POEMS OF ARUN KOLATKAR AND SUJATHA BHATT. ( GROUP II )
INDIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH -I
LIFE OF ARUN KOLATKAR
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Arun Kolatkar was born in 1931 in Kolhapur, Maharashtra, India. He grew up in a traditional patriarchal Hindu extended family'. He was educated at Rajaram High School in Kolhapur, also attending art schools in Kolhapur and Pune, graduating in 1957. He spent several years trying to
make a living before turning to work as an art director and graphic designer for several advertising agencies in Bombay, achieving great success in this field.
He wrote prolifically, in both Marathi and English, publishing in magazines and anthologies.His Marathi verse collection Bhijki Vahi won a Sahitya Akademi Award in 2005. His Collected Poems in English, edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, was published in Britain by Bloodaxe Books in 2010.
A reclusive figure all his life, he lived without a telephone, and was hesitant about publishing his work. It was only after he was diagnosed with cancer that two further volumes of his poetry in English were brought out by friends, Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra in 2004. He died not long afterwards. A further posthumous selection, The Boatride and Other Poems (2008), edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, contained his previous uncollected English poems as well as translations of his Marathi poems; among the book's surprises were his translations of bhakti poetry, song lyrics, and a long love poem, the only one he wrote, cleverly disguised as light verse. His Collected Poems in English (Bloodaxe Books, 2010), edited by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, brings together work from all those volumes.
Arun Kolatkar’s poetry reveals meaninglessness of life, loss of identity, revenge motif and superstitious
attitude. He is a bilingual poet writing in Marathi and English. His poems are totally different in structure, themes and style.
AN OLD WOMAN – ARUN KOLATKAR
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“An Old Woman” is written by Arun Kolatkar. This poem presents the old woman in the poem in a different picture as the speaker discovers her in a new light owing to his changed perspective. He finds this woman near a temple shrine looking frail but firm in her eyes. She wants him to take her service to go around the horseshoe shrine for a fifty paise coin. Though initially the speaker wants to ignore her, she sticks around and he notices her deep conviction to make her own living independently. His perception changes eventually.
Theme
The poet Arun Kolatkar in this poem writes about an old woman he meets at the horseshoe shrine. She grabs hold of the speaker’s sleeve and tags along. All she wants is a fifty paise coin. After all, for this money she intends to take the poet around the shrine. Though he has already seen it, she does not give up easily. The speaker, however, wants to declare that he does not want her service. But her words, ‘What else can an old woman do on hills as wretched as these’ draw his attention. He finds bullet holes for her eyes. Then, a sudden change occurs in the atmosphere. The hills crack, the temples crack and the sky falls. There is an inward change that takes place simultaneously in the speaker while the woman stands alone. By now the speaker’s perception of the woman as one merely pestering the visitors for money has undergone a change. He now understands that this woman likes to live independently earning her living. The poem concludes that anyone cannot be just taken for granted.
THE BOAT RIDE – ARUN KOLATKAR
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Kolatkar’s first long poem “The Boatride” has come up for considerable critical attention. The poem strikes the reader as a series of snapshots presenting scenes which shift constantly from the movement of the pair of knees streaking up and down to the spreading of the sail, the appearance of the stony-faced woman and her child. The surge of the sea which provides the basic rhythm to the poem lends a sense of unity and continuity to the whole poem bringing the snapshot perceptions into a well-unified orchestration.
Arun Kolatkar’s poem “ The Boat Ride “ is considered as an empty poem because it’s a no theme poem. The sails of the boat are unflurred. An abrupt flight of number of pigeons from the spot takes place as soon as the boat moves. The foreman of the boat sits self-conscious by the side of his spouse. The foreman feels boastfully to himself about his exceptional skill at his job. A two year child on the boat demands balloons from his father and cracks one of them. As the boat approaches the gateway of India, It seems shaky but it does not lose its balance. The passengers start getting down from the boat At the landing place which is paved with stones but on which shells lies shattered, Seeming to threaten the passengers. The gateway of India seems somewhat unsteady for a moment but recovers its equilibrium immediately.
LIFE OF SUJATHA BHATT
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Sujata Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, and brought up in Pune until 1968, when she emigrated to the United States with her family. She has an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and for a time
was writer-in-residence at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her translations from the German include Mickle Makes Muckle: poems, mini plays and short prose by Michael Augusti Writing
Many of Bhatt’s poems have themes of love and violence. She explores issues such as racism and the interaction between Asian, European, and North American culture. Michael Schmidt observed that her “free verse is fast-moving, urgent with narratives, softly spoken. Her cadence is natural, her diction
undecorated.”[3] Bhatt has been recognized as a distinctive voice in contemporary poetry. She is, the
New Statesman declared, “one of the finest poets alive”.
