'Sensitive Witnessing'

This paper studies the poetry, and persona, of the ‘Bombay Poet’ Arun Kolatkar. Though Kolatkar was bilingual and wrote both in Marathi and English, my paper specifically explores his English poetry cycle, Kala Ghoda Poems. Studying how the ‘social’ unravels through an interplay of urban associations and materialities, my first section locates the city in ‘Bombay Poetry’, illustrating specific modes through which Kolatkar’s poetry cycle embodies a poetics of placemaking. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘complete artist’, the poet’s gaze is reframed through an analytic of ‘sensitive witnessing’, thus moving beyond the focus on ‘the ordinary’ and the ‘visual’ that prior interpreters’ of Kolatkar’s work have maintained. Drawing from the poet’s ‘ethnographic’ style, this analysis emplaces Kolatkar within a post-humanist framework, rather than as a ‘modernist’ poet. Bennett’s (2010) conceptualisation of ‘thing-power’, ‘vital materiality’, and ‘distributive agency’ is instrumental in reading the evolving, and continuously changing urban landscape of ‘Bombay’ in the collection, described within a complex of ‘more-than-human’ vitality. This liberates Kolatkar’s text from a binary discursive relationship between ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ beings. In terms of an anthropological intervention, my analysis deepens extant ‘literary’ readings to suggest a ‘political ecology’ of human and more-than-human vitalities. In the last analysis, the paper raises the question of what it means for an artist—a poet—to witness an ‘urban assemblage’ with sensitivity, and how the space of the text, and the city, is transformed through this witnessing.