For Dhasal
For four years now, April — the month in which BR Ambedkar was born — has been celebrated as Dalit History Month. This year, the celebrations, inspired somewhat by Black History Month celebrated in the US, are even more poignant than previous years’ because they follow the contentious verdict of the Supreme Court on the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes Act in March and nationwide protest on April 2 that turned violent. Even as protests continue, with Dalit rights groups demanding more legislative protection for the law, I returned to Namdeo Dhasal’s poems, translated by Dilip Chitre, and the verses of my contemporary Dalit English poet Chandramohan.
Of course, to write about Dalit poetry or experience is anachronistic for a caste Hindu like me. What legitimacy do I have to write on Dhasal’s or Chandramohan’s poetry? No matter how much I appreciate these lines, there are aspects — experiences and emotions — to which I have no access. Dhasal is the godfather of 20th-century Dalit literature. In the seventies, he associated with the Black Panthers; his Dalit Panthers were recognised by the US Black rights group. His advice to other poets and Dalits was one of subaltern defiance and violence: “Stay tipsy day and night, / stay tight round the clock / Cuss at one and all; … / Man, you should keep handy a Rampuri knife” (Dhasal, “Man, You Should Explode”, Golpitha, translation: Dilip Chitre).
Chandramohan’s book, Letters to Namdeo Dhasal — his second after Warscape Verses (Authorpress, 2014) — pays tribute to the older poet. Though Dhasal wrote in Marathi and he hails from Kerala, Chandramohan’s poetry burns with anger, outrage and a desire for rebellion. At times, it is deliberately provocative: “The harvest of my poems will be winnowed. / If done dexterously, / The lighter shallow poems blow away in the wind / While the heavier, meaty poems fall back onto the tray, / To become the fire in my belly / Like beef.” In recent times, cow meat has, of course, been the excuse for murderous attacks on Dalits — and Muslims — across the country, starting from the lynching of Akhlaq in Dadri in 2014 to the stripping and assault on Dalit youths in Una, Gujarat, in 2016 to the murder of teenager Junaid Khan in a train on the outskirts of Delhi last year.
An uncanny reminder of the escalating violence is Chandramohan’s poem “Caste in a Local Train”. He describes a casteist fellow passenger as a Pakistani fast bowler: “Caste in a local train can be deceptive / like the soul / of a Pakistani fast bowler camouflaged / in a three-piece suit / and an Anglicised accent.” The only purpose of this passenger is to somehow squeeze out his interlocutor’s caste. Chandramohan describes this interrogation in terms of a duel between a fast bowler and a batsman: “He tries assessing me with an in-swinger first / ‘What is your full name?’ / Then he tries an out-swinger that seams a lot / ‘And what is your father’s name?’ / By this time, he loses his patience / And tries a direct Yorker / ‘What is your caste?’” Observe the enjambments that add pace to the narrative; one can almost hear the balls whizzing past the outer edge of the bat. In the pauses between the stanzas, one might imagine the bowler walking back to his run-up — or rather, in this case, the interrogator thinking up a more pointed, and offensive, question to extract information about the hapless victim’s caste.
As India hurtles towards another general elections next year and attitudes towards caste — and religion — get more and more polarised, violence couched in language is likely to become sharper. In such a climate, Chandramohan’s poetry is like a howl, like a gunshot rudely interrupting the polite topography of English poetry in India. In its rejection and uncompromising attitude, it is like an alarm clock: “NOTA / Is the sweat of the sweeper / who cleans the ashes of the effigies / burnt after every Jantar Mantar protest,” he writes, rejecting the commerceminded, self-congratulatory culture of politics we are familiar with. It is a call to something more honest and courageous.