The Chronicler of “Ordinary Grief”: Arun Kolatkar and the Songs of Insignificance

Laetitia Zecchini’s Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India (2014) is a decisive work on the precepts of modernism in India as it panned out around the aesthetic praxis of Kolatkar and his contemporaries against the cosmopolitan cultural background of Bombay (the present day Mumbai) in the post-independence era. Primarily known as a poet in the pan-Indian literary scene, this book introduces Kolatkar as a man of many talents. Apart from his literary pursuits, he had an immensely successful career in advertisement and graphic designing. A trained artist from the acclaimed J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, one of the oldest art institutions in the country, Kolatkar also had a cultivated knowledge in music—all of which directly honed his literary craft whose multiple layers and textures are gradually unfurled through the course of the book. At the very outset, the author etches out Kolatkar’s reclusiveness and his propensity to dodge public appearances. This created an aura of enigma around him that becomes clear from the numerous sobriquets attributed to the man on the occasion of his death: “The unseen Genius”, “The Almost Invisible Man” and so on. His elusiveness also indicates a self-conscious cultivation of marginality which situates him in an ex-centric position in relation to the mainstream regional literature, simultaneously problematizing his place within the modernist and the postcolonial paradigms that he embraced and had put to task at the same time