Dalit: 1. Ground 2. Broken or reduce to pieces generally. Molesworth’ Marathi-English Dictionary, 1975 repriny of 1831 edition.
In the early 1970s, two Maharashtrian movements achieved enough prominence to be noticed by the English language press-the Dalit Panthers and Dalit literature. By substituting the word “Black” for “Dalit” the reader can immediately understand that a phenomenon comparable to the American Black Panthers and Black literature has surfaced among the lower castes in social and literary affairs in western India. Like the American movements, the Dalit Panthers and the Dalit school of literature represent a new level of pride, militancy and sophisticated creativity. The Marathi word dalit, like the word Black, was chosen by the group itself and is used proudly; and even in the English press, the unfamiliar Marathi word had to be used. None of the normal words Untouchable, Scheduled Castes, Depressed Classes, Gandhi’s euphemism Harijan-had the same connotation. ‘Dalit implies those who have been broken, ground down by those above them in a deliberate and active way. There is in the word itself an inherent denial of pollution, karma, and justified caste hierarchy.
The Times Weekly Supplement of 25 November 1973 contained the first significant analysis of Dalit literature in English, together with translations of poetry, stories and essays, and it remains the best introduction in English to this school of literature. The Supplement also included news of the Dalit Panthers, a militant organization founded by two writers, Namdeo Dhasal and Raja Dhale, in April 1972 and already famous for its celebration of “Black Independence Day” on 15 August of that year, the Silver Jubilee of India’s Independence, and for its mass physical reaction to violence against Untouchables or Buddhists in the villages. In 1974, however, the Panther leadership split, and with the prohibition of demonstrations under the Emergency in 1975, the originazation plummetad into near obscurity as quickly as it
“We reproduce chapter IV of the just published book, ‘Untouchable to Dalit – Essays on Ambedkar movement by Eleanor Zelliot, a noted American scholar on Dr. Ambedkar and Dalit movement. (1992 Manohar publications, 2/ 6, Ansari Road Daryaganj, New Delhi-2 pp.300 Rs. 320. An old subscriber of Dalit Voice, her Ph.D thesis itself is on Dr. Ambedkar. It is a matter of shame to the Indian “intellectuals” that . foreign scholar should tell us about the greatness of the country’s tallest titan and Dalit literature.”
had risen into the limelight. It will not concern us much here, except as an example of the extreme militancy, commitment to action and profound bitterness of many of the Dalit writers.
Black literature: The Marathi press had taken notice of the new school of literature four years earlier with the publication of the editorial in the 1969 Diwali issue of Marathwada, published from Aurangabad. The lead editorial presented the issue as “A Discussion: The Literature of the Dalit: Consciousness, Direction and Inspiration”, with a drawing of the Buddha placed beside the title to indicate the debt of the movement to the conversion of Untouchables, largely from the Mahar caste, to Buddhism. Articles by M.N. Wankhade, a Buddhist who had received his Ph.D. in Literature from Indiana University: Baburao Bagul and Daya Pawar, both Buddhist writers; and Janardan Waghmare, a caste Hindu professor who studied Black literature for his Ph.D. thesis, as well as essays by several well- known Marathi critics were included, together with poems and stories from Buddhists such as Keshav Meshram, Shankarrao Kharat and Sukharam Hivrale and from other lower caste writers, including P.M. Shinde, who were associated with Dalit literature, along with the work of some of the most prestigious writers in the Marathi literary establishment. The Diwali issues of Marathi magazines are highly popular and widely circulated, and the dedication of a large part of its Diwali number by Marathwadato the Dalit movement meant that Dalit literature had arrived on the Marathi literary scene. For the first time since the seventeenth century, a school of accepted Marathi literature had arisen from a non-elite group.
Definition of Dalit: The clearest definition of dalit in its contemporary usage I have seen comes from a letter written to me by Gangadhar Pantawane, a Professor of Marathi a Milind College now at Marathwada University in Aurangabad and founder-editor of Asmitadarsh (mirror of identity), the chief organ of Dalit literature:
To me, Dalit is not a caste. He is a man exploited by the social and economic traditions of this country. He does not believe in God, Rebirth, Soul, Holy Books teaching separatism, Fate and Heaven because they have made him a slave. He does believe in humanism. Dalit is a symbol of change and revolution.
The key here is a radical rejection of the religious legitimization of poverty and untouchability by those who have suffered from either, a criteria which pretty well limits the true Dalit writer to a former Untouchable who has embraced Buddhism, i.e., a member of Mahar caste who rejected Hinduism in the movement led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and joined the Buddhist revival started in 1956, or a low-caste Marxist. The Marxist, however, would define Dalit in terms of class, generally including women, tribals, workers and agricultural labourers. There is a Marxist impact on the Dalit school: two of the best known writers are Communists, not Buddhists: (the late Annabhau Sathe, an Untouchable Mang by birth, is usually counted among Dalit writers, while. Narayan Surve, an abandoned orphan and hence casteless, is more often thought of as a proletarian poet than a Dalit writer, but his tone is much the same as that of many Dalit poets); some major Buddhist writers are interested in Marxist economic thought or in the Hindi Samantar (parallel) literature, which seems Marxist; and an exceptionally able Buddhist poet, Namdeo Dhasal, combines Buddhism and Marxism, and indeed the split in the Dalit Panthers was to some degree due to Dhasal’s Communist connections The history of the Dalit literature movement and themes, however, much more profoundly a part of the Mahar movement and the Buddhist revival.
