Jejuri and the Poetics of Subcultural Resistance

Abstract

Jejuri is the name of a series of poems written in 1976 by Arun Kolatkar. Jejuri is made up of a series of short fragments which provides the experiences of a secular visitor to the ruins of Jejuri. Jejuri is a religious place in Pune district in Maharashtra. The poem is one of the better known poems in modern Indian literature. The paper argues that the critical reception to Jejuri from a nativist viewpoint does not do justice to its complexity. Rather than reading Jejuri as a Bombay bred elitist’s denouncement of the subaltern, the paper argues that Kolatkar creates a fascinating and accurate picture of the power matrix that corroborates to create the shrine Jejuri. The paper draws from the notion of subculture propounded by Dick Hebidge who points out that subcultures rely on a replacement of normative world like sobriety, ambition and conformity with their opposites: hedonism and defiance of authority in an attempt to “express and resolve albeit magically the contradictions hidden or unresolved in parent culture. Jejuri constitutes an example of a subculture where the parent Brahminical culture is replicated through deification and legend creation, yet also contradicts the parent culture by rupturing hierarchal structures that are quite antithetical to the Brahminical discourse. The normative need for regularity, rationality and preservation for example are replaced by irregular shapes (of Gods and Mountains), irrational belief and decay. The poems testify to this interesting interplay by providing an accurate depiction of the place, as well as the various practices that create it. A closer reading of the poems reveals that by the end Kolatkar is able to juxtapose colonial modernity with the spiritual antiquity. The impression received is that Kolatkar becomes partially forgiving of the absurdity of the ritualistic day since he becomes aware of how the ritualistic subculture is not very different from modern culture.