According to M.K. Naik, “Arun Kolatkar is that rare phenomenon among modern Indian English poets - a bilingual poet writing both in English and in his mother tongue (Marathi, in this case).” His two major poems in English are The boatride and Jejuri.
The boatride describes a short boat - trip along the seashore, on Bombay, starting from Gateway of India and returning to it. It is a long and curious kind of poem which does not seem to have a specific theme. Nor does it have any specific ideas to express. According to Vilas Sarang, it is an “exercise in poetic description, illumined by minute observation, precise delineation, and brilliant use of metaphor. The poem deliberately sticks to description of phenomena, avoiding any larger meanings, except for such elusive ones as are thrown up by flashes of metaphor.” Not only the subject of the poem (which brings The Yachts to mind), but also its general manner is suggestive of the American poet William Carlos Williams.
“The boatride”, says R. Parthasarathy “is characterized by a hypnotic stillness. Kolatkar's poetics is original, and it is in keeping with the incantatory quality of his experiences. The absence of punctuation throughout reinforces this quality. The poem evokes a surreal world in which imagination and reality are fused, in which contradictions in logic are acceptable to the (reader’s) imagination, ordinary concepts of time and space do not operate, and everything is seen with an innocent eye.”
The boatride has no particular incident or episode; it appears to be a narrative poem but there is no story in it, nor are there any dramatic or exciting situations. Perhaps it is because of the absence of anything to stir or excite the reader that, says M.G. Krishnamurthy, Kolatkar's poems leave on the reader an impression of stillness, and that this impression is probably related to the air of contemplativeness in them. The significance which the reader perceives in events and things does not always get effectively conveyed except through such striking lines as
in the clarity of air
the gesture withers for want
of correspondence
Except for such touches here and there, we find hardly anything of interest in this poem. The sails of the boat are unfurled after a bit of confusion in the mind of the sailor. An abrupt flight of a number of pigeons takes place as soon as the boat moves. The foreman of the boat sits self - conscious by the side of his newly - married wife who is even more self - conscious than him. An old man hands over the fare to the foreman's wife without letting his hand touch her shoulder. Gold and sunlight fight for the possession of the woman's throat. The foreman boasts of his exceptional skill at his job. A timid old man, with a brood of grandchildren, warns them against falling into the dangerous sea. The foreman's wife speaks haughtily and arrogantly like a queen. A two - year - old child demands balloons from his father and bursts one of them. Two bespectacled sisters, who had got into the boat last of all, sit silently observing the boatman's profile as they look past him at the sea. A musician is playing on a stringed instrument on one of the many empty boats on the seashore as the passengers clamber down from this boat at Gateway of India, which seems somewhat unsteady for a moment but gains its equilibrium immediately. These are the “familiar perspectives” the poem recounts.
Kolatkar's fame, however, rests on Jejuri (1976), which won him the coveted Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977. The thirty - one short sections of the poem describe a visit to Jejuri, where the famous Khandoba temple is situated. “Apparently it is about the poet's irreverent odyssey to the temple of Khandoba at Jejuri, a small town in western Maharashtra.” In reality, however, the poem oscillates between faith and scepticism in a tradition that has run its course. Kolatkar expresses what he sees with the eye of a competent reporter in a language that is colloquial and spare. The result is a poem of unexpected beauty and power,” says R. Parthasarathy.
According to L.S. Deshpande, “Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri is a poem remarkable in many ways: it is complex in terms of theme, characterization, and imagery. Its structure is as much symbolic as mythological and naturalistic. Its most striking qualities are ambiguity and multi - valence, the one relating to its tone and the other to its meaning. What impresses one at the very outset, is its miraculism. Looking from the ontological viewpoint, the poem may, perhaps, be found best to illustrate what Ransom calls “metaphysical poetry”, of course in his highly individualised, special sense.”
Jejuri takes all its images from a temple town of the same name near Pune in western Maharashtra, which houses the temple of Khandoba a form of Shiva worshipped by Maharashtra's Dhangar community. However, according to Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, the presiding deity of Jejuri is not Khandoba but the human eye. The poem begins with “a day break”, as though to awaken your mind to “a few questions knocking about in your head”. And, at the twilight hour, Kolatkar catches you unawares, stopping halfway between the temples of Jejuri on the one hand and the railway station on the other. The protagonist (later identified as Manohar) stands, as it were
like a needle has stuck
a perfect balance between equal scales
with nothing left to add to your shed.
The phrase “a perfect balance”, says Deshpande, is of seminal value and is, as such, a key to the thematic structure of the poem. It may thus be seen as the open sesame to the worldview presented therein.
The city - bred protagonist reaches Jejuri after a bumpy bus ride early in the morning, along with a number of pilgrims and tourists. Asceptic, if not a disbeliever, he reaches the temple but has no intention of offering worship there. He goes round the place, scrutinizing every stone or bronze image of Khandoba and other deities in the “low temple”. The priest is unable to answer his queries about Khandoba because he has the pilgrims ' offerings on his mind. Priesthood is merely livelihood for him. He asks his young son to take the pilgrims around the temple premises but the boy is equally ignorant. Close to the temple are five hills which symbolise the five demons slain by Khandoba and a twenty - feet high statue of a tortoise on the back of which children are playing. But the boy cannot satisfy the protagonist's queries about who the demons were. At some distance from the temple is a derelict Maruti temple which is no longer in use but is still considered sacred by people.
Kolatkar's attitude is that of a rationalist. M.A. Satyanarayana calls Jejuri Kolatkar's Waste Land, a claim that is contested by M.K. Naik. But Jejuri contains some of the finest and amusing poems, such as Heart of Ruin, The Priest, The Pattern, The Horseshoe Shrine, Ajamil and the Tigers, A Song for a Murli, Makarand, The Temple Rat, The Cupboard, Yeshwant Rao, and The Railway Station. The poem pretends to be sceptical, but is not actually so. It is neither theistic nor atheistic in tone. Kolatkar maintains, more or less, an attitude of detachment as he does not directly express his views. Nor does he speak in the first person anywhere. However, the use of irony does convey to the reader how his mind is working in relation to the worship of idols and images in the Khandoba temple at Jejuri. He remains calm and composed throughout the poem which is generally regarded as his magnum opus and his signal contribution to Indian poetry in English.