BRAHMAN BOYS
Dr. Ambedkar, the hero of the movement and the guide to Buddhism, wrote off Marxists as “a bunch of Brahman boys” and avowed that Buddhism contained all the economic and social help necessary. The Pantawane definition of dalit will serve for most of the writers I will discuss.
While Dalit literature or, in Marathi, Dalit sahitya, as a school, a self-conscious movement, is a product of the 1960s, individual writers from among the Untouchables appear in the fourteenth century and again in the Mahar movement which began in the late nineteenth century. In the long history of Marathi literature before the 1960s, only one school of acknowledged writers included members of the lower castes-that of the Bhakti (devotional religion) saint-poets. ment-lawani Popular entertain- (ballads), pawada ( panegyric poetry) and folk-dramas called tamasha undoubtedly was produced by low castes, but was anonymous and never considered respectable literature. The Bhakti movement, begun traditionally by Dnyaneshwar in the thirteenth century, was joined by saint poets from almost all Marathi-speaking castes, including the Mahar poet Chokhamela. Two of the most popular Bhakti saints are the Shimpi (tailor) Namdeo, a contemporary of Chokhamela in the fourteenth century, and the last and greatest of the saint-poets, the Maratha-Kunbi Tukaram in the seventeenth century. Dnyaneshwar himself was an outcaste Brahman and another major figure in the Bhakti pantheon, the saint, Eknath of the sixteenth century, kept his Brahmanical standing only by virtue of miracles performed with the help of Vithoba, the God of the Bhakti movement.
The Maharashtrian Bhakti movement, like Bhakti movements throughout India, was anti-orthodox, inclusive of both women and Shudras, and based on the experience of God rather than on traditional piety or formal ritual. Its radical stance and its inclusiveness, however, were largely confined to the religious plane, and little action for social equality came from it.
BHAKTI MOVEMENT
Chokhamela himself occasionally protested about his caste. One abhanga ends:
In the beginning, at the end there is nothing but pollution. No one knows anyone who is born pure. Chokha says, in wonder, who is pure?
But in other abhangas, Chokhamela credits his low birth to past sins. Contemporary Buddhists are interested in the Bhakti movement, and indeed it is one of the few places where they can find a rational for pride in their past. Bhau Lokhande of Nagapur wrote his doctoral thesis on the influence of Budhism on the saint-poets, and several articles in Asmitadarsh discuss the attitudes and effect of Namdeo, Tukaram and others. Many believe that there was a connection between Buddhism in Maharashtra and the Bhakti movement, but the general stance of dalit writers, however, is to mourn that even the compassionate saint-poets upheld social distinctions, and that their compassion had little effect.
Throughout the period of pandit poetry following the Bhakti period and during the British period in Maharashtra, 1818-1947, the field of literature was dominated by the literate Brahman. There was some concern even in belles-letters for the problems of the lower castes, beginning in the late nineteenth century at about the time the Mahars were beginning to speak for themselves. Marathi’s first major modern poet, Keshavsut (K.K. Damle, 1866-1905) wrote poems entitled “Labourer” and “A Worker Forced to Starve”. In “New Soldier” he wrote,
Neither a Brahman, nor a Hindu, nor am I of any sect, Only those who have fallen circumscribe the universe.
and in “The First Question of the Untouchable Boy” he states at the end, after a Mahar child’s mother has explained to him that the Brahman boy cursed him because “we are low and they are high”,
How would she know that highness in this world is built on sin and glory on the degradation of others.
BURN VEDAS
Brahman reformers, chiefly M.G. Ranade and G.G. Agarkar, were writing at the same time as Keshavsut, and it was also in the last decade of the nineteenth century that documentation for a vigorous Mahar movement appears. An ex-soldier, Gopal Baba Walangkar from the Mahar caste, presented his demands for better treatment of Untouchables and an Untouchable poet, Pandit Kondiram, wrote bitterly of the condition of Untouchables, ending his long unpublished poetic complaint with an injunction to burn the Brahmanical scriptures! Earlier in that same century, a Mall (gardener) reformer, Jotibha Phule, had begun the Satya Shodak (truth-seeking) movement to attempt to reduce Brahman influence on the lower castes. Phule backed his preaching with such concrete action as a school for Untouchables and one for women, and seems to have been the first to use the word dalit in connection with caste in the term dalitodhar (uplift of the depressed). Indeed the second half of the nineteenth century was full of protest and reform, but only Keshavsut among the literary figures put social consciousness into poetry. And for the next several decades, no proper literature reflected the increasing dynamism of the Mahar protest. As Pantawane writes, “Only one Keshavsut has given expression to the outburst of social greed”.
The twentieth century saw the full blooming of the modern Marathi novel, a great emphasis on short stories which still continues, and several schools of poetry. It also saw the blossoming of the Mahar movement into a full-scale effective protest of social, religious and political disabilities, but there was little connection between Literature (with capital L) and the progress and increasing vocality of the Mahars. Kisan Fagoji Bansode of Nagpur, one of the most important pre- Ambedkar leaders, did write poetry which was collected and published after his death by his son. The newspapers of Dr. Ambedkar, the only highly educated Untouchable, which began in 1920, occasionally contained poems and stories, but these were generally read only by those in the movement. Ambedkar’s stress, however, was not only on equality in religion and power in political but also on education and cultural creativity. Most of the creativity took the form of material for the movement -jalsa ( singing message-performance), songs, poems, polemics, dozens of newspapers and although nothing that was considered Literature by the literary establishment appeared, a regard for literature, the habit of writing and a host of educated young people were well established by the time of the Buddhist conversion in 1956.
