Mumbai, Through Its Poets

—John Berger

It’s been said that poetry has the potential to ferment revolution. Since the Covid pandemic, there has been a lot of conversation about the arts as an essential commodity. ‘‘Poetry Pharmacies’’ exist, and seemingly bridge the gap between art and therapy. In a post-truth universe, where social media has the potential to curate anxiety, and rewire news as an intimate catastrophe, writing, more than ever, is a metaphor for political activity. Nothing is private or personal anymore. The communities that coalesce around art for its potential to liberate the individual from oppressive social realities, show us a way to regulate and diagnose the emotional temperature of a place—a city, perhaps?

Berger’s utterance that reformulates the city as a ‘‘character’’ keeps surfacing on social media once every couple of years or so. It’s become a popular template to think about inhabitants of cities as affective barometers that both make and unmake their burgeoning material infrastructures. The sociologist Louis Wirth, building on Georg Simmel’s notions of the “metropolis”, argued that urbanism embodied a distinct form of ‘‘group life’’, suggesting even that these forms could exist outside of ‘‘cities’’ as we see them in modernity. We are speaking here about a ‘‘spirit’’, a skein of relationality and association that has emerged in modern metropolitan centres, as distinct from other forms of living. Perhaps, the most imaginative documentation and assessment of this ‘‘spirit’’ comes to us, not from the historians or the journalists, but the poets and artists of a city.

The Bombay Poets were a group of writers who embodied novel modes of creative collaboration in the city through their practice. They’ve often been likened to the French Impressionists, who gathered at cafes and created magic with their artwork. Literary critic Anjali Nerlekar argues that they were at their peak during the 60s (sathothari) and the 70s, resisting and reworking publishing practices for a cultural sphere that was learning to cope with modern technologies of representation. They were a group of mostly Indian-English writers who, through their rejection of “high” poetic forms and eschewing of the anarchist and communist politics of the Beats and the Black Panthers, the radical defiance of the Bhakti poets and other important social and artistic movements, birthed a unique idiom to understand and interpret the city. Mythologies, like histories, gain currency through their heroes, and among the various creative individuals from the group, it was Arun Kolatkar, the ‘‘vanishing’’ poet, whose work has arguably drawn the most criticism—both positive and negative. The Marathi poet, Dilip Chitre, laments the loss suffered by the Marathi literary establishment because of its ignorance of Kolatkar’s Marathi oeuvre, equating it with a kind of amnesia or “blindness”. Many Marathi commentators refuse to elevate Kolatkar’s Marathi writing to the level of “poetry”. (In a conversation with me a few months ago, a senior Marathi poet disdained him by calling him little more than a “copywriter”).

Considering the cottage industries of criticism that have emerged around his English writings, it would not be hyperbole to claim that Kolatkar was ahead of his time. But even he had his heroes, and his own conception of a “tradition” from which he was drawing. His influences have been recounted by many commentators, but we are interested in a particular figure from Marathi literature whose work hasn’t been explored much in the context of the English Bombay Poets. There is a clue in a poem from his “urban” poetry cycle—Kala Ghoda Poems. This collection surfaces regularly in literary festivals and artistic events in Mumbai, and other cosmopolitan contexts elsewhere. It would be impossible to think of Kala Ghoda, the thriving commercial and cultural hub (“art quarters”) without remembering the famous characters and their material surroundings in the poetry cycle. These include Ugh the ‘‘Pi dog’’, who draws his lineage to the loyal canine that followed Yudhishtira up till the point of death, in the Mahabharata, the “Ogress” and the “Barefoot Queen of the Crossroads”.

This is a short extract from Kolatkar’s poems featuring the old Wayside Inn, written in the voice of a wall of the legendary cafe where these poets met regularly. In Kolatkar’s poetic metaverse, material objects were often charged with emotional histories and summoned as sensitive witnesses:

“It remembers Babasaheb sitting all by himself

with a pot of tea and scribbling notes,

dreaming with an audacious pencil

of a society undivided by caste and creed

It remembers an obscure poet munching on Welsh rabbit,

and thinking of rats dying in a wet barrel.”

