The Full Text of “The Bus”
The Full Text of “The Bus”
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“The Bus” Introduction
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"The Bus" is the enigmatic opening poem of Indian poet Arun Kolatkar's book Jejuri (1976). Jejuri tells the story of the author's 1963 journey to a famous Hindu temple in that titular city, an experience that led him to reflect on the withering away of old traditions and made him long for new sources of meaning. In "The Bus," the speaker describes the uncomfortable beginning of this pilgrimage. The ride to Jejuri is "bumpy," literally and figuratively, as the speaker is shut in a bus with covered windows and no view but his own "divided face" mirrored in an old man's glasses. This old man bears the mark of a religious devotee and creates a contrast with the skeptical speaker, who seems conflicted about this journey and unable to step beyond his own thoughts even as he longs for a wider perspective and understanding. "The Bus" is a richly symbolic meditation on faith, doubt, isolation, and the desire for meaning in a changing world.
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“The Bus” Summary
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The speaker (referring to himself in the second person as "you") describes riding in a bus whose canvas window flaps are kept buttoned closed all the way to Jejuri (a city in India).
The wind makes the window flaps whip around at the speaker's side.
The speaker looks down the road as it roars past and looks for a hint of dawn in the little bit of light that falls out of the bus's closed windows.
But the only view the speaker gets is of his own face, doubly reflected in the lenses of an old man's glasses.
The speaker feels as if he's moving endlessly forward toward some point just beyond the mark the old man wears on his forehead to show his social class.
Outside the bus, the speaker notices, the sun has risen. A beam shoots in through a lace hole in the window coverings and hits the old man's glasses.
Another sunbeam hits the driver softly in the side of the head, resting there like a shotgun. The speaker can feel the bus changing direction.
When the speaker gets off the bus at the end of the long, rough journey (during which he has felt his own face reflecting in the old man's glasses) he doesn't imagine what it's like to be the old man.
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“The Bus” Themes
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Faith, Doubt, and Uncertainty
“The Bus” is the first poem in Arun Kolatkar’s 1976 book Jejuri, a sequence that describes the poet's frustrating, fascinating visit to an ancient Hindu shrine in the Indian city of Jejuri. This poem focuses on the speaker's inner struggles with faith, doubt, and uncertainty as this journey begins.
The speaker (who presents himself in the second person as a “you” rather than an “I”) is on a crowded bus whose windows are blocked by “tarpaulin flaps" that block any view of the countryside. Symbolically speaking, the speaker’s physical predicament—shut in, aware there’s something else going on beyond but not able to see it—reveals his spiritual situation: he’s similarly shut into his own skeptical mind. An unlikely pilgrim, he’s perhaps hoping that he might get some wider perspective out of his visit to Jejuri, some glimpse of a greater world. But as the rest of this poem will reveal, that’s not too easy.
Stuck on this claustrophobic bus, the speaker doesn’t have much to look at but his “own divided face” mirrored in an old man’s glasses: another symbolic that evokes the speaker's inner conflict over this pilgrimage. On the one hand, the speaker has chosen to make this uncomfortable journey to a notable Hindu religious site, and he seems interested in broadening and deepening his understanding of life, spirituality, and so on. Indeed, when he notices that the old man in whose glasses he’s reflected wears a “caste mark” (a forehead marking that shows the man’s particular religious affiliations), he imagines moving “beyond” that mark and into the man’s head. This metaphor might suggest that the speaker is curious to see the world as this apparently devout pilgrim does (though it might also suggest that he feels more inclined to go "beyond" religious devotion to seek other sources of spiritual meaning).
Curious though he might be, however, the speaker can’t quite put himself in the shoes of a believer. By the end of the ride, he still can't bring himself to "step inside the old man's head." And his discomfort with the bus's blocked-off windows (which limit his ability to see where he's going) might also suggest that he's deeply uneasy with the very idea of faith: he's not comfortable sitting back and trusting that the bus is taking him somewhere he wants to go, literally or figuratively. Though occasional sunbeams make their way through the blocked windows—sunbeams that, in another context, might symbolize enlightenment—the speaker merely finds them menacing, seeing them as the "sawed off" barrels of shotguns rather than rays of illumination. And he never gets his wider symbolic glimpse of the "countryside" around him.