It is strange that this dynamic movement brought forth no response from Marathi writers. There is no Marathi equivalent to Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, or Sivashankar Pillai’s Scavenger’s Sons, and certainly nothing as historically important as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The reason
GANDHIAN REFORM
probably rests in Marathi literature’s commitment to realism, which meant that writers, if they wrote about social matters, wrote about what they actually knew-middle class marriage, the position of women, the problem of widowhood, or the independence movement.
This is not to say that there was no mention of the Untouchable. S.M. Mate, a professor of Marathi in Pune, wrote his first two books on the problems of the Untouchable. Asprishyavicar (thoughts on Untouchables) appeared in 1922 and in 1933. Mate coined a new word, aspirshata (the untouched rather than the untouchable) in his book Asprishatanca prashna (the question of those who are untouched). In the intervening period he devoted so much personal attention to the Untouchable community that he became known as “Mahar Mate”. In 1941, a collection of short stories entitled Upekshitance Antarang (the mind of the neglected) appeared. Mate was in touch with Dr. Ambedkar in the 1920s and I have seen a copy of one of Ambedkar’s speeches with a note to Mate on it asking for the latter’s comment. However, Mate seemed to be too radical for the establishment and not radical enough for the Mahar movement. Known primarily as a social thinker and essayist, rather than as a literary figure, he is somewhat neglected today by the Dalits and the high castes alike. I asked the Buddhist Baburao Bagul about him, and Bagul replied, “Mate was sympathetic but he showed the customs of the Untouchables as if they were ‘these strange ones””.
DON’T WANT PITY
Another Brahman writer with great social concern was Sane Guruji (1899-1950), still revered as a Gandhian reformer. In a very influential book, Shyamci Ai (Shyam’s mother) which appeared in 1935, Sane Guruji’s short stories taught courage, compassion and universal love as the true religion. In the story entitled “Devala Sari Priya” (all are dear to God), Sham’s mother tells him that he must help an old Mahar woman, and that she will gave him a bath afterward so that others will not criticize him. “To God all forms seem pure. He took the form of a fish, a tortoise, a boar, a lion. The meaning of that is that to God all forms are holy. God is in the body of the Brahman, the fish, even the Mahar ….. “. Sane Guruji put his beliefs into action and is credited with the opening of the chief Bhakti pilgrimage place, the temple at Pandharpur, to Untouchables in 1948. His courageous satyagrah at the temple door, however, took place after the Mahars had vowed to leave Hinduism, and today his pity is totally unacceptable to the Dalit school.
ANTI-BRAHMAN RIOTS
The rural school of writers, chiefly Vyankatesh Madgulkar and Shankar Patil, do use figures from the lower castes among their characters, but neither makes untouchability a major point of concern. Madgulkar’s dispassionate, sharp-eyed objectivity prevails even in his novel on the anti-Brahman riots of 1948 which profoundly affected his own family, and obviously he was not one to present an emotional protest of the Untouchable’s condition. Madgulkar’s superb stories, however, do reveal much of the life of the village Mahar, and I will compare one with the work of a Buddhist writer of rural short stories later in this article.
While the Marathi literati did not write about the Mahar movement, many did (and still do) give support to it. Among the names of those who either were marginally associated with Ambedkar or, in the current period, helpful to contemporary Dalit writers are some of the best known writers in the Marathi establishment: P.K. Atre, Mama Warerkar, Kusumagraj, D.K. Bedekar, G.T. Madhkolkar, Durga Bhagwat, Vijay Tendulkar, Dilip Chitre, Bhalchandra Nemade. But the literary establishment has generally left the passionate description of Mahar life the Untouchables themselves. Only
COMMUNITY INFLUENCE
recently have the city slums figured in fiction, and one of the best of this genre, Janavant Dalvi’s Chakra (wheel), was described by a Marathi critic as the work of an “outsider writing for outsiders”.
The “insiders” began their serious work in the late 1950s. Although most of the writers have come out of the Buddhist movement, one of the earliest, Annabhau Sathe, who belonged to the Untouchable Mang caste, was deeply influenced by Communism. Although he dedicated one book to Ambedkar and had before his death close connections with Buddhist writers, Sathe’s best known novel was not concerned with protest but with the Mang as hero. Fakira deals with the anti- British revolt of the Mangs and other low castes in the nineteenth century. A short story, “Savala Mang”, which presents the Untouchables as a Robin Hood, is available in English. At about the same time, Shankarrao Kharat’s very different short stories began to be published; “Manuskichi Huk” (the cry of humanity) appeared in P.K. Atre’s journal, Navayug, in 1958. Kharat’s book depicting the lives of all the “servants” of the village, Bara Balutedar (the twelve Balutedars) appeared the same year. Kharat was very much a part of the Ambedkar and Buddhist movements, serving as editor of one of Ambedkar’s newspapers for a time. And although he and Sathe were the only even moderately well-known writers of the time, there was enough interest in writing for a Maharashtra Dalit Literature Conference to be called by Buddhists in 1959.
