Arun Kolatkar
Quick answer: Arun Kolatkar craft guide: deadpan observation, sequence poems and bilingual mastery in Jejuri and Kala Ghoda Poems. Learn his methods, start reading.
Arun Kolatkar spent his mornings for years at the same table of a Bombay cafe, watching one traffic island, and turned what he saw into Kala Ghoda Poems, one of the great books of urban poetry in English. Before that, a short visit to a temple town produced Jejuri, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977 and remains a cult classic. He wrote with equal command in Marathi and English, worked as an award-winning graphic designer, and avoided publicity so thoroughly that he barely gave interviews and for a long time had no telephone.
Kolatkar teaches the poetics of attention: what happens when a writer trusts pure observation, deadpan tone and sequence structure to do the work that other poets ask of rhetoric.
The watcher of Kala Ghoda
Born in Kolhapur in 1932 and trained as a painter at the J.J. School of Art, Kolatkar earned his living in advertising as an art director, and a designer's exactness governs his pages: short lines, clean stanzas, images cropped like photographs. He was bilingual to an unusual depth, producing landmark Marathi collections, with Bhijki Vahi winning the Sahitya Akademi Award, alongside his English books.
Jejuri, published in 1976, follows a sceptical visitor through a pilgrimage town sacred to the god Khandoba, finding holiness, or at least wonder, in dilapidation, stray dogs and butterflies rather than official shrines. Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra both appeared in 2004, the year he died; the first watches Bombay's pavement life, the second retells a vengeful sacrifice from the Mahabharata as a modern moral fable.
The signature moves
Kolatkar's style is instantly recognisable and built from disciplined refusals.
What you can learn
Adopt a station. Choose one spot you can return to, a bus stand, a tea stall, a window, and write one short poem from it daily for two weeks, forbidding yourself opinions. Kolatkar's power comes from duration of attention; the fifteenth viewing sees what the first cannot. The resulting sequence will be more than the sum of its poems, which is the form's secret.
Practise his tonal restraint on charged material. Describe something you find either holy or outrageous using only what a camera would record, and let placement, what you put next to what, carry the argument. And learn from his lineation: cut your average line length in half for one draft and watch how weight redistributes. Short lines make small things monumental, which is precisely his effect.
Where to start reading
Jejuri first; it is short, funny and complete in an afternoon, though it unpacks for years. Kala Ghoda Poems shows the mature street method, and Sarpa Satra proves the deadpan voice can carry mythic outrage. For his Marathi side, Bhijki Vahi, poems voiced through weeping women of history and myth, is the landmark; translations of selections exist. The Boatride and Other Poems collects English work and translations, including his early long poem of a Bombay ferry crossing.
What poets can take from this
- Choose one physical spot and write a short observational poem from it daily for two weeks.
- Describe something you consider sacred using only camera-visible detail.
- Halve your average line length in one draft and study how emphasis moves.
- Let juxtaposition argue: place two images side by side and delete the sentence connecting them.
- Build a sequence around a place, not a theme; let the theme emerge from repeated looking.
Try it yourself
Spend thirty minutes at one ordinary public spot. Write a sequence of five poems of under ten short lines each, one per thing observed, with no adjectives of value and no stated feelings. Order them so the last recontextualises the first.
Questions
What is Jejuri about?
It is a sequence following a sceptical visitor around the Maharashtrian pilgrimage town of Jejuri, sacred to Khandoba. The poems find vitality in dogs, butterflies and ruins as much as in shrines, holding faith and doubt in balance. It won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977.
Did Arun Kolatkar write in Marathi or English?
Both, at the highest level. His Marathi collection Bhijki Vahi won the Sahitya Akademi Award, while Jejuri and Kala Ghoda Poems are classics of Indian poetry in English.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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