The words are
a spume of raw fire — degradation, obscenity, filth and horror
rage untamed; there’s a hymn to hear when they’re spent.
Nothing cushions in the world of Namdeo Dhasal, poet
feared and revered, founder of the Dalit Panthers, comrade of controversy,
born ‘untouchable’. Selections from thirty years of his
work, 1972 to 2006, brilliantly translated by fellow poet Dilip Chitre
have been released by Navayana, an award-winning publishing house, dedicated
to bringing out titles for social change. Dilip Chitre
and Navayana’s S. Anand talked to Shyama
Haldar about the exhilarations of finding Dhasal.
 |
Photo
and poems reproduced with permission from Navayana.
photo by Henning Stegmuller |
| |
Like most Dalit leaders,
Namdeo knows they will never come to power on their own. Mayawati
had to compromise — the elephant’s become Ganesha |
Dilip, you’ve
been a friend, translator and champion of Namdeo Dhasal for over four
decades. These poems, they rip through you — how is it they aren’t
better known?
Dilip Chitre
(DS): Namdeo Dhasal is known in Marathi as a major poet and
is almost unknown beyond the language — he’s won awards
and things like that, but very few critics have dared to delve into
his works and say exactly what it is about him that makes him great.
While I have no doubt that he is one of the world’s best 20th
century poets, he hasn’t been translated even into other Indian
languages because he is extremely difficult to translate.
There is, of course, the
problem that India does not have any publishers worth their salt consistently
publishing or promoting poetry, even in the English language. In fact,
there are actually more publishers in the Indian languages promoting
poetry than in English. In English, you have to be very close to your
grave to be acceptable to most of your contemporaries, and then they
may publish your collected poems. Then along comes this niche publisher
who reads four translations of Dhasal in a magazine — Tehelka,
as it so happened — and he contacts the translator, gets after
him: do you have more?
S. Anand
(SA): This was around the Sahitya Akademi’s golden jubilee
in 2004; they gave Namdeo a lifetime achievement award. I didn’t
know Dilip was on the committee, I just read this article he wrote.
Navayana was very young then, and had never done poetry, but this was
something I knew I wanted to publish. I hunted all over for a way to
contact Dilip, googled madly, and somehow found his number.
That’s
something the poems do, read just a few lines and you know you’re
with an enormously exciting writer.
DC: And that’s
what translation is about, sharing excitement. You can either share
it in a very quiet, sober, scholarly way, or you can share it in a poetic
way. Now, I am a practicing poet in two languages, English and Marathi,
and I am committed to translation — I’ve been translating
poetry from Marathi to English for the last fifty years, poetry from
the 13th century right up to the 21st. With Namdeo, I found that he
has it in him to be considered one of the world’s major poets,
and the only way I could substantiate that claim was to bring the best
of his poetry to the notice of Anglophone readers.
Namdeo’s
a lumpen, as he describes himself, with no assets except poetry —
he sometimes says he hurls his poems like stones, so they’re a
street-fighting weapon as well. To convey the idea that poets can come
from anywhere, that they bring from wherever they come something to
the surface of the world — that’s a role he plays exceptionally
well. Namdeo’s also an activist, and he’s been a good activist.
But like most Dalit leaders, small-time and big-time, he knows he lives
in India where Dalits cannot, by themselves, form a government anywhere.
They can only act as a pressure group…
 |
Namdeo
Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld
Translated by
Dilip Chitre
Navayana
180 pp; Rs 350 |
SA: Not until
Mayawati.
DC: Even
Mayawati has had to make that compromise with her ‘rainbow coalition’
— the elephant has been turned into Ganesha. These things will
continue to happen, but let us not be deceived about the facts of the
Dalit situation. No minority in India can ever come to power —
and, in fact, there is no majority, not even the Hindus are an absolute
majority, thank God. We are a land of minorities. And here is a minority
voice, someone from the urban dispossessed, uprooted from his rural
place, planted in the megapolis of Mumbai at the age of seven to grow
up in that urban underbelly that no one notices. In the 19th century,
the French poet Baudelaire wrote about Paris, wrote The Flowers of Evil,
and started the trend of modern urban poetry. Baudelaire talked about
decadence and so on, but he himself was a bourgeois trying to become
a déclassé. Namdeo Dhasal is a lumpen, that is the difference,
he’s already there. We also know that, although he was not dealing
with cities and so forth, Dante in his Commedia was dealing with his
contemporary world through the metaphorical frame of Paradise, Limbo
and Hell. So you start with Inferno, you come to Purgatorio, and then
you are elevated to Paradiso, in Dante’s framework. Now, here’s
a person who gives that epic, mytho-poeic quality to Mumbai, and installs
at the heart of his universe Golpitha, the red light neighbourhood of
central Mumbai. It is an impenetrable world unless it can be illuminated
by someone like Namdeo, illuminated from within. Golpitha, which was
published in 1972, is, to my mind, a milestone in world poetry.
| Cruelty |
|
I am a venereal
sore in the private part of language.
