irony. The poems get less angular in the later books, but the
best retain their voltage, and their form remains as taut and consciously attenuated as ever. In
this collection, many of whose poems concern the life of the Goan Roman Catholic
community, de Souza takes apart the clichsthe marriages made in heaven and the pillars
of the Church. While her first book emerged from what she calls a slow burning fuse about
my community (the Goan Catholics of Mumbai), de Souza believes her poems have grown
calmer, more nuanced, less one-dimensional over the years. They concede inadequacies in
myself as well, she once told. I feel Ive become a better poet over the years. Her other
collections of verse are Women in Dutch Painting (1988), Ways of Belonging: New and
Selected Poems (1990). She is represented in several recent anthologies of womens poetry,
among them Making for the Open : The Chatto Book of Post-Feminist Verse (1984) and Aint
I a Woman (1986).
Her aspiration, she says in her introduction to her recent book of poems, has always been to
write lyrical poems with soft, sensuous and passionate lines. It is a surprising admission
from someone who otherwise alludes to her persona in one of her poems as a sour old puss
in verse and whose book is entitled A Necklace of Skulls. The strength of de Souzas poetry
has always been its economy and its astringency. This irony whether corrosively pungent or
more gently wry certainly does not mean an absence of feeling; its intensity suggests, by
implication, a quest for a truer compassion than the variety invoked by more florid effusions
of sentiment.
Poems record what her elders said and are satiric in intent, there are commentaries made by
the poet in a satiric manner. She uses juxtapositions for ironic contrasts. Her manner in the
Goan poems is more that of a novelist who concentrates effects through scene, dialogue and

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irony. Poems grow out of situations, as when her aunt discusses the physical features of a
bride, or from the way Goans arranging a marriage will examine the girl and her family and
will look for any signs of insanity in the girls family history, as they know that some Goans
will attempt to marry off a woman who is insane in the hope that it will cure her. Although
there is an obvious anger at the social and moral attitudes of the women in the Goan Catholic
community, there is also compassion and sympathy for how they have been victimized by
their conformity, passivity, illusions and acceptance of the behavior expected of women.
In the poem Sweet Sixteen Eunice presents the experience of a teenager who defies every
restraint in her way of living. Phoebe is an ignorant sixteen year old Catholic girl asking her
mother about the menstrual cycle. Her mother begins the societal conditioning by leaving out
mentioning the onset of puberty. Sex and sexual topics are shunned for no real reasons except
that society demands it and the result is misconception and nave innocence. De Souza in this
poem draws the picture of a prudish Catholic society.
In the poem Catholic Mother from her first collection of poems Fix, Eunice de Souza
exposes her concerns of the life of the Goan Roman Catholic community. Having been
brought up in a typical conservative family of Catholics, Eunice herself has had a first hand
experience of discrimination based on gender. Catholic Mother stands out as an excellent
critique of the representation of a traditional woman as weak, docile and seductive whose
sentiments are firmly rooted in the social ethos that permit and justify such subjugation and
oppression. In the poem, Eunice brings out, in cryptic and bitter terms, her sense of
disillusionment at the subordinate role enacted by a woman in a patriarchal social structure,
and whose role is validated and accepted by the society as the accepted norm. Francis D
Souza who is described as the father of the year claims to instil fellow feelings in his
followers. But he becomes an utter failure in his personal life as he has failed to realise the
inner potentialities and to acknowledge the sensibilities of this wife as an individual.
Weighed down by the pressures of a patriarchal society, the Fathers wife is deprived of her
social, economic, familial and even fundamental human privileges and rights. The pathetic
plight of the Fathers wife is reflected in her consecutive impregnation for seven years, and
her deplorable plight is a clear indication of the gender inequities prevailing in the existing
social order. In this context, it is to be noted that through Eunices frank portrayal of the
idiosyncrasies self-important hypocritical nature of the members of her Goan Catholic
community, she throws light on the stereotyped projection of a woman as mere objects of
sexual lust and desire in an essentially patriarchal framework that disallows woman to have