(From ‘The Rat-poison Man’s Lunch Hour’, Kala Ghoda Poems)

In these lines, two diverse figures are brought together on the city streets—Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the revolutionary anti-caste theorist and social reformer, and B.S. Mardhekar, the popular Marathi modernist poet—a writer whose style was characterised as durbodh (obscure). Kolatkar chooses to tie together these diverse figures through the everyday activity of writing at a cafe. This gesture is metonymic in its suggestion of literary and political activity, convened by the material architecture of the city—a poster for rat-poison that leans on a cafe wall. Two distinct poetic styles emerge from this articulation: the poetry of sensitive witness—of observation and attention—and the poetry of experience, where the body itself becomes the locus of witnessing.

Aniket Jaaware speaks of Baburao Bagul’s writings as “destitute” literature, rather than Dalit literature, while writing into the second category. While Ambedkar is not known as a poet, he used metaphor to deepen his arguments for social justice. His own experiences became the basis for an anger that drew on, and amplified, public emotions. Whether it was his description of Hinduism as a “chamber of horrors”, or his urgency in asking the sensitive reader to join him in the “trenches” while speaking of the historic battle for dignity, his “audacious pencil” brought home the experience of caste in a vivid, corporeal idiom. Dalit poets wrote in this idiom in Marathi, perhaps channelling Phule’s compelling style of polemic, more than Ambedkar. Anger became the whetstone to Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry. This is how he opens a poem on Kamatipura, for instance:

The nocturnal porcupine reclines here

Like an alluring grey bouquet

Wearing the syphilitic sores of centuries

Pushing the calendar away

Forever lost in its own dreams

(Translated by Dilip Chitre)

In Prakash Jadhav’s ‘Dadar Pulakhali’ (immortalised as ‘Under Dadar Bridge’ in Night of Prophecy, Amar Kanwar’s documentary on poetry and songs of resistance), a micro-history of the city is written on the body of the persona, and his mother—a sex worker: “take my clothes off/strip me/have a good look/at the tomb that/was broken open/ to pull you out.” (Translated from the film’s subtitles). The imagery of death and humiliation ruptures the poet’s experience of life in Mumbai Shehar.

Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda Poems is, however, written in the first, not the second, poetic voice. In these poems, he allows the city to become a character through sensory vignettes, using metaphor and dialogue to balance the inevitable voyeuristic gaze. B.S. Mardhekar’s poem ‘Pipaat Mele Olya Undeer’, which he casually refers to here, is arguably the first real ‘decadent’, ‘urban’ poem in Modern Marathi Poetry.

In Barrels Wet Rats Died

Necks fell, without strangulation

On Lips, lips met

Necks fell, without desire

Poor, helpless, lived in ratholes

In barrels, died, hiccupping

Day spilled, in ash-grey eyes

Limbs and private parts washed clean

To live is a compulsion

To die is a compulsion

Sorrow has poisonous eyes,

but of glass

Honeyed honeycomb

set on lips

like Bakelite!

On lips, lips touch

In barrels, rats bathed.

(This translation is mine. Have attempted to preserve the cadences of the original Marathi)

The publication of this poem, in 1946, in the Marathi literary magazine, Abhiruchi, acquired the status of a “literary event”. It heralded a new kind of writing, perhaps unwittingly serving as a critique of the lofty imaginations of an independent India. It quickly entered schoolchildren’s Marathi textbooks. Most Marathi speakers belt out the title ‘Pipaat Mele Olya Undeer’ without batting an eyelid when they hear Mardhekar’s name. Why did this become the defining poem for an entire generation of people in Mumbai?

