Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) was one of the most exciting and distinguished Indian poets of the post-Independence era. After the widely acclaimed Jejuri (1977), which won him the Commonwealth Prize, Kolatkar, published two collections of English poetry: Kala Ghoda Poems and Sarpa Satra (2003), a year before his unfortunate demise.
Sarpa Satra, which has a parallel Marathi version in his Marathi collection, Bhijki Vahi 2003, sprucely reworks the Snake Sacrifice and Khandava Forest myth from The Mahabharata in a very ultramodern idiom to subvert the traditional master narrative, which usually exalts powerful people and their irrational actions, however inhuman they may be.
The poet cleverly deploys the myth of the Snake Sacrifice in The Mahabharata, where king Janmejaya decides to avenge the assassination of his father Parikshit by the snake Takshaka by performing the Snake Sacrifice, which would drive all the snakes in the world to immolate themselves in the sacrificial fire.
Along with this myth, Kolatkar has also exploited the myth of the incineration of Khandava Forest by Krishna and Arjuna. The myth that becomes an allegory of mass violence and genocide, apart from many other things, becomes the history of the 20th century. This essay briefly analyzes this narrative poem as a sardonic subversion of the traditional epic master narrative and as an allegory of fanaticism in all its relevance to today’s age of globalization and violent resurgence of religious radicalism.
Kolatkar’s multivocal narrative revolves around mainly three characters, i.e. Janmejaya, Jaratkaru and her son Astika. The first section of the poem, titled `Janmejaya’, opens with Janmejaya’s decision to perform the Snake Sacrifice on learning about his father Parikshita’s death by Takshaka. The speaker in this poem is King Janmejaya himself. While in the second section, titled `Jaratkaru’, Jaratkaru narrates Janmejaya’s decision to perform the Snake Sacrifice burning Khandava Forest and finally pleads with Astika to stop the Snake Sacrifice. Jaratkaru, who almost becomes the mouthpiece of Kolatkar, adopts a tone of surprise, disbelief and mockery to satirize not only crazy kings but also his yes men and so-called intellectuals, who have subscribed and pandered to the fanatic and homicidal ideas of powerful people at all times in history:
All the great rishis and maharishis,
So-called
Great thinkers, all
The finest minds of our age,
Even people like
Atreya, Uddalaka, Shvetaketu
-People we thought of
Until, oh, the day before yesterday
As living volcanoes of conscience
Ready to blow their tops
At the first sign
Of any wrongdoing in the land
Or whenever the mighty strayed
From the path of justice –
Seem strangely silent
And worried about just one thing:
How to wangle a job for themselves
As officiating priests.
(Sarpa Satra: 33)
And yet again:
When these sacrificial jamborees
come to an end,
the officiating priest,
honoured guests, Vedic wizards
and other
intellectual superstars of the show
go back to their respective homes,
ashramas or whatever,
bearing wealth beyond measure –
cartloads of gold,
herds of cattle with golden horns,
slavegirls dripping pearls.
(Sarpa Satra: 79)
The language of the poem is very lucid and extremely fluent. The phrases used here like ‘intellectual superstars of the show’, ‘Vedic wizards’, ‘ready to blow their tops’ are good examples of the colloquial and contemporary expression of the poet. The use of hyperboles like ` living volcanoes of conscience’ for the great rishis and maharishis, who are actually willing to sell their spiritual souls for material gains, is clearly ironical and satirical.
We can detect the same sardonic tone in the Jaratkaru’s depiction of devastation of Khandava Forest by Krishna and Arjuna. Instead of glorifying the great epic heroes, the mindless destruction of environment, flora and fauna and tribal population of the forest outrages the narrator. Describing Arjuna and Krishna, Jaratkaru, Astika’s mother and Kolatkar’s mouthpiece says:
You must have heard
of Janmejaya’s great-grandfather –
Arjuna, the great superhero.
But he received divine weapons
- a divine bow
two inexhaustible quivers –
and god knows what happened to him,
what came over him!
Just went berserk, I guess.
For the very first act of heroism
he performed
as soon as he got the new toys in his hands
was, well, this:
he burnt down one of the largest
rainforests in the land,
and what a thorough job he made of it.
Reduced it completely
to ash.
The irony of the “very first act of heroism” as soon as Arjuna lays his hands on his new weapons, the “new toys” and the “thorough job he made of it” is biting and exact. However, it was not Arjuna alone, Krishna too is his accomplice in this crime:
It wasn’t just him,
no.
He was aided in this crime
by another.
A cross-cousin of his,
a crony since childhood.
(Sarpa Satra: 41-42)
In Vyasa’s epic narrative, Krishna and Arjuna are, of course, glorified heroes. Kolatkar’s poem becomes subversive because the poet explicitly and deliberately deviates from Vyasa’s master narrative and holds up the heroes as criminals. For instance, Jaratkaru urges Astika to learn the truth about the Khandava Forest,
before venerable Vyasa gives
his own spin
to the whole of human history
(Sarpa Satra : 40)
As if implying that the master narrative of Vyasa will invariably be distorted in favour of powerful people and the winners.
Jaratkaru’s counter narrative refuses to glorify the heroes of Vyasa’s master narrative and being completely sympathetic to the victims of this mindless massacre. The victims are:
Not just the trees, birds, insects and animals
(herds upon herds
of elephants, gazelles, antelopes),
but people, Astika,
people as well
Simple folk,
children of the forest
who had lived there happily for generations,
since time began…..
The narrator, like the poet and the reader of the poem fails to understand the true motives behind this mindless massacre. Why did they do it? The narrator asks:
Who knows!
just for kicks, maybe.
