ABSTRACT
Arun Kolatkar’s first book publication was Jejuri,1 a volume in English that won the Commonwealth Poetry Award in 1977. This book charted the location of the various temples in this town of pilgrimage through the perambulations of the alienated poetic voice; it was a walking tour of this temple town. His next major book of poems in English, Kala Ghoda Poems, demarcates another spatial location in the city of Bombay, Kala Ghoda, and takes that as a starting point to explore the power differentials in the life of this metropolis. And, in between, he has many poems (in Marathi and in English) that name, locate and recreate travel routes, cities, towns, villages and monuments. This is a poet who is not just aware of, but obsessed with, the understanding of space; the process of mapping (in the literal and extended meaning of the word) provides the theme of the poems and also informs the structure of his books. The epistemology of cartography becomes the tool with which Kolatkar explores the modern post-independence Indian landscape in Bombay and its environs.
