Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry dared the reader to look reality in the eye. It also offered a redemptive vision.
Namdeo Dhasal, the great Marathi Dalit poet, who once described himself as “a venereal sore in the private part of language”, is no more. From 1972, when his ground-breaking first collection of poems, Golpitha, was published, till his death, his poetry and politics — 1972 was also the year he founded the Dalit Panthers movement — remained that of a guerilla fighter.
In writing about Golpitha and Kamathipura, he redrew the literary map of India’s most vibrant megapolis. Dhasal’s poetry embraced not just the “scum of the earth”, but the sensual and the bodily, with its odours and effusions. But beyond the slap of its scatology and rage, the “current of blood flowing through all pronouns”, Dhasal’s poetry also contains a redemptive vision. A great pity, then, that so little of his poetry has been translated in other Indian languages, despite the valiant attempts of a few. Perhaps the new tide of interest in translations in Indian publishing will rectify that.