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her own space. Eunices discussion of the Fathers obsessive sexual interest raises
fundamental questions about womans oppression under patriarchy. Created as a model
traditional character, the Fathers wife shows great devotion to her husband, and is always
polite, submissive and self-effacing willing to sacrifice her personal feelings and happiness.
Placed against the conceptual framework of paternalistic ideologies, her role and duties as a
woman are defined only in relation to those of her husband.
Catholic Mother also focuses on the Roman Catholics and their sense of alienation from the
mainstream Hindu society. It criticizes the bigger Hindu community for lacking ethos.
The poem Feeding the Poor at Christmas is an interesting poem which exposes the
penchant irony, the hollowness and false assumptions which underlie in an act of charity. It is
vanity rather than real compassion and humanity which seems to impel the feeders of the
poor even on a day as benevolent as Christmas. There is a hypocrisy and obvious arrogance
in this poem. What de Souza aims at bringing out is the un-Christian attitudes of those who
profess Christian charity. In the poem, in the very beginning there is a tone of arrogance also
the speaker treats the poor as if they are dying for his mercy:
Every Christmas we feed the poor
We arrive an hour late: Poor dears,
like children waiting for a treat. (lines 1-3)
At the end de Souza shows how her society lacks humility towards the underprivileged as the
speaker says,beggars must not be choosers.
The poem titled Eunice which is autobiographical deals with the prudishness in the
Christian society. As a child, Eunice de Souza too had to conform to the rules of this society
which she always,inwardly, revolted. In her poems, she disdains the priggish attitude of the
nuns and makes an offensive statement :Silly braless bitch.(line 6)
In the poem Miss Louise de Souza talks about some professor called Miss Louise, an old
Catholic woman who lives on her past unfulfilled dreams. A spinster, who dreamt of a
luxurious lifestyle and rich husband, she took extreme pride in her beauty. But once again we
are shown the orthodox aspect of the Christian society which even tries to control the nave
dreams and aspirations of innocent and docile Catholic women. The Goan society is
portrayed as a Puritanical cage.

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The next poem Forgive Me, Mother talks of de Souzas stifling relationship with her
mother over the years. There was a disturbing friction in their relationship which emotionally
affected her other consequent relationships. De Souza confesses of killing her mother in her
dreams. The end of the poem is finalized in the beginning; since her childhood, de Souza had
been alienated from the family circle and later in life, she became a life-long widow:
a life-long widow
Old, alone. (lines 3-4)
De Souzas poems are compressed, rebellious and explicitly confessional. Confessional
poetry gathered its concerns from two cultural forces: the awareness of the emotional vacuity
of public language in America and the insistent psychologizing of a society adrift from
purpose and meaningful labor. The fifties witnessed a new understanding of mass man and
his futilities: now it was a "post-industrial" society that provided his background, and the
sociologist identified his prototype with such terms as "alienation," "the lonely crowd," and
"inner-directed." Poets went against the grain of this social atomizing, and yet reflected its
inevitable, distorted enlargement of individual psychology.
The poem She and I has certain parallels with the previous poem. It talks about the growing
distance between Eunice and her mother which couldnt be bridged even after the father died.
The mother and daughter wept silent tears but could never comfort each other. Although they
both grieved the fathers absence but could never transcend the growing wall of silence and
separation:
Iam afraid
for her, for myself,
But can say nothing. (lines 11-13)

In another poem For My Father, Dead Young written in the memory of her father, de Souza
begins with a dream scene which is pathetic and morbid. She writes:
I hold the child up in delight
The revolving fan cuts her through.
Its a dream.

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Im you. (lines 1-4)
When M.L. Rosenthal first used the term, confessional poetry, he had in mind a phase in
Robert Lowells career when Lowell turned to themes of sexual guilt, alcoholism,
confinement in a mental hospital, and developed them in the first person in a way that
intended to point the poet himself. Rosenthal named Sylvia Plath a confessional poet because
she puts herself at the center of her poems in such a way as to make her psychological
vulnerability and shame, an embodiment of her civilization. What distinguishes confessional
poems from other modes is the kind of person in the poem; there is a literary self that exists
in the poem, says Robert Lowell. The speaker exaggerates his own emptiness and his
manipulative mind functions, tormenting itself by objectifying the pain. Sylvia Plath controls
her terror by forcing them into images as Eunice does in the poem For My Father, Dead
Young. When Sylvia Plath in the poem Daddy says, Daddy, I have had to kill you (line
6) we are immediately reminded of the imagery of the grinning skull that Eunice de Souza
talks of in her poem. The frantic pitch of her language and the swift switches of images
serves as a vehicle of expression for the disordered mind.
With a diseased imagination she recalls the memory of her father using gloomy images like
the grey mist, The black dawn, The grinning skull. De Souzas poems, those that she
wrote for her parents and kith and kin are embittered with insolence.
Eunice De Souza's poetry is a sculpture carved in words. Such measured words, such incisive
breaks, so much feeling and emotion. As if the smallest of movement in her life or around is
acutely scrutinized for meanings one cannot see with the naked eye. Unlike the women poet
of colonial period, Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu, Eunice de Souza doesnt write about
love,nature, home etc. in fact in one of her collections titled Dont look for My Life in These
Poems de Souza,in a very matter of fact tone, writes:
Poems have order, sanity
aesthetic distance from debris.
All I've learnt from pain
I always knew,
but could not do.

