Jejuri: A Pilgrimage into the Past and the Present

Abstract

Arun Kolhatkar’s Jejuri is probably the only book of Indian poetry in English in recent times that has some claims of be considered as a possible commonwealth classic. Though it was first published in 1954 in the Opinion Literary Quarterly, it caught the attention of the critical world only it was awarded the Commonwealth Literary Prize of 1977.It has been hailed since then as the most extraordinary book of poems. It gives us a symbolic picture of modern predicament. The subject of Kolatkar’s sequence of poems is religion, and the relation between religion and culture. Kolatkar’s attitude is very different from treatments of the same them in modern Europe and America. The difference is not ideological; it arises out of an entirely distinct climate of sensibility. Kolatkar’s poetic mind, enlivened though it may be by irony and irreverence, remains paradoxically a combination of the negatively dark and even the joyous. It represents in the final analysis a modern adjustment (present) to an accepted tradition (past). Unlike some Western work, it is not nor an attempt to construct something in a godless universe.