The living spirit looking out
of hundreds of thousands of sad, pitiful eyes
Has shaken me.
I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me.
There's no moonlight anywhere;
There's no water anywhere.
A rabid fox is tearing off my flesh with its teeth;
And a terrible venom-like cruelty
Spreads out from my monkey-bone.
Release me from my infernal identity.
Let me fall in love with these stars.
A flowering violet has begun to crawl towards horizons.
An oasis is welling up on a cracked face.
A cyclone is swirling in irreducible vulvas.
A cat has commenced combing the hairs of agony.
The night has created space for my rage.
A stray dog has started dancing in the window's eye.
The beak of an ostrich has begun to break open junk.
An Egyptian carrot is starting to savour physical reality.
A poem is arousing a corpse from its grave.
The doors of the self are being swiftly slammed shut.
There's a current of blood flowing through all pronouns now.
My day is rising beyond the wall of grammar.
God's shit falls on the bed of creation.
Pain and roti are being roasted in the same tandoor's fire.
The flame of the clothless dwells in mythologies and folklore.
The rock of whoring is meeting live roots;
A sigh is standing up on lame legs;
Satan has started drumming the long hollowness.
A young green leaf is beginning to swing at the door of desire.
Frustration's corpse is being sewn up.
A psychopathic muse is giving a shove to the statue of eternity.
Dust begins to peel armour.
The turban of darkness is coming off.
You, open your eyes: all these are old words.
The creek is getting filled with a rising tide;
Breakers are touching the shoreline.
Yet, a venom-like cruelty spreads out from my monkey-bone.
It's clear and limpid: like the waters of the Narmada river.
|
Anand, I’d
like to go back to the point about Namdeo as a Dalit leader. What do
you make of the issue of his aligning with the Shiv Sena?
SA: I really get
cheesed off when people start talking about Namdeo Dhasal with the words,
‘Oh, but hasn’t he joined the Shiv Sena?’ It’s
like people read a lot of newspapers and very little poetry...
He
Takes Mumbai and installs at the heart of his universe Golpitha,
the red light district, a world impenetrable unless illuminated
from within |
DC: And he’s
not with the Shiv Sena, this is factually incorrect. The Dalit Panthers
supported the Shiv Sena for a while, and then in the last municipal
elections in Mumbai, they supported the cpm. That’s the 360 degree
world of Indian politics — why isolate Namdeo Dhasal? Just because
he’s a Dalit? Why isolate Mayawati? Just because she’s a
Dalit? I think there’s high hypocrisy at work here, upper-caste,
upper-class, journalistic hypocrisy. And for people to use this to obscure
the fact that he is one of India’s major poets, it makes me furious.
SA: He writes for
Saamna, I’m told — I don’t read Marathi. And, yes
it’s a thin line, being with the Shiv Sena and writing for their
paper — but, again, it’s what you write that matters. I’ve
been told Namdeo speaks his mind in his Saamna essays, and Bal Thackeray
lets him. It’s not a Namdeo I’m interested in at all, though,
right now. Are we to divorce him from forty years of his work and say,
‘Oh, now he is with the Shiv Sena’?
Namdeo’s
wife is a Muslim, and the daughter of a Communist...
DC: Who was a well-known
balladeer, Amar Sheikh. Mallika is about ten or fifteen years younger
than Namdeo, and is an outstandingly good poet in Marathi in her own
right. They’ve had a very turbulent marriage; in fact, Mallika
wrote an autobiography, I Want to Smash Myself, about their relationship,
how much she disapproved of his Panther movement, how difficult it was
to live with this man, an activist with cases against him all over Maharashtra,
many of them implicating him in crimes he did not commit. At the time
they married, he was constantly underground, they were hounded from
place to place.
Modern Marathi
literature has this constellation of outstanding contemporaries: Vilas
Sarang, Kiran Nagarkar, Namdeo Dhasal, Arun Kolatkar, yourself. There’s
this strain of defiance, rage and relentlessness that runs through this
group — where is it coming from?
DS: Well, one of
the things that’s common to all of us is that we are rooted in
the same metropolis, we are very much Mumbai writers, all of us are
rooted in the maddening cosmopolitan mix of Mumbai. We have our different
modes of approaching it — for example, in Vilas’ case, he
is consciously located in the existentialist tradition of Camus and
the nihilist tradition of Samuel Beckett; Kafka has also been a very
significant influence on him. You cannot say that about Arun Kolatkar.
Kiran Nagarkar has a variety of narrative voices, but you can also read
the European influence in Kiran very distinctly. Putting Namdeo aside,
Arun, Vilas, Kiran and myself are all bilingual writers who practice
writing in English as well as Marathi. Namdeo is monolingual, he writes
in Marathi, speaks in Marathi. He doesn’t read any French or Spanish
or German or English, for that matter. Where does his surrealism come
from, where does his existentialism come from? It’s something
native, it’s part of his self-education. He is a self-educated,
dispossessed Dalit, fighting his way up into the literary world of the
megapolis. Everything he’s read, he’s read in Marathi translation,
and if he hears of someone whose work is untranslated, he’ll say,
‘Who is this person, tell me more about him, will you translate
him for me?’