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There is a remarkable shift in the poems of contemporary Indian women poets from
eulogizing and spiritualizing love to a more mundane acceptance of sexuality and the
physical needs of women. These poets have discovered their own voices and developed their
sensibilities. Their poetry expresses the desire of woman to get away from the ties that have
restricted her since times immemorial. Some women poets, in particular, have made
worthwhile attempts at mapping out new terrains as human beings and also as creative writers
(Pathak 15). This contemporary poetry reveals the frustrations and tensions which women
face because of the discrepancy between the way they want to behave and the way they are
made to behave. The entrenched patriarchal structure still continues to control and restrict the
lives of women in one way or the other.
Eunice de Souzas poems are stripped down to their bare bones.They are sheer dramatic in
mode,not in a peculiar descriptive and narrative style. The poems, reflecting de Souzas
Catholic childhood, are a means to gain control over private fears, anxieties and angers. Such
poems are in the confessional manner, where instead of consistency of character there is a
mosaic of guilts, desires and revelations. Her poems have the brevity, unexpectedness, and
urgency of telegrams. With Goan names and its vernacular on her lips, Miss de Souza adopts
the role of a community entertainer.













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Conclusion

In the beginning of this dissertation it was stated that these group of Bombay poets have
made a relatively remarkable attempt in exploring the urban landscape along with bringing
out the latent emotions beneath a material culture in a metropolis as vibrant as Bombay. By
taking into account some of their significant collection of poems we have seen how the city
of Bombay and its multi-faceted characteristics serves as a Muse for our poets. Some drew
inspiration from the ruins of a temple in as remote a place as Jejuri (in Maharashtra) while
others triumphed in turning a stinking filthy disgrace of a piss-soaked wall into a beautiful
fragrant place with a multi-faith mural. Kala Ghoda Poems by Kolatkar is a kind of
contemporary street theatre poetry, which records the successive appearances of the different
characters of the Kala Ghoda traffic island - whole families of pavement dwellers, bums and
lepers, grannies and crippled, children, dogs and cats, rubbish, old tyres and birds, things and
objects abandoned on the sideway, on the margins both of modernization and of our ordinary
perception or exclusive vision. This leaves us with enough evidence to acknowledge him as
an urban poet.
The ones who were more inclined on confessing themselves wrote about their inner
pathos, frustrations, desires and deprivations, especially about how ones emotional life has
been formed by the past.
Indian poetry in English is not like poetry in any other Indian language which has
specific regional characteristics. English poetry of the four metropolitan cities has somewhat
individual identities. The one we are dealing with is called "Bombay Poetry" for example.
English poetry of the Northeast is entirely different from that of the rest of the country. And
there are the 'roving poets,' sometimes diaspora, sometimes Indian. English poetry on the
whole attains a pan-Indian characteristic, as it deals generally with Indian ethos and is written
in the English language that finds expression in India. The present is progressively wrought
with the anxiety and shock that come with the political, social and cultural developments on
the one hand, and the awe and wonderment induced by human progress and advancement, on
the other. Most of the best poets writing now make sure they catch the vital moments and
immortalize them in their poems. Less of nostalgia and more of the imminence of the actual
can be noted as predominating the poetic expression in English now, in our country.