CASTE-RIDDEN SOCIETY
In the sixties, the flow of Dalit literary writing increased. Conferences were held almost every year Asmitadarsh, a journal devoted to literature in contrast to the more general magazines of the movement, was founded by Professor Pantawane at Milind College in Aurangabad, one of the colleges formed by Ambedkar and the name Dalit Sahitya achieved the status of a genuine school of literature with the Marathwada issue of 1969. In the 1970s, individual volumes of poetry began to appear. Cokha Kamble’s Pimpalpan (leaf of the pimpal tree), with an introduction by Durga Bhagwat, who was soon to be President of the Maharashtra Literary Conference; Namdeo Dhasal’s Golpitha (a slum area of Bombay), with an introduction by the dramatist Vijay Tendulkar; Waman Nimbalkar’s Gao kushabaheril Kavita (poetry from beyond the village boundary);Daya Pawar’s Kondwada (cattle pen); Trymbak Sapkale’s Surung. All were published by the Maharashtra Buddhist Literature Committee, Asmitadarsh Press, or the Marxist Magova Press, with the exception of Golpitha. All were well printed and bound and most accompanied by vivid modern art-a far cry from the cheap pamphlets sold at the movement’s meeting. Gangadhar Pantawane’s books of essays, Mulyavedh (the preception of value) appeared in 1974, and a volume of biographical sketches of
“opposition writers”, including Annabhau Sathe, the folk-singer Waman Kardak, an early Nagpur writer N.R. Shende, Kisan Fago Bansode, the early Pune leader, Shivaram Janba Kamble, Shankarrao Kharat and Bandhu Madhav (Modak), a writer of the 1930s, which appeared earlier in the popular monthly Amrit will soon be published. The work of the proletarian poet, Narayan Surve, began to appear on standard M.A. reading lists in Maharashtran universities. Baburao Bagul’s volumes of the 1960s were printed, his novella, Sud (revenge), appeared, and Keshav Meshram’s work was published.
As the volumes appeared, Marathi criticism followed-praising, scorning, serious, frivolous. Dalit literature was to be found in every bookstore in the Marathi-speaking area, and had become unmistakably part of the Maharashtrain literary scene. The 1974 survey of regional literature in the Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature included Vasudha Mane’s piece on “Recent Marathi Writing”, which began
In a Society which is still caste- ridden, the new crop of writers belonging to castes and classes which were traditionally outside the pale of literature so far, has attracted attention during the past few years in Marathi literature. They come from backward rural areas, from slums in industrial towns and many of them hail from families of labourers and menials. They come with experiences hitherto unknown and unimagined by the most sympathetic and observant of writers in the traditionally literate classes. They come with a language and expression which has trampled all conventions.
The discussion of themes and expression in Dalit literature which follows is a very personal one. During a recent Sabbatical year in Pune, I read and translated as many poems, stories and essays as I could, with the help of Rekha Damle, Vidyut Bhagwat and Jayant Karve, in the time left from work on another project. I met many of the major writers; attended the Dalit Literature Conference in Nagpur and the Buddhist Literature Conference in Bombay, both in 1976; and checked meanings of words and phrases with Buddhist friends who dropped by. My expertise, however, is in the history of the Mahar and Buddhist movements; literary criticism is not my forte, and I here apologize for misunderstandings or for omitting significant work. I have tended to take my examples from several published volumes rather than search through Marathi magazines, and I have chosen themes which interest me most as a historian rather than attempting a literary analysis based on all Dalit literature.
THE LIFE OF THE LOWLY
There is, of course, a focus on the life of the lowly in Dalit literature. The style and content vary, however, from the suffering tinged with hope of the village Mahar in Shankarrao Kharat’s stories to the gaunt, stark brutality of life in the Bombay slums described by Baburao Bagul in prose and Namdeo Dhasal in poetry. To take Shankarrao Kharat first-he is himself the son of a village Mahar who did the work delicately described in British records as that of the “inferior village servant”- cutting wood, carrying messages, bringing fuel to the burning ground, working on other’s lands, dragging out dead cattle. Kharat managed an eduction, however, and had a degree in law. His childhood experience and the life he saw in the slums are the subjects of his fictional writing, although he does have other books on Buddhist and Ambedkarian subjects and is writing a history of the Mahars. His first book, Bara Balutedar, took all twelve village servants as subjects for stories, not only the Mahar, and he has continued to deal with characters from many different communities, generally the lower orders, in a dozen volumes.
CHOLERA GODDESS Three stories translated by Pramod Kale in Robert Miller represent Kharat’s treatment of the Untouchable. In “The Burden”, a Mahar kotwal refuses the help of an educated Mahar who has returned to the village, saying “You felt my pain and that’s why you held the umbrella over my head in this soaking rain. It’s all very well. You may hold the umbrella over my head now. But what about tomorrow. Rain is there. Heat is there. The burden on the head is always there. Yes”. In “The Town Crier’s Call”, the Mahar village servant has to go out to drum and announce the need for all villagers to come to be inoculated by the visiting doctor, even though he himself is so sick he falls, vomits and dies as he attempts to shout and drum. In “Inside the Village Womb”, an educated Mahar, returning to his village, remembers himself as a school boy following his father on his humiliating round of duty, and runs from the now “tumble-down houses, that empty chavadi, that collapsed shop … wet with perspiration”. In an as yet unpublished (in English) story, “Potraj” (the servant of the cholera goddess), a Mahar school boy outwits the villagers who demand that he take his father’s place in placating the goddess by arranging a “miracle”.