Though the speaker seems intrigued by the idea of faith and a world beyond himself, then, something also holds him back. His “divided” face introduces an unresolved conflict between his doubts and his curiosity about religious faith, a conflict Jejuri will go on to explore at length.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-25
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Time, Aging, Mortality
On a pilgrimage to Jejuri (a city in India where an important Hindu shrine is located), this poem’s speaker finds himself uneasily confronted with reminders of age and death. One reason to seek some kind of spiritual meaning, the poem hints, might be to find ways of living with these uncomfortable and inevitable realities.
Unable to look past the “tarpaulin flaps” that cover the bus’s windows, the poem’s speaker instead finds himself staring at his own reflection in “a pair of glasses / on an old man’s nose.” That reflection might symbolically suggest that the speaker is seeing himself in this old man—and remind readers that every moment he spends on that bus is carrying him closer to being an old man himself. As he puts it, he feels as if he's moving “continually forward / towards a destination / just beyond the caste mark between [the old man’s] eyebrows”: he’s on his way to being inside an elderly body, to being old himself.
When thin beams of sunlight shoot through gaps in the window coverings, the speaker’s thoughts turn to what comes after old age. Ominously, the speaker describes the sunlight as if it were a gun: it “shoots at the old man’s glasses” and rests like a “sawed off” shotgun against the driver’s head. The light of the sun becomes a murder weapon: every new dawn marks every living person’s next step toward the grave.
Perhaps these thoughts of age and death are part of what drives this speaker to make a pilgrimage. In the rest of Jejuri (the long poem sequence that begins with “The Bus”), the poem’s speaker will make a longing-but-skeptical visit to a Hindu temple, simultaneously hoping and doubting that spirituality might give him some sense of deeper meaning in the face of inevitable death.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 10-11
- Lines 13-15
- Lines 16-20
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Isolation, Division, and Perspective
The speaker of "The Bus" is just one of many passengers on a dark, uncomfortable journey to the holy city of Jejuri. Yet while these people might all be traveling together (symbolically, one might say they're all on the same bumpy, surprising journey of life), the poem highlights the divisions—generational, social, and religious—that keep the speaker isolated and reveal the difficulty of moving beyond one's own limited perspective.
The only thing the speaker can see on this dark bus is his “own divided face” reflected in the glasses of an old man sitting near him. This image suggests he’s finding it hard to see beyond himself: even when he looks at someone else, he just sees his own face. For that matter, he might even feel isolated from himself. His reflection is “divided,” and he refers to himself in the second person as “you,” suggesting he feels as distant from himself as from anyone else. His voice is that of a detached observer hovering a little above everyone on the bus.
What the speaker does observe of the old man only reminds him of the distance between the two of them. He pays special attention to the old man’s “caste mark” (a forehead mark worn by Hindu devotees to mark their particular stripe of religious belief and their social class). That mark, intended to set people apart from each other, works as a symbol of the emotional and spiritual distance between the speaker and the old man. The old man's caste mark suggests he's a sincere pilgrim on his way to worship at Jejuri, while the "divided" speaker doesn't appear to have any such clear purpose in mind for his journey.
A difference in age puts a distance between the speaker and the “old man,” too. Though the rising sun (marking a new day) and the long journey (ticking off the hours) remind the speaker that he, too, will be an old man one day, at the moment he can only see the old man as someone different from him. (In another symbolic reading, the contrast between the speaker and the old man might also reflect the contrast in traditions and faith between India's older and younger generations.)
The speaker never gets “inside the old man’s head” to truly empathize with him. Nonetheless, the speaker feels as if he’s traveling “continually forward / towards a destination / just beyond the caste mark between [the old man’s] eyebrows,” words that suggest he's curious about bridging the gap between them and feeling what a very different person's experience might be like. But by the time the speaker gets off the bus, he doesn’t seem much closer to a sense of connection or meaning, and he still doesn’t feel he can “step inside the old man’s head”; he remains separate and isolated. A sense of connection, in this poem, doesn’t come just for the wanting.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 10-15
- Lines 22-25
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Bus”
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Lines 1-6
The tarpaulin flaps ...
... at your elbow.“The Bus” is the first poem in Arun Kolatkar’s 1976 collection Jejuri. That influential book tells the story of Kolatkar’s trip to the shrine of Khandoba, a temple in the town of Jejuri that honors an incarnation of the Hindu god Shiva. Kolatkar was a native of Maharashtra (the western Indian state where Jejuri is located), so he had a local’s familiarity with the temple. But, as his poem sequence describes, his visit to Jejuri was not a devout pilgrimage. Rather, the journey made him reflect on a changing, increasingly secular world—and on his own skepticism.