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There is a need for taking into consideration the milieu in which the poet breeds and
nurtures himself. Earlier the focus, invariably, had been the Vision of Faith, the Vision of the
Mother, the Vision of Patriotism, the Vision of India the Mother but the range, variety,
themes, attitudes and voices of Indian English poetry have increased greatly in recent
decades. Instead of reducing India to stereotyped sentiments, India has become a reality. It is
seen, felt, experienced; the poet responds to its various details, events, happenings, politics,
values, peoples, behavior and legends. Not the Ganga anymore but the gutter has become the
subject-matter of the urban poets. The modern poetry places,dialectically, sin, guilt, danger,
and punishment. Two of the poets taken for analysis i.e. Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar, are
as much as English-language poets as they are the regional-language maestros. Exploring
their relationship to the past, to their families, to local society and their immediate
relationship with others, the poems are no longer filled with mysticism, spiritual heritage and
high-seriousness of the forefathers. In fact, Arun Kolatkar achieved fame by dealing with as
trivial a topic as kerosene, lice, old bicycle tyre, charas pill, beggar women, traffic lights,
taxis, cocktails, constables and prostitutes. While Dilip Chitre lends a brevity to his ideas and
draws inspiration from Dadar Beach, Horniman Circle Garden, Byculla Goods Depot,
Nariman Point, Victoria Gardens Zoo, cockroaches and crowded chawls of his Chinchpokli
locality. Having experienced the ideological vacuum of the modern age, Chitre asserts,
I itch. I become horny. I booze. I want to get smashed ( line 49,The
View from Chinchpokli)
Eunice de Souza, on the other hand is unique in her style. Although she doesnt
particularly deal with the Bombay landscape but fiercely exposes the mindset of the dominant
Catholic locality inhabiting the city. Goan Catholics especially are dispersed across Bombay.
According to statistical reports, 90,000 Goans live in urban Bombay and 10,000 in suburban
Bombay. Beginning with the discrimination of women within the Catholic community in
Goa, de Souza goes on to explore the problematic relationship that community has with India
as a nation. The colonial past of Goa is one of her major preoccupations, which is deftly
interwoven into her intricate depiction of Indian nationalism. Unlike other parts of India, Goa
was under the Portuguese rule and continued to be so until 1961. The euphoria of nationalism
which pervaded the collective consciousness of the Indian mass during the freedom
movement and later developed into a meta-narrative institutionalized by the Indian state, had
different ramifications in Goa than in other parts of India. By virtue of having a different
colonizer and by being aloof from Indian nationalism during its formative years, the region

53

became a metaphor for the contradictions of history and a playground for the crisscross of
different cultures. Goans of de Souza's generation inherited two cultural legacies Goa with
its unique historical experience and Indian nationalism with all the cultural traditions that
went into its making as well as those that were deliberately overlooked. De Souza uses this
historical situation to delineate the different cultural identities associated with it. The idyllic
past of Goa is part of her family folklore and it represents the nostalgia for a colonial past. It
is neatly expressed in the poem Idyll:

When Goa was Goa
my grandfather says
the bandits came
over the mountain
to our village
only to splash
in cool springs (lines 4-10)
The imagination of this idyllic past is a psychological necessity for a parochial
community which finds itself alienated from the nation it belongs to. India with all its
diversity and anarchy is the cultural 'other' for her community. But de Souza belongs to a
generation of Indians who were fated to define their individual identities within the broader
framework of Indian nationality. Hence, we find in her poems a deliberate attempt to locate
her identity in the vortex of nation. As G J V Prasad puts it, "hers is another attempt to
contextualize herself within the complex grid that makes India and Indianness." To
contextualize herself within the 'complex grid' of Indian nationality, she has to identify the
different traditions that constitute it and put them into a perspective that she personally
subscribes to.
Writing is a means of creating a place in the world; the use of the personal voice and
self-revelation are means of self-assertion. Women poets like Kamala Das and Eunice de
Souza opened areas in which previously forbidden or ignored emotions could be expressed in
ways which reflect the true voice of feeling; they showed how an Indian woman poet could
create a space for herself in the public world. Eunice explicitly brings a sense of Catholic