A Mahar story by the Brahman Vyankatesh Madgulkar is included in the same Robert Miller article. Many of the same themes that Kharat uses enter Madgulkar’s story, “Nirvana” – the separate quarters of the Maharwada at a distance from the village; the distinct greeting johar, used by Mahars to higher castes; the traditional duties; the lack of true communication between Untouchables and caste Hindus but the figure of the Old Mahar who alone does not convert to Buddhism and who dies trying to perform his duties for the uncaring village is an unlikely subject for a Dalit writer. Old mad Bavarya is honored after his death by the caste Hindus for his loyalty; the Dalit writers, including the gentle Kharat, would say that honor must come in life and that true honor is not possible without change. Pantawane has put it this way, “In short, the Dalit story’s essence is not individual commitment, but social commitment”.
BOMBAY PROSTITUTES
The city world of the Dalit is most cruel in the poetry of Namdeo Dhasal and Baburao Bagul’s prose. To set the stage, let me quote from Vijay Tendulkar’s introduction to Namdeo Dhasal’s Golpitha, in part because Dhasal’s poetry is far too complex for me to even start to translate (Tendulkar himself lists twenty-six words and phrases he could not understand). Tendulkar, perhaps the best known of the contemporary Marathi dramatists, writes:
In the calculations of the white collar workers, “no man’s land” begins at the border of their world, and it is here that the world of Namdeo Dhasal’s poetry of Bombay’s Golpitha begins. This is the world of days of nights; of empty or half-full stomachs; of the pain of death; of tomorrow’s worries; of men’s bodies in which shame and sensitivity have been burned out; of overflowing gutters; of a sick young body, knees curled to belly against the cold of death, next to the gutter; of the jobless; of beggars; of pick-pockets; of Bairaga swamis; of Dada bosses and pimps; of Muslim tombs and Christian crosses; of film star Rajesh Khanna and the gods on the peeling wall above the creaking bed; of a hashish cot and a beautiful child asleep on the edge of that cot and a tubercular father employed at a cathouse nearby still cherishing the ambition that his child may become a “sharif”, a gentleman; of hermaphrodites; of home-brew liquor; of records of philosophical Qawali; and of hot sticky blood running at the price of water at any moment; of steaming tasteless cups of bright red tea; of smuggling; of naked knives; of opium …. Dhasal’s Golpitha, where leprous women are paid the price and fucked on the road, where children cry nearby, where prostitutes waiting for business sing full-throated love songs, from where one cannot run to save his life, or if he runs, he comes back-that Golpitha. Mercy- grace-peace do not touch Golpitha. Dhasal says, here all seasons are pitiless, here all seasons have a contrary heart.
Tendulkar’s view through Namdeo Dhasal’s eyes is more complete, more picturesque, less personal, than that of the true insider. Baburao Bagul’s story of Bombay, “Death is Getting Cheaper” is as violent and as stark; his characters are Christian, Muslim, Maratha, Madrasi, Mahar, all in one way or another defeated by hopeless poverty, crushed by the system, but they are real people and one cares about them. In “Lutalut” (the looter looted), prostitutes quarrel, and the air around them is heavy with vulgarity and violence.But Bagul himself is not at all a defeatist. He has written, “Dalit Sahitya is not a literature of vengeance. Dalit Sahitya is not a literature which spreads hatred. Dalit Sahitya first promotes man’s greatness and man’s freedom and for that reason it is an historic necessity”. He told the Dalit Literature Conference held in Nagpur in 1976, “Anguish, waiting, pronouncements of sorrow alone do not define Dalit literature. We want literature heroically full of life for the creation of a (new) society”.
MANU STILL LIVING
Perhaps the contrast between Bagul, the man of hpe, the Bagul, the writer of stark despair, can be explained by yet another quotation. Daya Pawar’s report on the 1976 Dalit Literature Conference quotes Bagul this way:
Even if democracy has been placed over government power, even if Manu has been thrown into darkness, he did not die. He is living today in books, in holy scripture, in temple after temple. He lives in mind after mind. The structure of society’s arrangements are under his control. And only his loving people are at the center of power. So in India at this time there are two worlds, two powers, two life traditions, two scriptures. He who wants victory, he who wants influence, must take a role in determining the future. We must bring our role to completion with literature and art.
It seems to me Baburao Bagul’s purpose is to present the world of the lowly in all its harshness in order to make the middle class understand. Heroism and hope come in facing and acknowledging what is, in order that something better may be created.
THE SPEECH OF THE DALIT
Dalit writers at times use speech from the Mahar past or the city slum present that is incomprehensible or offensive to the high caste reader. This may be in part simply a new trend in Marathi literature; the non-Dalit novels Chakra by Jayavant Dalvi and Vasunaka by Bhau Padhye were considered by many to be obscene. But it is true that some words and images genuinely represent the Mahar past. Dhasal most of all, but also many other writers, use phrases that the average city dweller does not understand. There seems to be a certain pride in this, a lack of the sense of dual pressures of speech depicted in a poem of Arun Kamble which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement Dalit issue, translated by Ga Deshpande:
Bone-chewing grampus at the burning ghat: permanent resident of my own heart: with the weight of tradition behind his back yells: Saddling bastard I tell you, stutter with our tongue! Picking through the Vedas, buttering his queue, the Brahmin teacher at school bellows: Speak my pure tongue whoreson! Now you tell me which speech am I to tongue?
