Jejuri (poem)

Jejuri is the name of a series of poems by Arun Kolatkar in 1976, an Indian poet who wrote in Marathi and English. Jejuri won the Commonwealth Prize 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, a pilgrimage site in Maharashtra. 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.

See also

• Arun Kolatkar
• Kolatkar's Poems
• "Popular Indian Poems"
• Indian Poetry
• Famous Poets of India
• "Journal of Commonwealth Literature - Review of Jejury"

Bibliography

• Chaudhuri, Amit. On Strangeness in Indian Writing. The Hindu, 2005. [1]
• Kolatkar, Arun. Jejuri. Introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. New York Review Books Classics, 2005. ISBN 1-59017-163-2