Jejuri

A sequence of stunningly simple but haunting poems, Jejuri is one of the great books of modern India. Jejuri is a site of pilgramage in author Arun Kolatkar's native state of Maharashtra, and Jejuri the poem is the record of a visit to the town -- a place that is as crassly commercial as it is holy, as modern and ruinous as it is ancient and enduring. Evoking the town's crowded streets, many shrines, and mythic history of sages and gods, Kolatkar's poem offers a rich description of India while at the same time performing a complex act of devotion. For the essence of the poem is a spiritual quest, the effort to find the divine trace in a degenerate world. Spare, comic, sorrowful, singing, Jejuri is the work of a writer with a unique and visionary voice.

Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) was born in the town of Kolhapur in the western Indian state of Maharashtra and attended the JJ School of Art in Bombay, the city in which he was to pursue a long and successful career as an art director in advertising. Jejuri, published by a small press in 1976, received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Kolatkar was also the author of four volumes of poetry in Marathi. Two long-awaited further collections in English, Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra, appeared shortly before his death.

Amit Chaudhuri is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. He has written several works of fiction, a critical study of the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, and edited The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature. Among the many awards he has received are the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India’s Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is also a musician.