The Dalit poet makes an effort t use images as well as words which come from his own experience. I his introduction to a collection poems, Kondwada, Daya Pawa reflects on his growth as a poet. A first, after his move to the city, h wrote romantic poetry, and the when he realized that he was being untrue to both past and present, tha he had no acquaintance with the “holy gourd” he had used as an image that his beloved slept on the ground and had no pillow to stain with tears he stopped.
My uneasiness grew. I was now satisfied with the kind of poetry that I had published. I read poetry continually from the collections of respected Marathi poets. Mardhekar is understood to be the sculptor of the new poety. At that time I was not touched by Mardhekar’s poetry nor did he seem to me to be different. Men had been made insects by the machine age, so he thought, but the machine age had not touched me. Actually we were waiting for the machine age. We were convinced that our slavation was in the machine age. I thought that the angry generation coming after Dilip Chitre was controlled by “form”. I thought their poetry was vapid, caught in a tangle of images, and I could not write such poetry. I think it well that I did not get a B.A. or M.A. in Marathi at a university. Otherwise I would have written such flaccid poetry swollen with images. Muktibodh, Vinda Karandikar, Kusumagraj-I liked the progressive thought in their poetry. I was mute until the poetry collections of Narayan Surve, Thus I Am Brahma, My University, appeared. Surve’s writing style, his straightforward language, told me much …
Nevertheless, few Dalit poets apart from Dhasal, break many Marathi poetic convention. I could wish for some experimentation in carrying over the “low” Mahar cultural tradition of the past, of tamasha, of jalsa, but this is found only in the comparatively unsophisticated poetry of the folk- poet, Waman Kardak (1972). Pawar has written, in prose, more vividly than any other Dalit writer of the cultural influences of his childhood the difference between the music and literature in a Brahman and in a Mahar home, his father’s band, his boyish imitations of tamasha, the mime and music of the nomadic Rayrandi who stayed in the Maharawada, the jalsa groups inspired by the Ambedkar movement who would sing such things as “The child of a Mahar is very, very clever; in all the world you will not see his like. Come on, look up, look up!” But even Pawar does not use these rhythmic influences in his poetry.
True, there is no Freud, or T.S. Eliot fallout in Dalit poetry. But on the subjects, a certain straightforward quality, the attitudes, some special words, and the references to history and myths from a dalit point of view, mark Dalit poetry as dalit-not its inherent structure.
BLACK LITERATURE
Dalit writers are extremely interested in Black American literature and see their own movement as a parallel phenomenon. Gangadhar Pantawane began his major essay on Dalit literature with a quotation from James Baldwin in English:
“Our The words a peculiar institution describe the untouchability created by the caste system …. The Negro should not change the colour of his hide, nor the Untouchable his caste. There is no difference between the placeof the Negro in America and the step or level of the Untouchable in India. And so for a long time both were caught in the whirlwind of self-denigration and self-hatred. Both were confined in the prison of fatalism. To prolong this imprisonment, the whites found authority in the Bible’s myths and symbols, and the clean castes in the Vedas and Manusmriti.
LOVE POEM
There is an occasional reference to the Black world in Dalit literature, such as in Daya Pawar’s poem entitled “Harlem,” which is a love poem to his wife with full realization of the life-destroying world around them. There seems, however, to be no imitation of Black literature and its two strongest fields, autobiography and drama, are not yet developed in Dalit literature . A Buddhist amateur playwright, however, B.S. Shinde, who has previously produced plays based on Buddhist legends with an amateur caste in the off-hours of the
PROSTITUTES
prestigious Bal Gandharva theatre in Pune, is fascinated by James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie and would like to do a Marathi verson of it. But the chief influence of American Black literature is as support, as proof that a group similar to the Dalit can become militant, can become creative, and can progress in a hostile society.
This section and anti-traditionalism might as well be started off with lines from the most condemnatory of the poets, Namdeo Dhasal. Even the best of orthodoxy is unacceptable to him:
Their traditional pity is no better than the pimp on Falkland Road. and even well wishers get not sympathy:
The very intelligent people … those who don’t even know the darkness under their asses they should poke their noses like fifty-cent prostitutes even today at men who are burning.
Daya Pawar is equally condemnatory, though less scurrilous, in “Sanskriti” (culture):
In hut after hut, total darkness. Then the siren went off. From the fourteen story Damodar comes-what’s this-a gleam of light
What do you say: They’ve got a permit for light. Sh! Sh! Don’t peep into their windows They’ve taken shelter under thir beds. Generation after generation has arranged the plastic pastime of that Great Divine Culture. Now then they stuff balls of cotton in their ears. In huts after hut, whimpering, the weeping of a broken heart disturbs their peaceful life.
And in “He Mahan Desha: (O great country), he ends:
O great country how can you be called great? You don’t see the charred waste burning at your feet. Like Nero you play the sarangi and sing sweetly of the Himalayas.