This poem opens Jejuri on an uneasy note. The poem’s speaker is a voice for Kolatkar, but refers to himself in the second person as “you,” as if he’s observing himself from a little distance—or as if he’s inviting readers to sit down and get uncomfortable in his place. He describes sitting in a claustrophobic “state transport bus.” All the “tarpaulin flaps” that shade the windows are firmly “buttoned down,” stopping the speaker from seeing out the window, but not stopping an uneasy “cold wind” from “whipping / and slapping” at the canvas. The speaker, this imagery reveals, is feeling shut into this bus, but also nagged by something outside it. That cold wind persistently reminds him of a wider world beyond what his eyes can perceive.
The poem’s shape helps to show the speaker’s discomfort. Except for its stand-alone closing line, this free verse poem (written without a meter or a rhyme scheme) is divided into three-line stanzas of roughly even length. But that regularity to the eye belies a lot of sharp, jarring enjambments, surprising line breaks that clash on the ear and help to evoke the speaker’s unsettled state of mind. Take the enjambments in the second stanza, for instance:
A cold wind keeps whipping
and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin
at your elbow.The line break between “whipping / and slapping” works just like the tarpaulin’s whip-cracks, falling right where one would least expect it, jarring the reader’s ear as the tarp’s irregular flapping jars the speaker’s nerves. (The /p/ consonance of “whipping” and “slapping” helps to capture the sounds of the flapping tarp, too.)
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Lines 7-12
You look down ...
... get to see. -
Lines 13-15
You seem to ...
... between his eyebrows. -
Lines 16-21
Outside, the sun ...
... to change direction. -
Lines 22-25
At the end ...
... old man's head.
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“The Bus” Symbols
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The Covered Windows and the Sunbeams
Traveling on a bus with all its window coverings buttoned shut, the speaker feels antsy and penned in. He can’t see the “countryside” around him; he’s left staring at his own reflection in an old man’s glasses. On one level, this physical predicament can be read as a symbol of a spiritual and emotional predicament, a feeling of being trapped inside one’s own head and unable to see a broader meaning in the world around you. The image of those flaps covering the windows also echoes an idea that comes up in religions the world over: the image of the physical world as nothing more than a veil that separates humanity from a greater spiritual truth. The speaker's discomfort with not being able to see the world outside (nor, it follows, precisely where the bus is going) further reflects his skepticism and discomfort with the unknown. He lacks the sense of purpose—the faith in the journey—that a more religious pilgrim would have.
The beams of dawn light that sneak past the tarps, then, arrive like messages from a world beyond. Light is a common symbol of, well, enlightenment, of new understanding and insight. Yet here, the beams of light remind the speaker of weapons, resting on people’s foreheads like a “sawed off” shotgun and “shoot[ing] the old man’s glasses.” If these brief flashes of light provide any enlightenment, then, their message doesn't seem like a comforting one.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-6: “The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down / on the windows of the state transport bus / all the way up to Jejuri. / A cold wind keeps whipping / and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin / at your elbow.”
- Lines 16-18: “Outside, the sun has risen quietly. / It aims through an eyelet in the tarpaulin / and shoots at the old man's glasses.”
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The Reflection in the Glasses
The glasses in which the speaker sees his face reflected symbolize the speaker’s state of mind. In his doubled reflection in the lenses, the speaker sees himself as a person who is feeling divided, self-absorbed, and frightened of his own mortality.
The speaker mentions more than once that his reflection in the old man’s glasses is “divided,” so that his face seems to appear on “either side” of him. That image suggests that he feels of two minds about the journey he’s making. A skeptical person making a journey that a religious person would treat as a pilgrimage, he’s not sure that this uncomfortable bus ride is going to carry him toward any new understanding. He's also trapped in his own head. As he looks at this old man, he sees not the old man, but his reflection; this separate person just mirrors his own face back at him. For that matter, the reflection might remind him that he, too, will be an old man one day, like it or not. In treating the old man’s glasses as a mirror, the speaker shows his face to readers as much as to himself. His divided reflection reveals his anxieties and uncertainties.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 10-12: “Your own divided face in a pair of glasses / on an old man's nose / is all the countryside you get to see.”
