Jejuri is a series of poems written by Indian poet Arun Kolatkar. Consisting of a sequence of 31 poems, Jejuri depicts Kolatkar's visit to Jejuri, a city in Pune, which the poet visited in 1964. It was first published in Opinion Literary Quarterly in 1974, and issued in book-form in 1976. Jejuri won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1977.[1]
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. It is one of the better known poems in modern Indian literature.
Jejuri is a sequence of simple but stunningly beautiful poems and is one of the major work in modern Indian literature.[2] 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.[3] 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.