Representation of cities as spaces through symbolist imagery in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda

Abstract

In twentieth-century's poetry, the city has become an important and complex theme because when writing about cities, poets tend to re-formulate and re-define their relation with literary and cultural traditions. The city poses a particular challenge for the modern poets because of their commitment to social and cultural traditions they feel that their role has been fused to simply responding to the social, moral, cultural and psychological transformations that the city symbolizes. Is it right to read a poet, or poetry, as an extension of a place? The answer is may or may not be. The question is to answer the unique narrative description of Bombay in Arun Kolatkar’s Kala Ghoda and the city of London in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland that defines the city using imagery and symbolism in the best manner. Walking through Bombay and reading Kala Ghoda Poems recreates a city that is constantly shifting and dancing around, full of noises and colours, all the while exposing those lives that are pushed out of an expanding concrete jungle, hidden under bright lights and tall towers—the triumphs of development. Eliot utilises the ‘unreal city’ London as the main setting for The Wasteland and the city comes to embody the title of the poem that id portrayed as ugly, cruel and grey, lacking any real human warmth or meaningful connections. The study will be centred on a reading and analysis of deconstructive poetry to show how postmodernism is hinted at while also demonstrating continuous sociocultural and socioreligious activities through the use of symbolism and imagery. The study will continue with chapters broken down into many aspects, including a comparative analysis of Eliot and Kolatkar's poetry, studying the issue of experimentalism and symbolism as well as imagery employed in Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda and Eliot's Wasteland. The subjectivities and experimentation in Indian English poetry and Western poetry can be understood and explored through a comparison of Arun Kolatkar and T.S. Eliot.