Translating
someone like Namdeo is, in a sense, like Method acting —
you have to find a space for him inside you, make room, and then
act it out |
SA: There’s
something I’ve wanted to ask you, Dilip. His political followers
— as you’ve told me — when he’s in hospital,
there are some two hundred Panthers outside. Do they read his poetry,
do they have an understanding of it? Or is there a split between Namdeo
the poet, and this other, political, person?
DC: I don’t
see it as a split in Namdeo; it’s the one-sidedness of his multiple
audiences. His Dalit audience sees him as a charismatic leader, but
they may not possess the literary sensibility demanded by his poetry.
He’s not someone like Gadar, who will write these very simplistic
poems, and some of them rank bad poetry, and express revolutionary sentiments
and rouse people and so on. A middle-class person approaching his poetry
does not know the Dalit situation, he does not even want to know. So
he misses part of the poetry.
SA: So, is there’s
no perfect audience for Namdeo’s Dhasal’s poetry? Nobody
who’d have the sensibilities of his politics and be able also
to appreciate his poems?
DC: Turn the shirt
around and the shirt asks if it fits the audience as well. The shirt
poem…
SA: I’d like
to read the last three lines from that one, ‘Speculations on a
Shirt’:
A human being
shouldn’t become so spotless / One should leave a few stains on
one’s shirt / One should carry on oneself a little bit of sin.
| The
Day She Was Gone |
|
The day she was
gone,
I painted my face black.
I slapped the savage schizophrenic wind hard in its face.
I picked up small pieces of my life
And stood naked in front of a cracked mirror.
I allowed me to wreak vengeance upon myself.
I stared condescendingly at the Sun and said, 'You screwball!'
I showered choice curses upon all artists who paint dreams;
I walked from the East towards the West;
I picked stones I found on the way and hurled them at myself,
How boisterously flows this water in its fit of laughter
Through mountains and gorges.
What ocean is it seeking to meet?
Or will it seep
Into the soil at sea-level?
Did even I belong to myself?
I could not even embrace her dead body
And cry my heart out.
The day she was gone,
I painted my face black. |
And just look at
the beginning of it: Let’s change the sex of Eve / Let’s
make Adam pregnant. And then you find it so odd that he should be with
the Shiv Sena — maybe he’s saying, ‘Let’s do
that, let’s go out and confuse you.’
DC: Namdeo dares
you, as a reader, and as a translator. There’s something I describe
as aesthetic subversion. Namdeo subverts bourgeois sensibilities, and
that’s what appeals to me. A subversive act tries to undo the
entire system on which your values are based. Namdeo is a guerrilla
poet. In one phrase, one line, he’ll juxtapose dialect and the
slang of Kamathipura with European references in very sophisticated
Marathi. These shifts and transitions of register make translating him
very hard. Translating someone like Namdeo is in a sense like Method
acting — you have to find a space for him inside you, make room,
and then act it out.
Viju Chitre
(Dilip’s wife): At the time Namdeo started writing, his
poems were the sort people couldn’t bear to go near. The words
he used were the kind educated people would never even think of. That’s
why most people can talk politics with him, but they don’t want
to go into his poetry, because they get scared, even now. When you ask
why he’s not better known, it’s because of that. He’s
too rough for the sensibilities of even literary people like Vijay Tendulkar.
We all pass Golpitha every day, but we try not only to not see what
is there, but not to even feel it.
DC: You know, there
are many Dalit poets writing in Marathi, none of them write this way.
He’s far above them. It’s not as though he could be the
leading light of Dalit literature when Dalit writers have such very
small ambitions. They all have too many statements to make about being
Dalit.
What you’re
saying is this is past being an identity statement: I am Dalit, this
is my voice. Maybe this is one way of getting over the question of audience
— maybe the perfect audience for Namdeo Dhasal is the reader’s
gut.
DC: How does he
reach German audiences through a secondary translation based on my translation?
SA: Or how would
I read one small excerpt and get so excited by it, and say I want to
publish this, somehow, anyhow? When I show this book around, when people
read just one poem, first they’re not sure they’re reading
a translation, and then they can’t understand why they haven’t
heard of him before.
DC: But it is also
the case that you cannot really separate Namdeo’s politics from
his poetry. On April 14 [Ambedkar’s birth anniversary], every
year from 1972 onwards, Namdeo Dhasal has been writing one long poem
addressed to Ambedkar, but also at the same-time a self-questioning
poem. He is talking to Ambedkar and to himself, and is asking himself
and all Dalits the question, have we lived up to the standards Ambedkar
set us? These are self-examining poems that also point to several things
that happened after Ambedkar passed away in 1956 that he did not have
to face — the India that Ambedkar never knew and that Dalits have
to face today is also part of those poems. There is this too in Namdeao’s
work — if people were to read his poetry first and then read his
politics, perhaps they will be less clueless than they are when they
start with his politics and don’t even approach his poetry.
