SOUTH Asia is becoming increasingly monolingual and linguistically divided, in terms of both intellectual discourse and the critical appreciation of literature. But there was a time not that long ago when we had quite a few bilingual or multilingual writers. Or even those who would write in one language remained equally familiar with the literature produced in a number of other languages. We had poets like Taufiq Rafat and Daud Kamal who wrote in English, but also comfortably translated classical works from Urdu and Punjabi into English. We had bilingual prose writers like Ahmed Ali and Qurratulain Hyder. Ali has a definite quality to his writing in both Urdu and English. Hyder, the leading Urdu fiction writer, enjoyed a command over English in which she wrote occasionally. Before them, there were polyglots like Rabindranath Tagore and Allama Muhammad Iqbal. I will specifically discuss languages, multilingualism, creativity, and our current linguistic condition some other time. What made me dwell on this issue today was my wish to praise a sequence of poems by Arun Kolatkar, who also happens to be a bilingual poet of Marathi and English. Not only has he written in two languages, he makes us experience two parallel worlds.

I remember being introduced to Kolatkar’s work through an anthology of 20th century Indian poetry where some of his Marathi poems were translated into English. They had left an impact for being surreal and relevant at the same time. But what a treat it was to finally read Jejuri, a collection of 31 poems originally written in English by Kolatkar, published first in 1976. These poems, which are both separate from each other and intrinsically connected, are about a pilgrimage to the small city of Jejuri in the Indian state of Maharashtra where the main temple of Khandoba is located. Khandoba is a Hindu deity considered a manifestation of Shiva in the Deccan plateau of South India.

From arriving in the city in a rickety bus to waiting at the run-down railway station for a train that will take you back, this is as much the story of a journey taken to a holy city as into the depths of that contemporary human mind, which is dangling undecidedly between compassion and indifference, traditional and modern, rural and urban, charity and commerce, old and new. The lines between the choices here are not so clearly marked, either. For it is the pilgrimage by what Amit Chaudhuri calls a “flâneur” and not of a pilgrim. Chaudhuri has penned an insightful introduction to the edition of Jejuri brought out by the New York Review Books in 2006. This introduction warrants a separate column on its own.

Hence, in the poems of Jejuri, the flâneur, the vagrant, the idler, and the tramp exercises his option to completely ignore things which may hold great significance for a regular pilgrim while engaging passionately with scenes and events, animals and people that remain invisible to a pilgrim. Nevertheless, the flâneur can choose to be more devotional than a pilgrim when haunted by something that he considers a spiritual experience.

On occasions, the complex emotion in these poems is conveyed through simple language — which is a poetic feat in itself. In other places there is a certain matter-of-factness where reason emphatically challenges the metaphysical. But Kolatkar’s Jejuri takes me to all the temples, shrines, and old worship places in South Asia. From Jejuri to Ajmer, from Haridwar to Bhaktapur, and from Delhi to Multan, in all these places empathy springs from a belief in the metaphysical and apathy finds its source in the physical experience.

Here is the last stanza of the poem ‘Yashwant Rao’ in Jejuri.

“Yashwant Rao/ Does nothing spectacular/ He doesn’t promise you the earth/ Or book your seat on the next rocket to heaven/ But if any bones are broken/ You know he’ll mend them/ He’ll make you whole in your body/ And hope your spirit will look after itself/ He is merely a kind of a bone setter/ The only thing is/ As he himself has no heads, hands, and feet/ He happens to understand you a little better.”

Harris Khalique is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, February 5th, 2017