- Lines 22-23: “At the end of a bumpy ride / with your own face on either side”
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The Caste Mark
The old man’s tilaka (a forehead marking signifying an Indian person’s religious and/or class affiliations) symbolizes both religious faith and cultural difference. The poem’s skeptical speaker focuses on the old man’s “caste mark” when he imagines what it would be like to “step inside the old man’s head”: to really empathize with this old man would involve moving “beyond” this mark, he says. That idea works on two levels:
- Himself an uneasy skeptic, the speaker sees the tilaka as an image of a religious faith he lacks (and might sort of like to have).
- Himself not a devout old man (and perhaps not a member of this old man’s caste, his social class), the speaker sees the tilaka as an image of the many differences between himself and his fellow passenger.
Either way, getting “beyond” this mark of difference proves a little too difficult for the speaker, who ends the poem no closer to empathizing with the old man’s experience of this pilgrimage to Jejuri.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 13-15: “You seem to move continually forward / towards a destination / just beyond the caste mark between his eyebrows.”
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The Bus
The bus itself might be read as a symbol of the shared human predicament. The bus’s blocked windows and rapid progress both reflect general philosophical problems about life: nobody can really see where they’re going, and all they can really know is that their journey will have to end someday.
Shut up in a bus with all its windows covered in tarps, the speaker feels distinctly uncomfortable with his inability to tell what’s happening outside. Though he cranes to get a view out the windscreen, there’s not much to see: just the “roaring road” that tells him he’s going somewhere, and fast. His discomfort with this situation mirrors his spiritual and emotional discomfort, his unease with the idea that he can’t see a wider view of the metaphorical “landscape” of existence. Being on this bus forces the speaker to admit he doesn’t have as much control over (or understanding of) his circumstances as he might like.
That’s particularly true because of how speedily the bus is zipping along. As the bus journeys through the night and into the dawn, the first light of sunrise only reminds the speaker that life’s journey inevitably ends in death. Every mile the bus covers is a mile closer to that inevitable destination.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-9: “The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down / on the windows of the state transport bus / all the way up to Jejuri. / A cold wind keeps whipping / and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin / at your elbow. / You look down the roaring road. / You search for the signs of daybreak in / what little light spills out of the bus.”
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“The Bus” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
Throughout "The Bus," imagery helps to evoke the speaker’s inner predicament by describing his outer predicament. His discomfort on the bus mirrors his frustrations and his hopes for his pilgrimage to Jejuri.
The bus ride to Jejuri feels claustrophobic. With the “tarpaulin flaps […] buttoned down” over the windows, there’s no view of the surrounding world; the speaker can’t get a good look at where he’s going. But the outside world nevertheless reminds him of its presence:
A cold wind keeps whipping
and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin
at your elbow.Restlessly tugging on the tarps, that uncomfortable “cold wind” feels as if it’s nagging the speaker, refusing to let him forget that there’s something outside the window, even if he can’t see much of it. That sense of a presence or meaning in the world beyond him will haunt the speaker all through the poem.
Nudged by that chilly breeze, the speaker peers out the front of the bus and down the “roaring road” (in a moment of imagery that blends the sound of the bus’s engine with the sight of miles of road grinding past). There’s still not much to see: it’s before dawn, and no “signs of daybreak” have yet appeared. When dawn comes at last, it does so “quietly,” with no big fanfare—but also with a strange violence. When the speaker observes a “sawed off sunbeam” resting “gently against the driver’s right temple,” the image feels inherently threatening. Sure, the sunlight might be soft and “gentl[e],” but it also puts the speaker in mind of a “sawed off” shotgun resting against the driver's head.
When the outside world penetrates this bus, then, it does so in ways that discomfit the speaker, suggesting danger and death. But the speaker also keeps on wanting to know what’s out there—to understand the world beyond this closed-in bus. The poem’s imagery thus underscores its symbolism, evoking the speaker’s simultaneous fear of and longing for a broader perspective.
Where imagery appears in the poem:- Lines 4-6: “A cold wind keeps whipping / and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin / at your elbow.”
- Line 7: “You look down the roaring road.”
- Lines 16-20: “Outside, the sun has risen quietly. / It aims through an eyelet in the tarpaulin / and shoots at the old man's glasses. / A sawed off sunbeam comes to rest / gently against the driver's right temple.”
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Metaphor
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Enjambment
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Consonance
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"The Bus" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Tarpaulin
- Jejuri
- Caste mark
- Eyelet
- Sawed off
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “The tarpaulin flaps are buttoned down”; Lines 4-5: “A cold wind keeps whipping / and slapping a corner of the tarpaulin”; Line 17: “It aims through an eyelet in the tarpaulin”)
Thick canvas (here being used to cover the windows of a bus).
