Re-reading postcolonial poetry: Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri

Abstract

This paper considers how Arun Kolatkar’s 1976 Commonwealth Prize winning sequence Jejuri constitutes a challenge to the interpretation of postcolonial poetry. In particular, it is concerned with examining the interpretive demands Jejuri makes of its readers, arguing that its microcosmic spatial and temporal composition requires the reader to dispense with his or her own sense of exteriority to, or distance from, the text. At the same time, Kolatkar’s use of cross-cultural and trans-historical imagery situates Jejuri within a macrocosmic, global network that implicitly compels the reader to adopt an interpretive position undetermined by national or cultural preconceptions. Jejuri is thus a sequence that prompts specialist postcolonial readers to question the set of methodological practices they work within. Moreover, the interpretive demands made of the reader confirm the ethical imperative of the act of reading more generally, requiring the non-specialist audience to also abandon preconceptions about the meaning of the sequence. This paper draws on Edward Said’s notion of worldliness in order to suggest that Kolatkar’s sequence requires a particular kind of critical response: one that is attentive to the historical and cultural specificities of the text, and yet one that is able to acknowledge the wider political implications of reading the poems.