Censor board officials, while reviewing a movie on legendary Dalit poet-activist Namdeo Dhasal, asked who he was, stunning the filmmaker and sparking political and social outrage. Dhasal gave voice to not just the Dalit experience but also that of those forced to the fringes of society. His was the voice of all the oppressed. Dhasal’s words transformed into action which, in turn, transformed into inspiration. That inspiration lives on for millions. Please listen to the latest episode of All Indians Matter.
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[00:00:03] Hello and welcome to All Indians Matter, I am Ashraf Engineer. A strange thing happened recently when Chalhalla Bol, a film on Naumdev Dhasal, the late Dalit poet and author and founder of the Dalit Panther movement went before the censor board. Who is Namdev Dhasal? asked some of the officers reviewing the film. It seemed they had no idea who Dhasal was or of his contributions to literature and Dalit activism. Subsequently, the film faced delays because of objections the censor board raised.
[00:00:29] The filmmaker Mahesh Bansode said the film was funded largely by crowdsourcing and submitted or nominated for 252 film festivals in India and abroad, winning 32 awards. He said the youth need to be told Dhasal's story and that is what the film aimed to do. Not surprisingly, the officers' ignorance and comments sparked something of a political storm with several parties pointing out how central Dhasal's work had been to the Dalit narrative, especially in Maharashtra but also across India.
[00:00:55] Dhasal gave voice to the Dalit experience. He was not just a great of literature. His words transformed into action, which in turn transformed into inspiration. That inspiration lives on in the lives of all those pushed to the margins, exploited and forgotten. So since the question has been asked, let us understand who Dhasal was and why he matters. All Indians matter.
[00:01:24] Dhasal was born on February 15, 1949 in Pur village in Pune district's Khet Taluka into a Mahars family. Mahars have been historically discriminated against and branded untouchables. It was his experiences of this atrocity as a child that led to Dhasal using his poetry to wage war against every form of exploitation. Dhasal's father, Lakshman, moved to Mumbai to make ends meet, working as a porter in a butcher's beef shop in central Mumbai.
[00:01:48] The family lived in the Dhor Chawl neighbourhood and Dhasal's youth was spent amid drug peddlers, thugs and sex workers. These themes and experiences feature prominently in his writings. After his schooling, Dhasal read Ambedkar and was drawn to Dr. Ram Munohar Loya's socialism. He saw parallels between that and Ambedkar's vision of a secular socialist and republican India. Dhasal was never educated beyond school but was self-educated through a voracious reading habit.
[00:02:13] Fluent in Marathi and the hybrid Mumbai lingo known as Bambaya, Dhasal could converse knowledgeably about unlikely subjects like cubism and surrealism. His poetry meanwhile embraced the harsh reality around him. It spoke of sex workers, pimps, criminals, street urchins, mujra dancers, labourers and others. Dhasal's poetry embraced all those used by society and then rejected by it. It seemed to be staging an uprising against the upper classes and castes, forcing them to notice the underbelly they were otherwise blind to.
[00:02:43] This is why poet Dilip Chitre christened him Poet of the Underworld. Dhasal said and I quote, Both my individual and my collective life have been through such tremendous upheavals that if my personal life did not have poetry to fall back on, I would not have reached thus far. I would have become a top gangster, the owner of a brothel or a smuggler. Stop quote. He once described his life thus and I quote, I boozed, I visited brothels, I went to mujra dancing women's establishments and to houses of ordinary sex workers.
[00:03:11] The whole ambience and the ethos of it was the revelation of a tremendous form of life. It was life. Then I threw out all the rule books, no longer the rules of prosody for me. My poetry was as free as I was. I wrote what I felt like writing and how I felt like writing. Stop quote. In all, Dhasal wrote nine anthologies of poems and a lot of prose including a novel. His most celebrated work was Golpeet, his first collection of poems published in 1971.
[00:03:37] Golpeet was a rough locality perceived as the hub of prostitution and gang wars. The harsh, unfiltered language shook up the Marathi literary world and angered many upper caste writers. Dhasal's words were like a hammer taken to the cultural edifice. The poetry brought alive the life of Dalits. It spoke also of the red light district. Caged women preparing to sell themselves to keep at bay the hunger and insecurity that gnawed at them. Dhasal raised several questions about the women's plight. However, his words were not laments but angry leaping flames.
[00:04:07] Here's a sample translation. The sun leaked and was dying in the arms of the night. At such a time I was born on a footpath. I grew up in tatters and became orphaned. The mother who had given birth to me went towards the skies to my father. Sick of the tortures of the ghosts of footpaths to wash off the darkness of the earth like a fused man. I kept on moving on the filth of the path. Give me five paise. Take five abusers on the path through Varga. It is often thought that each of Dhasal's works was inspired by some real life incident.
[00:04:37] Golpeet was the same. Namdev was in love but the relationship ended because he was a mahar. Respondent, Dhasal took refuge in liquor and the dark underbelly of Bombay as it was known then. On the political front, Dhasal came to be disillusioned with Lohiaid socialists. Although not with Lohiaid himself. Subsequently, he was briefly attracted to Marxism. It seemed to fit well into his vision of widening the idea of who a Dalit was beyond caste location to the global proletariat. Eventually, Dhasal married Malika, the then teenage daughter of Amar Sheikh,
[00:05:06] a member of the Communist Party of India and who was known as Shahir or People's Bard. Sheikh was a renowned lyricist and singer who became a major figure during the Samyatta Maharashtra movement for a Marathi-speaking state. Meanwhile, atrocities against Dalits were on the rise. On May 24, 1972, the socialist Madhu Limaye raised the issue in the Lok Sabha which seemed to ignite a social spark. The Republican Party, meanwhile, was seen as apathetic to the plight of Dalits and soon splintered into various factions.