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Bus”
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Form
“The Bus” appears early in Kolatkar’s 1976 book Jejuri, a sequence of poems that describes Kolatkar’s trip to an ancient Hindu shrine in Jejuri (a city in Maharashtra, a state in the west of India). Across the sequence, Kolatkar describes his struggle to find meaning and holiness in this pilgrimage. A secular, skeptical thinker, he’s equally fascinated and frustrated by the shrine.
Like the rest of the poems in this sequence, “The Bus” is written in thoughtful, reflective free verse, not bound to any particular poetic form, meter, or rhyme scheme. Perhaps Kolatkar chooses to write in free verse precisely because of his poem’s themes: his speaker steps outside inherited religious tradition and inherited poetic tradition alike.
“The Bus” tells its story over the course of 26 lines divided into 8 stanzas, all but the last of which are three lines long. The final stanza is just a single stand-alone line. These short stanzas single out small moments and images, capturing the drifting, dreamy, intermittently startled attention of a passenger on a long bus journey. In this, they mirror the poem’s world, working rather like the beams of sunlight that the speaker describes shooting through the “tarpaulin” window coverings on the bus to highlight the “driver’s right temple” or to create reflections in the “pair of glasses / on an old man’s nose.”
Readers might also be struck by Kolatkar’s decision to write the poem in the second person: his speaker is a “you,” not an “I.” This choice demands the reader’s involvement, putting them in Kolatkar’s shoes. It might also suggest that the speaker is describing his own experience from a little distance, "divided" like the reflection in the old man's glasses.
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Meter
"The Bus" is a free verse poem and doesn’t use a regular meter. Kolatkar instead creates rhythm through varied line lengths and stanza forms. Consider, for instance, the fourth stanza (lines 10-12):
Your own divided face in the pair of glasses
on an old man’s nose
is all the countryside you get to see.These lines are one long enjambed sentence, and their shape highlights the important figure of the “old man”:
- Line 9, in which the old man makes his first appearance, is shorter than the lines that flank it.
- What’s more, every word in line 9 has just one syllable, while the lines around it are more varied.
These rhythmic choices help the image of the old man to stand out—and to arrive with a certain sense of surprise. The reader can almost feel the speaker jolting as his eyes refocus from his own “divided” reflection in the glasses to the person who's wearing those glasses.
While the poem trots along in fairly steady three-line stanzas most of the way, a change comes in the final stanza, which is just one line long: "you don't step inside the old man's head." Sitting there all on its own, that line invites readers to reflect on what that distance between speaker and old man might signify.
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Rhyme Scheme
“The Bus” is written in free verse, so it doesn’t use a regular rhyme scheme. The poem plays with sound in other ways, creating atmosphere and emphasis through devices like alliteration. For instance, the alliteration and consonance of the /r/ sounds in the speaker’s description of the “roaring road” (line 6) capture the grinding sound of an engine on a long-haul drive, while the /w/ of the “cold wind […] whipping” the tarpaulin (line 4) sounds fittingly gusty.
Later on, in the second-to-last stanza, a single moment of rhyme helps to create a sense of drama as the poem heads toward its conclusion:
At the end of a bumpy ride
with your own face on either sideThat little rhyme makes these lines stand out from what’s come before, inviting readers to feel that the poem’s enigmatic conclusion is set apart a little from the rest of the speaker's experience.
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“The Bus” Speaker
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Unusually, “The Bus” is written in the second person. The speaker describes the actions and feelings of a separate “you,” describing what might at first sound like someone else’s bus journey to Jejuri. But this unknown “you” also feels like a very particular you. Readers quickly gather that the “you” here is really the speaker himself—and that the speaker is a voice for the poet, Arun Kolatkar. This poem (and the rest of the poems in Kolatkar’s 1976 book Jejuri) is an autobiographical story of a half-skeptical pilgrimage Kolatkar made to Jejuri, the home of a famous Hindu shrine.
In this poem, the speaker is feeling frustrated and claustrophobic, shut up inside a bus with all its windows blocked off by “tarpaulin flaps.” The bus’s blinded state mirrors his own spiritual frustration as he longs for some kind of perspective or enlightenment that doesn’t seem readily forthcoming.