While Mardhekar’s first collection of writing, Shishiragam, aligned more with the Ravi Kiran Mandal poets and British Romanticism, ‘Pipaat...’ and other poems written in this somewhat Eliotesque aesthetics of urban sensation witnessed the city in its vivid, material reality. Even at its incomprehensible best, it reads like a series of broken images that lay bare the anxieties and struggles of a people who have been thrown into uneven urban development. The images are from a special issue on the poem by Abhiruchi after close to 50 years of its first publication. M.V. Dhond’s article from the same issue offers two readings of the poem: in the first reading, Dhond makes the connection between people who come to Mumbai in droves, with aspirations, every day. In the rat-like struggle (rat-race), they fight with each other and drop dead (metaphorically and literally). In the second reading, Dhond suggests that the barrels are the thekas where labourers go to drink. In both readings, Dhond reads the poem as a metaphor for alienation, exploitation of labour, urban despair, dreams and aspiration, and migration patterns.

I am reminded of Shahryar’s sher sung soulfully by Suresh Wadkar in the film Gaman (1978):

“???? ??? ??? ????? ??? ?????? ?? ????? ?? ?? ??? ??? ?? ????? ?????? ?? ????? ???”

Is Pipaat… not an answer to these apocryphal questions?

Perhaps one of the reasons that this poem became a popular symbol for the urban condition in Mumbai Shehar is the spectacular use of metaphor. The entire poem is a metaphor for ‘‘living’’ and ‘‘dying’’, and Mardhekar’s pen doesn’t provide any explanation even until the end, essentially opening it up to a plethora of interpretations. Who are the rats? What is the barrel? Why is it wet? Why “Bakelite”? Without using any “emotion words”, completely relying on material details, Mardhekar managed to put his finger on the pulse of a people disillusioned by the promises of modern urban life. In his “city poems”, there are moments of wonder at technological advancement and the “factory”, but they are quickly muffled by the sounds of the siren that calls factory workers (including mill karamcharis) to work.

In an interview with the Bombay poet Eunice De Souza, Kolatkar refers to an essay by Durga Bhagwat called ‘Absence of Butterflies’ where she speaks about the dearth of “physical observation and detail”—“There are a lot of mythical birds and beasts in Indian poetry but not ordinary things…Sparrows and crows have rarely appeared in Marathi poetry but it is full of mythical Sanskrit birds, the chatak and the chator, for instance.” He speaks about how English Romanticism allowed the poets to write about “butterflies” and “waterfalls”. It must be acknowledged, however, that it is the urban poetry of Mardhekar, and others, that opened the door to “rats” and “garbage”, “railway platforms”, “calendar gods”, “bus tickets” and even “rat-poison posters”.

The Bombay Poets embraced this politics of the everyday, embodied even in the paintings of Bhupen Khakhar and Sudhir Patwardhan. Mundane objects moved the vocabularies of the many different Bombays that the poets mapped—corrupting and re-creating the “English”, Marathi, Gujarati and Urdu into “Bambaiyya” like some effervescent contagion. In his essay, ‘Death of a Poet’, A.K. Mehrotra, Kolatkar’s contemporary, observes how he “enchanted” the “ordinary” through this “art by invoice”. The poetry became familiar, intimate and relatable, employing imagery and metaphors that flapped a lazy allegorical eye towards the Sant Kavi, Bhakti poets, and even other Modernist American or European contemporaries. The narratives fold ‘‘extraordinary’’ events into ‘‘ordinary’’ tableaus, blurring the lines between mythic, magic, and social realism.

Young poets writing of the city today draw upon the writings of Adil Jussawala, A.K. Mehrotra, Melanie Silgardo, Eunice De Souza, and others, including Kolatkar, as if they are flipping through the pages of a “Bombay catalogue” from yesteryear. As we search for new idioms to define our fragmented experiences, perhaps we can learn to express our realities by paying attention to our material surroundings that are often caught in different stages of decay. Perhaps this humbling gaze that departs from the chaotic certainties of our own human selves to channel objects that move in transformative ways, holds the secret to a different politics of freedom.

(Views expressed are personal)

Aranya is a poet, currently based in Delhi, a place to which he doesn’t belong. He is pursuing a PhD in Social Anthropology

(This appeared in the print as 'Verses of Witnessing')