Recognition
She received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asia) and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for her first collection Brunizem. She received a Cholmondeley Award in 1991and the Italian Tratti Poetry Prize in 2000.
Her poem ‘A Different History’ dealing with the issues of globalization and westernization, featured in
the poetry anthology used for IGCSE English examinations, for examination in 2014.
Awards
1988 Commonwealth poetry prize (Asia) Brunizem
1988 Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize Brunizem
1991 Poetry Book Society Recommendation Monkey Shadows
1991 Cholmondeley Award
2000 Poetry Book Society Recommendation Aguatora
2000 Tratti Poetry Prize
Search for my tongue
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The speaker addresses someone who has just asked her what she means when she says she has lost her “tongue,” meaning her language. The speaker asks this person what they would do if they had two different tongues (a figurative way of referring to language that the speaker uses throughout the poem) in their mouth, but then no longer had the first one, their native language, and couldn’t ever feel totally at ease with other one, the foreign language. The speaker says that you couldn’t use both of these languages at the same time, even if you thought and understood things in two languages at once. What’s more, if you lived somewhere where you always had to speak in a foreign language, then your first language (again envisioned as a tongue) would start to decay until it eventually died in your mouth and then you had to spit it out and get rid of it entirely. The speaker says that she thought she had in fact spat out her own tongue (her first language), but something different happens in her dreams.
The speaker then shows what happens at night when she dreams, and speaks in Gujarati, her native language, for seven lines.
The speaker then translates what she has just said in Gujarati into English. She explains that, in her dream, her first language (again depicted as a tongue) grows back. At first it is just a small shoot, like the sprout of a plant. But then it grows longer and becomes stronger, to the point that it can even tie the foreign tongue up in knots. This first tongue is then compared to a budding flowers that blooms inside the speaker’s mouth, and in doing so pushes away the foreign tongue. The speaker concludes that each time she thinks she has forgotten or lost the ability to speaker her first language, it blooms like a flower out of her mouth.
Symbols
The Dream
The dream in the poem reflects the speaker’s ultimately unshakable connection to her native language. It can be thought of as a manifestation of her truest self.
At the end of the first stanza, the speaker says, “but overnight while I dream,” and then goes on to speak in Gujarati. The speaker implies, then, that the native language she fears she has lost isn’t lost at all. On the contrary, it comes to life again while she is dreaming, and in her dreams she fluently speaks that “mother tongue.”
Dreams are understood to come from the deepest levels of someone’s consciousness. As such, they often symbolize the unconscious or subconscious levels of a person’s thoughts. The fact that the speaker dreams in Gujarati, then, implies that this language lives at a deep level of her consciousness and her existence. Something so deeply connected to her identity, the poem suggests, can’t truly be lost.
Line 16:“but overnight while I dream,”
The Bud and Blossom
In the last section of the poem, the speaker describes how her native language reemerges like a flowering plant. First, the speaker says that the language grows stronger, and then compares it to a “bud” of a flower that begins to open. Finally, the speaker concludes that every time she fears she has lost her native language, it “blossoms out of [her] mouth.”
Flowers, and especially the new buds of flowers, symbolize new life, and the reemergence of life after a period of dormancy. The image of the flowering plant, then, is highly symbolic in the poem. These images of buds and blossoms suggest that the speaker’s native language has never truly died at all. Instead, it might go dormant during periods of time, like a plant in winter. But implicitly, it will always come back and flower again.
Line 27: “the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,”
Line 31: “it blossoms out of my mouth.”
Partition – Sujata Bhatt
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Sujata Bhatt was born in 1952 in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, India and lived there until 1968, when she emigrated to United States with her family. She now lives in Germany.
In 1942, British rule in India came to an end and the country was partitioned into India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). This was planned by the British and Muslim leaders to assist the Muslim minority and give them a national identity. The partition was the signal for bloody conflict which left over one million dead.
In the poem, the people at the railway station are probably Muslim refugees trying to escape the violence.The Pain of Partition and Violent Epoch.The poem “Partition” is not all about the partition of India but is about all kinds of violent epochs that thwarted the aspirations of the common people, as found in the vast expanse of recorded history. The poem traces the incidents in which a land and its people are partitioned on the basis of religious beliefs, giving centrality to the partition of India. The poet seems to question the validity of the decision which caused the bloodshed of civilians on an unprecedented scale:
‘How could they
Have let a man
Who knew nothing
About geography
Divide a country?’