Maybe just the fact
that now they had all these fantastic weapons
went to their heads
and they just couldn’t wait
to test their awesome powers.
May be they just wanted
a clear title to the land,
unchallenged
by so much as a tigermoth.
(Sarpa Satra: 44,45)
Senseless massacres of the environment and human life from human greed very obliquely evoke images of contemporary history, like the American presence in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. This subversive counter narrative of Jaratkaru becomes more radical when we see that the main voice in the poem is of Jaratkaru - a snake woman and mother of Astika, a marginal character in Vyasa’s master narrative. Making use of a marginal character and giving voice to people who live on the fringes is a common Kolatkar-device and it can even be seen in his polyphonic Kala Ghoda poems. The use of contemporary slangy language in rewritings of mythological or legendary narratives is the device that is often found in his Marathi poetry, too (Ketkar, 2005).
While the master narrative, The Mahabharata of Vyasa ends with Janmejaya granting boon to Astika and thus stopping the Snake Sacrifice, the last section of the Sarpa Satra, “Ritual Bath”, which is spoken by an unidentified narrator, gives faint indication about the end of the Snake Sacrifice. It bespeaks of another war:
When these things come to an end,
people find
other subjects to talk about
than just
the latest episode of Mahabharata
and the daily statistics of death ;
……………………………….
Life seems to return to normal.
While anachronistic mention of the “latest episode of Mahabharata” is characteristically `Kolatkaresque’, the narrator seems to point out that the fire of mindless cycles of hatred will not be put out so easily. “ But do not be deceived”, the speaker warns us because
like everything else,
the fire_ the fire lit for purpose-
can never be put out.
………………………………………
it continues to consume
rakshasas
rocks
trees
(Sarpa Satra 82, 83, 84)
Arun Kolatkar’s style of narration is a contemporary version of oral narration, as he uses the story-within-a-story device of narration and also employs very conversational and dialogic style. It seems as if he is within the same tradition of oral narrative of Vyasa’s master narrative and at the same time, he is subverting this master narrative. In short, Kolatkar’s poem can be read as a deconstruction of Vyasa’s Mahabharata.
Nevertheless, Kolatkar’s poem is also an allegory of extremism and the recurrent theme of seemingly perpetual cycle of violence and counter violence. Takshaka’s revenge of destruction of Khandava Forest by assassinating Arjuna’s grandson Parikshit is in Jaratkaru’s view a terrorist act. She says:
To say that he was always an extremist
is not to make excuse for him.
He deserves the harshest punishment in the book.
And I certainly do not approve
of the way he’s hiding now
behind Indra’s throne to save his skin,
hoping his powerful friend
will help him escape the consequences
of an act we’re now paying for.
it only shows what cowards
all terrorists are
behind their snarling ferocious masks
(Sarpa Satra: 39)
Takshaka’s act, which resembles a powerful terrorist attack like the one on the World Trade Center, is followed by Janmejaya’s Snake sacrifice, resembling the US war on terror. However, Jaratkaru is not in favour of either of them. She sympathizes neither with Takshaka nor with Janmejaya. This cycle of revenge also reminds us of Godhra massacre and the following cycle of vengeance like the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat and the Mumbai train blast. Kolatkar’s fluent and smart narration is thus replete with many allusions to contemporary fabricated disasters and unceasing cycles of fanaticism, murder and revenge like the holocaust of the Second World War and the `ethnic cleansing’ promoted by Slobodan Milosevic. In many ways, the contemporary rewriting of this narrative a kind of history of the twentieth century in a nutshell or even that of history as a whole . The use of contemporary language offers a twenty-first century perspective to the reading of the myth.
Instead of offering a satisfactory conclusion, the end of the poem evokes very unsettling questions. After the `Ritual Bath’, the `sanctified’ kings go back to their kingdoms
Wondering
which neighboring kingdom to attack next,
or what new taxes to levy
To refill the coffers,
And ask their ministers to come up
With recommendation (Sarpa Satra: 81)
The ritual bath is precisely what it is - a mere ritual. It only symbolically rids oneself of the sin of genocide. Kolatkar’s almost Shakespearean moral is that the evils that men do persists long time after their death. Human greed for wealth and power is virtually limitless. So is the human drive for aggression and revenge. Though these things have resulted in a bloodbath innumerable times in human history, people have not renounced them. Insatiable human greed and the senseless instinct for violence are historical, and still, there is something trans-historical about them. By rewriting the mythological narrative in a contemporary idiom, the poet makes it possible to perceive the antiquated human myth in present-day terms and thus succeeds in making the antiquated narrative extremely relevant to today’s times. Even though the language of the poem is extremely up-to-date and bitingly exact in its irony and satire, the theme of the poem is timeless and yet pertinently relevant to our period. The antiquated myth becomes an allegory of human history, which has always been a history of terrorism.
In this very short and stylized poem, Kolatkar has succeeded in a subversive rewriting of the entire history of human beings in the form of myth and indeed, it does not make very comforting or optimistic reading. Neither the fire in Khandava Forest, nor the sacrificial fire of the snake sacrifice can be put out so easily and the little water of the ritual baths cannot really cleanse us of these deeds.
References
Arun Kolatkar, Sarpa Satra, Clearing House Publication, Mumbai, 2003.
Kala Ghoda Poems, Clearing House Publication, Mumbai, 2003.
E.V. Ramakrishnan, Takshaka Imagery in Modern Poetry, A Journal of Creative Writing, Vadodara.
Sachin Ketkar, A Third Way of Reading Kolatkar, New Quest 162 (Oct-Dec 2005).
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