54

locality to her poems. There are classrooms where she condemns the prudish knowledge
given by the nuns, the homes she left, the bedrooms where at night she dreamt of killing her
mother, family gatherings during Christmas that brings out the arrogance of the rich towards
the exploited, jokes and paintings of her father which she no longer cares to recall, wounded
relationship with her mother which she has no intention to heal, the people she visits or
notices but shares an indifferent attitude to their worries. Her poems are set in situations
rather than by observing or alluding to their environment. She rebels against patriarchy and
the inhibiting world of middle-class respectability, with its clean thoughts, clean words and
clean teeth.
Dealing further with the techniques and new concepts of these experimental poets, there
is no mimicry of the west neither of pre-colonial times but a healthy assimilation of the West
into the Indian sensibility which is the correct ideal. Cross- cultural fertilization has definitely
taken place as Kolatkar was influenced by Black American music and speech and the
European avant-garde movement called Dadaism so was Dilip Chitre. After having spent four
years in Ethiopia, the tradition of Chitres method is the dramatic monologue as it developed
out of Browning through Pound and Eliot. In the case of Eunice de Souza, many of her
poems are satires or are in a confessional mode similar to Sylvia Plaths miming of deep fears
and resentments which are expressed through self-ironic wit. These poets have retained a
unique Indianness in their work, maintained their dignity and self-respect in the presence of
powerful influences acquiring the true freedom of mind and not a tutelage under European
schoolmasters.
In the decade immediately after Independence (1947), the literatures in most of the Indian
languages underwent a different kind of upheaval at approximately the same time, launching
more or less "regional" poetic movements that were often simply called new poetry (for
instance, nai kavita in Hindi and nava kavya in Marathi). Dilip Chitre and Arun Kolatkar
were ardent followers of the Marathi saint Tukaram. Although Indian English poetry has
emerged as a national literature, the imaginative world of the poets is still most concerned
with their confined locality. There were more poems about specific locales, poems about the
community in which one was raised, poems which consciously took positions on matters of
cultural heritage or were criticisms the concern with the self and its way of perceiving reality.
Community bonding was very significant for these Marathi poets and they were bothered by
the continuous erosion of local and regional color, the dying of dialects, the termination of
oral traditions, the withering of folklore. Therefore Arun Kolatkar has dedicated almost half

55

of his verses to Tukaram and Namdeo Dhasal, a Marathi poet, writer and Human Rights
activist. Even Chitre has words of appreciation for Namdeo Dhasal who was also the leader
of the group called Dalit Panthers rooted in Bombay and were a product of the history of the
city. Following Ambedkar, many Maharashtrian Dalits had quit Hinduism to liberate
themselves from a caste-system that stamped them with a lifelong lowly status. They were
uncomfortable with any kind of Hindu cultural and political rhetoric. They were looking for a
platform in their fight for equality and freedom. There was an articulate Dalit avant-garde
that stormed the Marathi literary scene and attracted nation-wide attention. They wanted to
take their activism beyond literature and culture directly into the political arena. Yet they also
knew, from the outset, that as a minority they would only be small-time players in electoral
politics or even be made mere stooges. They found guerilla tactics a very attractive weapon in
the ethos of the big city where the poorer neighbor hoods were ruled by organized crime and
where politicians used the underworld as a source of secret weapons.
Thus the newground Bombay poets have expanded and redefined the areas of reality first
mapped by Ezekiel in Indian English poetry. There is increased attention to and analysis of
life in Bombay and its suburbs, of the effects of public signs, advertising, newspapers, the
radio and motion pictures; more concern with family, personal history and the past as part of
character and the sources of emotional problems; more psychology, especially the revelation
of weaknesses, fears and moments of loss of control(King, p 146). In terms of space the new
poetry has moved further into the crowded streets, local trains, public places and lives of
Bombay and the suburbs once again validating Foucalts theory of heterotopia where
private spaces have been taken over by a hysterical city rush together with charting Goan and
Poona Christian society. Ultimately it is the citys capacity to mould and magnify the
imagination of a poet so as to juxtapose worlds created by a mosaic of faiths and those who
inhabit it. What does it mean to be a poet and writing about a city where majority and
minority live in close proximity without necessarily understanding each other or engaging
with one another, warren-like tenements comfortably co-existing with sprawling mansions
and skyscrapers which forces millions of differences to proliferate? These are the questions
that Bombay poses and that its writers attempt to answer in a myriad stories. Bombay, as the
proverb goes, is the city that never sleeps .To quote Julian Sands, The thing about
Bombay is you go five yards and all of human existence is revealed. Its an incredible
cavalcade of life and I love that.


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57

Acknowledgement

It is a privilege to extend my sincere gratitude to Dr. Sravani Biswas,Assistant
Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Tezpur University, for her
encouragement, time to time scrutiny, support, advice and guidance throughout the entire
process of writing this dissertation.
I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Dr. Prasanta Kr. Das, HoD.
Department of English and Foreign Languages, Tezpur University, for his valuable advice.
Iam obliged to the National Library of India, Kolkata, for providing me with and sorting
out rare documents and journals that helped me in building up my dissertation process.
Words would not suffice to thank my parents for their constant support and blessings.
Especially my mother for whom this dissertation brought equal level of anxiety and
apprehension.
Lastly, I would like to express my appreciation to my friends Prahelika, Ananya,
Gitika(my roommate) and Arpana for their valuable assistance even at midnight, their
suggestions and perennial words of encouragement .












