SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Arun Kolatkar and modernism in India II: the ‘many cycles of give-and-take’ set in motion between languages

Made from the photocopy of a photo held by Darshan Chhabda

Abstract

The words included in the title of this presentation are those of A. K Ramanujan’s, discussing the way traditions interflow into each other, so much so that it becomes difficult to ‘isolate elements as belonging exclusively to the one or the other’. This comment could, at least to a certain extent, illustrate the constant transactions between Kolatkar’s two bodies of work in English and in Marathi. The poet wrote in both languages, often ‘translated’ himself – as I will argue, translation is not always an appropriate word - from one language to the other, and also translated bhakti poetry into English. I would like to outline the productive connections between practices of translation and creative writing which are at the heart of literary modernism in India, the conductibility, in Kolatkar’s work, between so-called ‘original’ texts and their subsequent variations, between the voice of the self and the voice of the ‘other’, between past and present. For modernism is also an oblique selection of the past. ‘Acts of fervent endorsements’ and affiliations, as essential to modernism as the ‘acts of demolition’ Mehrotra also advocates, are made both ‘overseas’ and ‘in their own backyard’ (Mehrotra again), often through translations. But in the process, through these translations/reinventions, provenance labels are torn off. The boundaries are blurred between ‘overseas’ and ‘backyard’, ‘native’ and ‘alien’, but also between what comes ‘first’ or second and in some cases for Kolatkar, between Marathi and English. In this talk, I will also discuss the extraordinary relevance and modernity of bhakti for Kolatkar and others of his generation, the way this tradition is remade through the blues, through Kolatkar's passionate interest in songs, rock and roll and folk music.

Speaker Biography

Laetitia Zecchini is a Research Fellow at the CNRS in Paris. Her research interests and publications focus on contemporary Indian poetry, on postcolonial theory and on the politics of poetics. She recently co-edited La modernité littéraire indienne: Perspectives postcoloniales (2009) and co-translated the Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh into French (Dans un pays tout plein d'histoires, 2007). She co-organizes the 'Postcolonial literatures and theories' research seminar at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS Ulm) in Paris and is currently finishing a book provisionally entitled Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (accepted by Continuum). Her translation of Kala Ghoda Poems (Arun Kolatkar) into French is forthcoming by Gallimard (bilingual edition, May 2013).