A society in which ordinary Hindus and Muslims lived in perfect harmony and good neighbourliness was smashed up following the political formula of partition. This poem seeks to mitigate the negative effects of alienation, isolation, and dispersal through the literal and symbolic activities of translation. The fragmented senses of self, the frailty of survival, the persistence of hope, the wariness of the new are all represented with sharp precision.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TITLE
“The Shadow Lines”
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Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines describes the story about an Indian family and an English family since 1960 covering three decades and three cities - Calcutta, London and Dhaka.The partition of 1947,which drew imaginary lines across India the nation, by making the countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India caused much destruction through the communal violence and riots.The title of this fascinating work relates to a key concern of post colonialism - that of borders and boundaries. It evaluates the worthless and useless attempts of creating boundaries. The novel is the commentary on how these boundaries can’t separate the minds, imagination and sense of nativity and origin. It is an amazing story that lapses several borders. It is Postcolonial criticism that examines and criticizes man-made boundaries and borders. The novel depicts the suffering, the death and devastation caused by a shadow line of borders that could not wipe out the connections among human beings.
SUMMARY:
The novel has no chapters or scenes, but is structured in two parts: “Going Away” and “Coming Home.” “Coming Home” begins as the Narrator relates the story of several of his family members and how they came to live in Calcutta. The Narrator makes it clear that he is writing about the past from some undetermined point in the 1970s as he works on a Doctoral degree in London. Oddly, his mother and father are scarcely mentioned in the novel. Part 1, “Going Away,” focuses primarily on his relationship with his grandmother Tha’mma , his tutelage under the care of an intellectual named Tridib and the daughter of an Indian diplomat,Ila
Tha’mma is a force of nature who insists that all in the family adhere to the old Indian traditions. She is appalled to learn that the Narrator occasionally visits prostitutes and takes measures to have him expelled from college by notifying the Dean of his activities. The Dean lets him stay, but Tha’mma is relentless in her condemnation of the Narrator’s increasingly liberated ideas, and of the company he keeps. Ila, who has moved to London, receives particular scorn for her short hair and her propensity for wearing blue jeans.
The Narrator bounces back and forth between past and present, hinting at disasters to come while not revealing their nature. As a child, and then as a young man, he falls in love with Ila. But when he reveals his feelings, she rejects him and leaves. He vacillates between their conversation in the past and at several different periods in the future, but at no point is it implied that they will be a couple. After studying for years in London, the Narrator returns home and Part 2, “Coming Home,” begins.
In Part 2, the Narrator focuses primarily on the political turmoil that will eventually engulf India and Pakistan in riots, and on the efforts of his grandmother to bring her uncle back to India from his home in the city of Dhaka. It is also revealed that Ila has entered into an unhappy marriage with Nick Price. As Ila flirts with bohemian idealism, Tridib falls deeper into melancholy as he pursues his own studies. There are hints that he has fallen in love with May Price, Nick’s sister. But again, there is no sense that this will have a happy ending for either of them.
At the novel’s climax, the Narrator learns that Tridib’s death—mentioned but never explained—was not an accident. He was killed in a riot that overtook the town of Dhaka on the trip when Tha’mma went to retrieve her uncle. At this point, the Narrator must question the quality and truth of his own memories and those of everyone else. As he has written his chronicle, he has always been reliant on the stories of others. But stories from others are reliant on their own memories, which may be as fallible as his. As the novel ends, he is in bed with May Price, who has begun to act as a mother figure—and possibly a lover—to him. It is unclear whether he will view his future with optimism because what is real to him today will soon become an untrustworthy memory.
The Shadow Lines received great acclaim, despite its challenging style. It is not a book that can be read quickly or haphazardly, given the Narrator’s tendency to switch cities, years, and sometimes even decades, all in the same paragraph. But read carefully, the novel is an ingenious, occasionally frustrating nesting structure—much like memory itself.
THEMES
PARTITION,IDENTITY AND COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN THE SHADOW LINES.
