The Alchemist of the Ordinary: A Profile of Arun Kolatkar

In the bustling heart of South Mumbai, at a now-closed restaurant called the Wayside Inn, a man with silver hair and a drooping mustache used to sit for decades. He was a silent fixture at a window table, watching the world through a pair of thick glasses, nursing a cup of tea. This was Arun Kolatkar—a man who worked by day as a high-flying graphic designer in advertising and spent his nights and quiet afternoons becoming one of the most significant poets in modern Indian history.

Kolatkar was a rare bilingual titan, writing with equal mastery in both Marathi and English. His poetic style is often described as the 'camera eye'—a precision-engineered gaze that records the world with a deadpan, almost clinical detachment, yet manages to find a strange, shimmering holiness in the mundane. He didn't rely on grand metaphors or flowery rhetoric. Instead, he relied on the power of looking.

The Journey to Jejuri

His arrival on the international stage was marked by the 1976 publication of 'Jejuri', a sequence of 31 poems that follows a skeptical urban traveler on a visit to a temple town in Maharashtra. The book was a revelation, winning the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. In 'Jejuri', Kolatkar strips away the traditional piety of the pilgrimage, focusing instead on the cracks in the stones and the stray dogs in the courtyard. In the opening poem, 'The Bus', he sets the scene with startling physical detail:

"The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down
on the windows of the state transport bus
all the way to Jejuri."

Later, in 'A Scratch', he challenges the very nature of divinity with his trademark brevity:

"what is god.
and what is stone.
the dividing line.
if it exists.
is very thin.
at Jejuri."

A Maverick Recluse

Critical reception of Kolatkar’s work has often placed him alongside luminaries like Salman Rushdie for his ability to capture the post-independence Indian identity. However, Kolatkar was a maverick who shunned the limelight. For years, he lived without a telephone and was famously hesitant to publish his manuscripts, often keeping them in folders for decades. It was only in 2004, when he knew he was dying of cancer, that he allowed his friends to publish two more major English works: 'Kala Ghoda Poems' and 'Sarpa Satra'.

'Kala Ghoda Poems' is a sprawling, celebratory tribute to the street life of Mumbai—the pi-dogs, the lepers, the idli-vendors, and the historical statues that inhabit the triangular island opposite his favorite cafe. Meanwhile, 'Sarpa Satra' turned his gaze toward ancient mythology, retelling a story from the Mahabharata as a modern critique of vengeance and political violence.

The Poetics of Attention

If you are coming to Kolatkar’s work for the first time, the specific poem to read is 'An Old Woman'. It is a masterpiece of perspective. The poem begins with a persistent beggar woman clutching at a traveler's sleeve, but it ends with a cosmic shift that changes the way you see the world. He writes:

"And as you look on,
the cracks that begin around her eyes
spread beyond her skin.

And the hills crack.
And the temples crack.
And the sky falls

with a plate-glass clatter
around the shatterproof crone
who stands alone."

This poem is the perfect introduction because it encapsulates Kolatkar’s greatest innovation: the 'poetics of attention.' He teaches us that if we look at anything long enough—even a beggar on a wretched hill—the object of our attention eventually shatters our preconceptions and reveals a hard, indestructible truth. Arun Kolatkar remains the alchemist of the ordinary, a poet who looked at a stone and saw a god, and looked at a city and saw a universe.