[00:05:32] According to activist writer J.V. Pawar, he, poet Daya Pawar, social activist Arjun Dangle, Dhasal, activist writer Raja Dhalay and poet Pralaj Chandwankar met at an Irani cafe in Mumbai's Dadar locality to discuss how to deal with the situation. They decided to write a memorandum on atrocities against Dalits and launch a signature campaign. Eventually, the effort coalesced into the Dalit Panthers organization which was inspired by the American Black Panthers movement. Its first meeting was held at Siddhartha Nagar in Bombay on July 9, 1972.
[00:06:03] Dhasal became a leading light of the organization working tirelessly to build it. The Dalit Panthers would go on to play a major role in Dalit politics throughout the 1970s. That was also a time when youth movements, protests and demonstrations were springing up across the world. So the first wave of Dalit Panther protests in 1972 and 1973 fit right into that mosaic, bringing Marathi Dalit poetry to the middle and upper classes across India. Dhasal was one of the most prominent writers of such poetry.
[00:06:30] Eventually, ideological cracks began to appear in the Dalit Panthers movement and Dhasal was accused of being a Marxist. He was expelled in 1974. The Dalit Panthers' radical anti-caste movement helped to fundamentally alter the cultural and literary space of resistance and it continues to inspire anti-caste activists born well after the 1970s. Dhasal's words were central to the movement, challenging caste structures and influenced by traditional theatre, a Marathi art form known as Tamasha,
[00:06:55] and the anti-caste movements of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Dr. Baba Sahib Ambedkar. Dhasal pointed out that untouchability was so entrenched in villages that it could not be shaken off even by migrating to the city. It was a life destructive to not just the body but also the soul. In one of the poems in Goldpeat, Man You Should Explode, he zeroes in on this element of destruction. Kill oneself too. Let diseases thrive. Make all trees leafless. Take care that no bird ever sings, man. One should plan to die groaning and screaming in pain.
[00:07:25] Let all this grow into a tumour to fill the universe. Balloon up and burst at a nameless time to shrink. However, as I said earlier, his thoughts were not confined to caste but to all those discriminated against by society. So, Dhasal reimagined sex workers and the transgender community as activists. In 1971, he organised a march of sex workers and transgender people at a time when both groups were politically invisible. The combination of his activism and writings gave the Marathi language itself a boost.
[00:07:54] From the harshness of his words emerged a new vocabulary and grammar which seemed to override the well-established Brahminical Marathi. Coming back to Goldpeat, many equate it with T.S. Eliot's classic The Wasteland. It is considered not just a Marathi classic but one of Indian poetry and could only have been written by a Dalit. Another example of this is the poem Kamathipura, part of the 1981 collection Tu Hi Atta Kanchi Tu Hi Atta which translates as What grade are you in? What grade? Dhasal writes, This is hell.
[00:08:23] This is a swirling vortex. This is an ugly agony. This is pain wearing a dancer's anklets. Shed your skin. Shed your skin from its very roots. Skin yourself. Let these poisoned everlasting wombs become disembodied. Let not this numbed ball of flesh sprout limbs. Taste this. Potassium cyanide. As you die at the infinitesimal fraction of a second, write down the small s that's being forever lowered. Here cue up they who want to taste poison's sweet or salty flavor
[00:08:52] that gathers here as do words. In just a minute it will start pouring here. O Kamathipura, tucking all seasons under your armpit, you squat in the mud here. I go beyond all the pleasures and pains of worrying and wait for your lotus to bloom. A lotus in the mud. This translation depicts life and social relations in Mumbai's red light district of Kamathipura. In a crowd, no one is visible and the narratives of such localities have also remained largely invisible.
[00:09:20] Dasar is important not just because he was a Dalit or Marathi poet. You could argue that he is among the literary greats of the last century because his poetry was born from his own experience of oppression. It was brutal enough to create a new vocabulary like I said. It was from his own life that the metaphors and imagery he left us with emerged. His words express the sentiments of all those who are exploited and desperately seeking equality, liberty and justice. For this, Dasar was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999
[00:09:47] and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sahitya Academy in 2004. He was conferred the Maharashtra State Award for Literature four times in 1973, 1974, 1982 and 1983. Dasar died in Mumbai at age 64 on January 15, 2014 after a long battle with colon cancer. So, to the question who is Namdev Dasar, he is undoubtedly one of India's most significant poets of the 20th century. His words gave shape to the aspiration of freedom and democracy
[00:10:17] that are so out of reach even today for millions. It is Dalit literature in general and Dasar's poems in particular that capture this asymmetry at the core of our society and also what pushes so many to its fringes. Who is Namdev Dasar? Perhaps this quote of his captures it best. I enjoy discovering myself. I am happy when I am writing a poem and I am happy when I am leading a demonstration of sex workers fighting for their rights.