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Ghosh's Novel,The Shadow Lines deals with issues of partition, identity, freedom and cross cultural interactions in the backdrop of communal violence. The attitudes and motives of both
Indian and British characters in the novel as they emerge in the context different situations are the other significant issues. The novel portrays the friendship between an upper class Bengali family and an English family,over three generations. The narrator’s family is spread over
Dhaka,Calcutta and London. The family consists of his grandmother, Mayadebi’s elder sister, and his parents,and their three sons, Jatin, an economist with the U.N, Tridib and Robi. Ila Jatin’s daughter is always away with her parents. The narrator’s family is settled in Calcutta where his grandmother is a headmistress in a school. On the other hand, the family of Mayadebi, with the exception of Tridib, goes around the world. Tridib lives in his ancestral house in Bally gunge place. The friendship between the Indian families and the English family began whenLionel Tresawsen was in India. Later on, in India he developed an interest on spiritualism and began to attend the meetings of the Theosophical society in Calcutta, where he met and earned the trust and friendship of a number of leading nationalists. The friendship between Tresawsen and Datta-Chaudhuri is strengthened by their heirs. In this connection, the year 1939 is significant because the story in the novel starts at this period of time. It is also the year of the Second World war. This is the period when British imperialism was at its zenith in India. This period also accelerated the fall of the British Empire. The membership of the Theosophical society brings Tresawsen and Datta-Chaudhuri in each other’s intimacy. The society was a western attempt to use the springs of Indian spirituality. It gathered many prominent Indians around her, and opened branches in many cities,
all over India. There could be no better place for an Indian than the society to develop friendship with an Englishman. The Indian spirituality,as opposed to the British materialism,places Datta Chaudhuri and Tresawsen on sure footing. It is the blooming of friendship between their
successors,which forms the back bone of the narrative of The Shadow Lines. Mrs. Price , the daughter of Tresawsen and Mayadebi and her elder sister continue to maintain this friendly relationship, irrespective of the fact that the year 1939 was the year of Indian slavery. But the
spirituality of the Theosophical society dissolves any trace of antipathy between the colonizer and the colonized. Amitav Ghosh thus prepares the readers for a friendly English woman and her family.
Ghosh portrays the friendly fine Englishmen and women in The Shadow Lines,from 1939 to 1979. Mrs. Mayadebi finds a kind of “Exhilarations” in the airin1939. Ila’s upbringing and
Education in England is a matter of contradictory opinions. Her father was with a University in Northern England. Her mother was called Queen Victoria,who loved to lord over household
servants,like whitemen sahib’s of the colonial India. She was“The Daughter of a man who had left his village in Barisalin rags and went on to earn a Knighthood in the old Indian civil service”.
“The whitememsahibs,in the colonial India,had their life of idleness and frivolity,their scandal mongering and flirtations,their insensitivity and their rudeness towards Indians.
The focus of the novel is the partition of India and the consequent trauma of East Bengal’s psyche.
The narrator of Ghosh’s novel is a young boy who grew up in Calcutta and Delhi in
post–partition India. The trauma of partition continues through three generations. The agonies of displacement,
the sense of alienation in the adopted land and the constant dream of are turn
to one’s land are the themes of this novel.
Partition was viewed as the price for political freedom from British colonial rule. There are several novels that belong to the genre of the partition novel. Some of these novels are KhushwantSingh’s A Train to Pakistan(1956), Attia Houain’s Sunlight on BrokenColumn(1961),ManoharMalgaonkar’s A Bendin the Ganges(1964),RajGill’s The Rape(1974)and BapsiSidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man(1988).The Vulnerability of human understanding life caused by the throes of partition which relentlessly divided friends, families, lovers and neighbors are shown in these novels.In Indo-Anglian fiction the division of Bengal and the suffering caused by partition are first highlighted by Ghosh in The Shadow Lines.
This novel rejects the concept of partition. People scoff at national leaders
who had believed that problems could be solved by drawing lines across the land. Both Bengals are historically, culturally and geographically one and a division was not a solution to the Traditional Hindu ,Muslim animosity.Amitav Ghosh is driven to ask:“Why don’t they draw thousand of lines
through the whole subcontinents and give every place a new name“.The novel is divided into two parts:“Going Away” and“Coming Home”.It beautifully shifts from past to present and from present to past, Ghosh Manages in a masterly way time of two kinds, time past: memory and time present;reality.
The first section “Going Away” means going away from self. ‘coming home’
means coming back to the self. The concept of coming and going, and not belonging is expressed as part of the family’s secret love.
The novel is full of symbolic references to house old and new, maps and mirrors, borders and boundaries.
All these symbols, in one way or the other, deal with the theme of man’s search for identity,i.e.,his search for roots. This is not a story of the grandmother but one depicting the eternal suffering of every man torn between the past and the present.The novel raises serious questions about roots, identifies, war, borders and soon. The shadow lines shows how the borders of India and Pakistan become sites of violence- violence that shreds communities,bloodies a common historical memory, and displaces whole populations as refugees.Yet,it suggests that communal violence can also make visible the connections between and the continuity of social relations and the communities that nation- states seek to efface. Yet identical temporality of the Hindu- Muslim violence in both places in which his cousin Tridip loses his life (in Dhaka),the narrator recognizes people's common histories and shared identities.