BURN SCRIPTURES
Manu, the Brahmanical law-giver, is seen as the arch enemy. Indeed the earliest recorded modern Mahar poet, Pandit Kondiram, cried out for the burning of the Brahmanical scriptures way back in the late nineteenth century. The Manusmriti was actually burned at the Mahad Conference of the Depressed Classes in 1928, at the hands of a Brahman who worked closely with Dr. Ambedkar. It was a gesture which shocked (and still shocks) many pious Hindus. Waman Nimbalkar uses the image of burning in a reversed way in “Itihas” (history) which begins
O heirs of Manu! For millennia we have watched our own naked evening. In half a dozen huts on the village
boundary our countless bodies have been burning, set
afire by your feeble thoughts. (Translated by Grahman Smith and Eleanor Zelliot)
Shashikant Lokhande puts in this way:
When you try to heat the bread of your sweat or pull up the lungoti of your pain they slash at your buttocks, yours breast, your hand, they bind on your neck the burden of Manusmriti.
Daya Pawar, in “Ye Hemangi” (come, gold-skinned one), is more optimistic:
By the mixture of our blood Manu’s wall will be demolished brick by brick.
The great Hindu epics are seen quite differently from the Dalit viewpoint. The Mahabharata calls up not an image of heroism and performance of duty but the figures of Karna, the illegitimate son of Kunti, who was scorned by his Pandava brothers for his unknown parentage, and Eklavya, the low born, who cut off his thumb at the command of the guru he had followed from far, les the might triumph over the guru’s favorite, Arjuna, in archery. The Ramayana evokes the image of Shambuk, who was killed because he heard the Veds, not the models of the perfect king Rama and the perfect wife, Sita. Eklavya and Shambuk as archetypal symbols of suffering appear in dozens of poems, though these references to minor epic characters are often tucked in the poetry without explanation, as in Waman Nimbalkar’s “Kavita” (poem) which ends with a reference to the Buddha through the use of one of his names, Tathaga tha, and to Eklavya as an oath of resolve:
Gathering the sky in my eyes, I cast my glance forwards, -and so on to Tathagatha.
On the horizon I will erect the rainbow arch of mankind. I am conscious of my resolve.
The worth of the blood of Eklavya’s broken finger —
This is my loyalty. I will not barter my word.
I stand today at the very end of the twentieth century.
Tryambak Sapkale also uses the image of Eklavya as strength:
Round earth. Steel oar in my hand but no oarlock? O you ideal disciple Eklavya! Give me your slashed finger for support.
Waman Nimbalkar expresses the attitude toward the epics in general:
O Gods of Words! You have creaed great epics- those eating gold, walking with the wind, wearing gold-bordered cloth- heaps of words were dampened in leaves, flowers, fragrance, the intoxication of Madira. This dire, crushed life of the outskirts of the village never became the subject of your poetry.
CRUSHING HINDUISM
Even the beloved Maharashtran saint-poets are not free from scorn in the poetry of the Dalit. Daya Pawar’s poem “Pay” (legs or feet) refers to the Rig Vedic hymn of creation, the story of Eknath giving water to a donkey, and the legend of Dnyaneshwar, who produced the sacred Vedas from the mouth of a bufallo to show that these sacrosanct texts should not be confined to the high castes. The imagery of “Pay” shows Hindu culture as a pyramidical structure, crushing those on the bottom, and ends:
The legs of those born from the feet were snapped like green buds. Everyone says: “The safety of the pyramid is worth fifty legs. O come on, bear a little pain”.
They paint the pyramid’s pinacle. your name is not mentioned. Someone cuts the ribbon. The pitchers of Ganges water come and are poured into the mouth of a donkey.
If the water vessel is filled, they say Dnyaneshwar’s buffalo will come!
But the picture is not entirely negative. Even in the same poet one can find both condemnation of Hindu culture and the demand for a place in it. Daya Pawar in the introduction to the collection which contains the above poem wrote: “I am intensely conscious of the chasm in Indian cultural life. If my poetry is sacrificed for the removal of cultural duality, then that’s all right. I came to that conclusion and I wrote:
Like the elephant leading the charge on the pike-studded doors of the fort, let us die laughing”.
Tryambak Sapkale puts it another way in a poem addressed, As I read it, to Mother India. Your whole life you were simply a woman; You never became a mother. Your hunger for motherhood I can satisfy Would you be a mother? I am ready to be adopted.
and ends his collection with an exquisitely wrought poem so simple it is difficult to put into interesting English:
Don’t despair.
This day will depart too.
Now, this day is pregnant with day.
Our day is not far away. Look, from the day is born the day.
And Waman Kardak, the folk poet, sings: “We will burn, but we will light the earth”!
BRAHMIN CULPRIT
The way in which Dalit writers evoke their own past, the references to “Babasaheb” Ambedkar and to Buddhism, the use of recent events, are the most interesting themes at least as far as the historian in me is concerned. Although most of the poets are educated, many are city- dwellers, and some have entered at least the lower reaches of middle- class comfort, the Mahar past is not far from even the young generation. Arun Kamble’s poem, translated by Gauri Deshpande in the 1973 Times Weekly Supplement, is addressed to the Brahman:
If you were to live the life we live (then out of you would poems arise).
We: kicked and spat at for our piece of bread.
You: fetch fulfilment and name of the Lord.
We: down-gutter degraders of our heritage
You: its sole repository and descendants of the sage.
We: never have a paisa to scratch our arse
You: the golden cup of offerings in your bank. your bodies flame in sandalwood
Ours you shovel under half-tumed sand.
Wouldn’t the world change, ‘nd fast, if you were forced to live at last this life that’s all we’ve ever had?