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59

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE WORKS OF
BOMBAY POETS IN INDIAN WRITING IN
ENGLISH


A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR AWARD OF THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF
ARTS





Vipasha Bhardwaj
ROLL NO: EGE12029



DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH & FOREIGN LANGUAGES
TEZPUR UNIVERSITY, ASSAM
MAY, 2013



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TEZPUR UNIVERSITY

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify thet the dissertation entitled A Critical Analysis of the Works of
Bombay Poets in Indian Writing in English submitted to the School of Humanities and
Social Sciences, Tezpur University in part fulfilment for the award of the degree of Master of
Arts in English is a record of research work carried out by Vipasha Bhardwaj under my
supervision and guidance.
All help received by him/her from various sources have been duly acknowledged.
No part of this thesis has been submitted elsewhere for award of any other degree.




Dated: May 3, 2014 Supervisor: Dr. Sravani Biswas
Designation: Assistant Proffesor
School: Humanities and Social Sciences
Department: English & Foreign
Languages






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CONTENTS
Page no.
Certificate

Acknowledgements

Introduction 1-10

Chapter I : Arun Kolatkar 11-30

Chapter II: Dilip Chitre 32-43

Chapter III: Eunice de Souza 44-51

Conclusion 52-56
Bibliography 57-59










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Works Cited
(Primary Sources)
Abrahams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Delhi: Thomsan Wadsworth, 2007. Print.

Iyengar, K.R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,2010.
Reprint.

King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Rev. ed. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2001. Print

Gopal, Priyamvada. The Indian English Novel. New York: Oxford University Press,2009.
Print

Patke, Rajeev S. Post Colonial Poetry in English. London: Oxford University Press. 2006.
Print

Mitra, Zinia, ed. Indian Poetry in English: Critical Essays. New Delhi:PHI Learning Private
Limited. 2012. Print

Naik, M.K, ed. Jejuri: A Thematic Study, Perspectives on Indian Poetry in English, New
Delhi: Abhinav Prakashan. 1984. Print

Krishna Arvind,Mehrotra,ed. Arun Kolatkar: Collected Poems in English. UK: Bloodaxe
Books.2010. Print


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de Souza, Eunice. A Necklace of Skulls: Collected Poems. Penguin Books. 2010. Print

de Souza, Eunice., Melanie Silgardo., eds. These My Words. New Delhi: Penguin India. 2012.
Print

(Secondary Sources)
Quoted in K.R. Srinivas Iyengar, The New Poets, Indian Writing in English. New Delhi:
Sterling Publishers. 2010. Reprint

Krishna Arvind, Mehrotra, The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets,
Oxford University Press, Calcutta, 2002. Print

Dehaene,Michiel., Lieven De Cauter.,eds. Heterotopia and the City: Public space in a
postcivil society. London: Routledge.2008. Print

Chaudhri, Amit. Clearing a Space, Reflections on India, Literature and Culture. New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2008. Print

Chitre, Dilip, ed. An Anthology of Marathi Poetry (19451965). Bombay: Nirmala Sadanand,
1967. Print

Maclean, Gerald, et al., eds. The Country and The City Revisited. UK: Cambridge University
Press. 1999. Print

Ezekiel, Nissim. Indian English Poems of Bombay Poets: A postscript to the selections.
JSTOR. 30.4 ( 1987): n.pag. Web.8 June 2014.

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Chitre, Dilip. Street Fight Poet. Tehelka 2 .June 2007.Web. 15 January 2014.
http://www.tehelka.com/story/

Kolatkar, Arun. No Easy Answers. The Hindu Literary Review 5 .September 2004. Web.
15 January 2014.
http://www.hindu.com/

Prakash, Gyan. Mumbai Fables. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010. Print


Ramakrishnan, E. V. Poetry Is Language Looking at Experience. A Conversation with Dilip
Chitre. Making it New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi, Hindi Poetry. Shimla: Indian
Institute of Advanced Study, 1995. 228-37. Web. 10 February 2014.

Chaudhri, Amit., ed. The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. London: Macmillan,
2001. Print

Zecchini, Laetitia. Modernism in Indian Poetry:at the time, we didnt dissociate between
East and West, it was just part of Bombay. Web.20 March 2014.






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