Jejuri

Jejuri is one of the great books of modern India, a sequence of stunningly simple but haunting poems that has established itself deep in the hearts of Indian readers, including Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Jejuri is a site of pilgrimage in author Arun Kolatkar's native state of Maharashtra, and Jejuri the poem is the record of a visit to the town that is as crassly commercial as it is holy, as ruinous and rapacious as it is ancient and enduring. Evoking the town's streets, crowded with beggars, cripples, street vendors, children at play, predatory priests, and pompous officials, and the barren stony landscape that surrounds it, but also its mysterious shrines, mythic history, and associated tales of sages and gods, Kolatkar's poem offers a rich description of modern India that is at the same time a complex act of devotion.