Паломництво до поезії: читання “Джедзурі” як міжсистемна літературна рецепція

Abstract

Bhakti poets across medieval India tried to repair the fault lines created by institutionalized religion through interrogation and a re-imagination of the relationship with the divine. Arun Kolatkar, a bilingual postcolonial Indian poet and translator of medieval Marathi bhakti poetry, draws from that repertoire of signification for his poem sequence, Jejuri, written in English to respond to his time. He is the bridge between these two worlds, and periods in literary history, helping us reassess the paradigm from within which we can have a deeper understanding of diverse ways of engaging with the divine. As a poet, he consumes the animate and inanimate inhabitants of Jejuri, a pilgrimage temple town in Maharashtra, India, and in the lineage of his literary ancestors, through his poetry questions, rebukes, and re-imagines institutionalized religion and hierarchies. His deceptively simple poems as concise, carefully crafted, evocative images are the bricks that build the outer world of Jejuri, and in reading them the reader’s imaginative inner world is challenged. Time is cyclical and fluid, in Jejuri, and yet in an encounter with truth time is suspended and the world of Jejuri cracks open. In possessing the eye of both sceptic and mystic, he calls the reader to think for them and engage with the shifting meanings of cultural instruments. Thus, his poetry invites the reader to confront binary oppositions and contradictory perspectives, and while inhabiting the philosophy achintya-bheda-abheda representative of one-ness and difference. Through a close reading of Jejuri in general and of the three “Chaitanya” poems, in particular, this paper offers an analysis of the poem sequence through a polysystem theory as a response to the fault lines created by institutionalized religion.