The poem describes the speaker seeing his “own divided face” reflected in a “pair of glasses / on an old man’s nose,” an image that symbolically suggests conflict and doubleness. In the rest of Jejuri, Kolatkar will describe feeling both skeptical and wistful over the demonstrations of religious faith he sees on his pilgrimage. The speaker's vision of a “face on either side” might thus suggest an internal argument, a sense that two parts of his mind and heart aren’t quite lining up with each other.
Kolatkar’s use of the second person lends force to that reading. By presenting his own experiences as those of a “you” whose life he’s describing, he stands at a little distance from himself, examining his conflicts as he might a stranger’s.
Kolatkar's speaker might also be a person who’s feeling a little nervous about getting older. Seeing himself mirrored in the old man's glasses, he feels he’s moving “continually forward / toward a destination” somewhere just beyond the "caste mark" (or tilaka, a symbolic religious marking) on the old man’s forehead—that is, toward living in an old man’s body, becoming an old man himself. And when a few beams of dawn light at last manage to penetrate the dim bus, the speaker imagines them “shoot[ing]” people like “sawed off” shotguns, an image that links the arrival of each new day with a movement toward death.
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“The Bus” Setting
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"The Bus" is confined to one claustrophobic space: a “state transport bus” with all its windows covered with “tarpaulin flaps," making the long drive “all the way up to Jejuri” (a town in western India that hosts an important Hindu temple). Outside the bus, the Indian countryside rolls past—but for all the poem’s speaker can see of the landscape, the bus might as well be driving through a void.
The poem begins before dawn, when dark glimpses of the “roaring road” through the windshield are all the speaker can see, and ends when the bus ride does: not long after dawn, when just a few “sunbeam[s]” have managed to break in through the lace holes in the window shades.
This dim, enclosed bus becomes a symbol of the speaker’s predicament. Stuck on this bus, he’s frustrated by how little he can see, longing for a brighter glimpse of the world beyond this bus, aware he’s on the go but unable to see where he’s going to. All this is true of his inner life, too: he’s feeling cut off, isolated, and eager for a view of a wider world in a spiritual and emotional sense.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Bus”
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Literary Context
Arun Kolatkar (1932-2004) was one of the most important Indian poets of the 20th century. Kolatkar wrote in both Marathi and English; Jejuri, the 1976 poem sequence in which “The Bus” appears, is his most celebrated English work.
Jejuri was an intensely personal and autobiographical book for Kolatkar. The collection tells the story of his 1963 visit to a shrine in his home state of Maharashtra—a journey in which he grappled with his relationship to cultural and religious tradition. Equally idealistic and skeptical, the poems in Jejuri spoke to a changing India, and they were much discussed and anthologized worldwide.
Kolatkar’s use of free verse here reflect his grounding in the work of Modernist poets like William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. A playful, experimental, and opinionated writer, he also listed figures as diverse as Leadbelly, Kierkegaard, Jynaneshwar, and Laurel and Hardy among his influences. His work would go on to influence writers like Salman Rushdie.
Historical Context
Arun Kolatkar wrote Jejuri after making a 1963 journey to the temple of Khandoba, a deity particularly important in Kolatkar’s native state of Maharashtra. Khandoba was believed to be an incarnation of Shiva, one of the central gods in the Hindu pantheon, and his huge, ornate temple at Jejuri remains an important site of pilgrimage to this day.
As a native of Maharashtra, Kolatkar felt a local's interest in the temple at Jejuri—but not the interest of a devotee. A skeptical, secular thinker who once said that he didn’t feel he had to “take a position about God one way or the other,” Kolatkar visited the temple with a mixture of dismay and awe: he was perplexed by the true believers (and didn’t always feel they were such true believers), distressed by the sight of impoverished people begging around the temple, and moved by the sheer force of faith and legend that seemed to imbue the very landscape.
Kolatkar’s attitude toward Jejuri reflected a worldwide mood of upheaval in the 1960s. In India as in the rest of the world, young people were beginning to question inherited traditions and beliefs. In his skepticism and his formal experimentation alike, Kolatkar might be read in parallel with American Beat contemporaries like Allen Ginsberg, who likewise upturned convention in search of fresh meaning.
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More “The Bus” Resources
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External Resources
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A Memory of Kolatkar — Read a posthumous tribute to Kolatkar that describes his legacy (and includes his delightfully wide-ranging list of influences).
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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Kolatkar and Rushdie — Read novelist Salman Rushdie's anecdote about meeting the irascible, irreverent Kolatkar.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Kolatkar's life.
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