''Jejuri'' is a series of poems written by Indian poet
Arun Kolatkar
Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar ( Marathi: अरुण बालकृष्ण कोलटकर) (1 November 1932 – 25 September 2004) was an Indian poet who wrote in both Marathi and English. His poems found humour in everyday matters. Kolatkar ...
. Consist of 31 poetic sequence, ''Jejuri'' depicts Kolatkar's visit to
Jejuri
Jejuri (Marathi pronunciation: ͡ʒed͡zuɾiː is a city and a municipal council in the Pune district of Maharashtra, India. The town has an important mandir to the Hindu Lord Khandoba, the Khandoba Mandir, which is one of the most visited ...
, a city in
Pune
Pune (; ; also known as Poona, (List of renamed Indian cities and states#Maharashtra, the official name from 1818 until 1978) is one of the most important industrial and educational hubs of India, with an estimated population of 7.4 million ...
, which the poet visited in 1964. It was first published in ''Opinion Literary Quarterly'' in 1974, and issued in book-form in 1976. ''Jejuri'' won the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize The Commonwealth Poetry Prize was an annual poetry prize established in 1972, for a first published book of English poetry from a country other than the United Kingdom. It was initially administered jointly by the Commonwealth Institute and the Nat ...
in 1977.
The poem is made up of a series of often short fragments which describe the experiences of a secular visitor to the ruins of Jejuri. It is one of the better known poems in modern Indian literature.
Comments and criticism
''Jejury'' is a sequence of simple but stunningly beautiful poems and is one of the major work in modern Indian literature. The poems are remarkable for their haunting quality. However, modern critics have analysed the difficulty of readers in interpreting the Jejury poems in their proper context.
Kolatkar's use of cross-cultural and trans-historical imagery posits ''Jejuri'' within a macrocosmic, global framework which forces the reader to adopt an interpretive position not determined by national or cultural preconceptions.
Bibliography
*
Chaudhuri, Amit. On Strangeness in Indian Writing. ''The Hindu'', 2005
* Kolatkar, Arun. ''Jejuri''. Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. New York Review Books Classics, 2005.
See also
*
Indian poetry
Indian poetry and Indian literature in general, has a long history dating back to Vedic times. They were written in various Indian languages such as Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Sanskrit, Tamil, Odia, Maithili, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese, ...
"Journal of Commonwealth Literature - Review of Jejury"
References
{{reflist
1976 poems
Indian poems