Although the Brahman, as originator and protector of the caste hierarchy, is still the arch-enemy to the Dalit, the dominant agricultural caste, the Marathas, who are far more closely associated with the village Untouchable, are also seen as tormentors. Prahlad Chendwankar’s poem, translated by Gauri Desphande in the Times Weekly Supplement, attacks the Maratha headman, the Patil:
When Patil sent for me, I went “Siddown”, said, yet ground was wet.
Threw at my head torn sacking jute still there I stood quite mute.
Patil cracked betelnut yelled, ‘why aint this runt bloody scum, dancing on boards to fill its gut’.
Paunch-scratching, spewed forth filth-abuse I went on standing mute rooted still within my boots. Wonder now, why did I stand hadn’t eaten no fodder at his father’s hand.
Dr. B.R. Babasaheb Ambedkar receives much less direct attention in sophisticated Dalit literature than in the movement literature.
Often the reference is to a ‘sunflower- giving fakir’, our sannyasi, or to the sun which has set. J.V. Pawar, in a poem which appeared in Magowa, uses the image of the conference at Mahad in 1928, which many see as the turning point in Ambedkar’s movement, to turn from despair to militancy:
Even the sea has a shore. Why doesn’t my grief have limits .
A mantra was given to start some Mahad …
I have become an ocean.
I stand erect, I roll like the ocean,
I have started to build your tombs …
The literature which does deal directly with Ambedkar and the conversion to Buddhism seems less sophisticated, more in tune with the earlier movement literature. A rather charming story by Waman Howal in the Diwali issue of Asmitadarsh in 1974 illustrates this. In “Angara” (sacred ash), an old Mahar village devrishi is converted to Buddhism and gives up all his magic. But when pressed by the villagers, he rather scornfully throws ordinary ash from his stove on the sufferer, and laughs quietly
underneath his moustache. It is doubtful if a story like this would be accepted by any but the journals associated with the Ambedkar movement. (Later: I am now not sure about this point)
A recent novel on the life of Buddha’s wife, Yasodhara, by a Buddhist has been well received by the Marathi press, but most Dalit writers deal as obliquely with Buddhism as they do with Ambedkar. I asked Baburao Bagul for an explanation, and he said something to the effect that experience must be completely absorbed and understood before it can become literature. He also stated that Dalit literature began with the Buddhist conversion, that only that release from the psychological imprisonment of untouchability freed the poet, the writer, to create. Daya Pawar’s poem “Jhad” (tree) places this belief in the symbolism of Hindu and Buddhist trees:
This tree I saw mangled with sorrow had roots as deep down as the Bodhi-tree’s.
But the Bodhi-tree flowered, and this tree through all seasons was barren.
Recent violent events involving Buddhists and the Dalit are quite often used as subjects for poetry. The Worli riots of 1974 which saw Dalit Panthers and Buddhists opposed to their Maratha neighbors and the poli ‘evoked a long poem from Daya Pawar. It ends with the image of a soldier of the Mahar Battalion (founded at Ambedkar’s plea in 1942) lying in his Worli room filled with tear-gas:
Mahar-battalion Kamble, legs lost in service,
stares in the dark with gas-burned eyes.
Who did I fight for there on the border?
Why was | crippled for this country?
The question pierces like the scream from the soul.
Now his hand gropes near the pillow for the long-missing gun.
The blinding of the Buddhist Gawai brothers in January 1975, during a ‘dispute with Marathas in a village, brought forth a bitter poem from the usually gentle Spakale which has been translated by Vidyut Bhagwat:
The other day I heard your speech-
you condemned America for bombing Vietnam-
Workers of the World unite you roared.
The next day your brothers condemned Russia
and wept for the Hungarians Gawai brothers lost their eyes.
not a tear | saw in your eyes.
No protest meetings.
Just a small news in a couple of dailies and everything is so peaceful! Quiet! Quiet!
Such internal matters as splits and quarrels among the Buddhists themselves also receive attention. The most explicit example I have seen is from the folk-poetry of Waman Kardak. I heard him sing this song at the Nagpur Dalit Literature Conference, and the young Dalit Panthers in the front rows of the audience demanded that he sing it over and over again, hardly letting him stop for breath. “Bhim” in the poem is a reference to Ambedkar through a shortened version of his name, and
DO DALIT WRITERS PROTEST TOO MUCH?
“Mother Bhim” follows an old Marathi convention of feminizing a deity or a saint to evoke the sense of creation and protection:
All are children of Mother Bhim.
I weave the garland of unity. Build this nest again.
Oh become a friend of Waman.
On the stem of the heart engrave the name of Bhim, live happily here is unity.
That headline is from the Times of India, 30 May 1976, and although the nows story itself is sympathetic, the editorial lead reads: “It is inevitable for early Dalit literature to have given expression to the torments of an oppressed people. But one note of continued protest and indignation is beginning to pall…..and writers should give a new direction to the Dalit literature movement”. Most Dalit writers would not agree. One of the best received poems spoken in an open session at the Nagpur Dalit Literature Conference contained these lines:
In a song full of hope in the evening there is no meaning.
This is a time to breathe battle!
It was recited by the late Mina Gajbhiye, a very young woman, and so far the only feminine poet highly regarded in the new Dalit school, But there are also signs of new sorts of creativity. At the same time that the Dalit school appeared, a Mahar poet who does not belong to the Dalit school, who writes brilliant lyric and nature poetry, who refuses to mention caste, achieved status as a major Maharashtrian poet using the pen-name of “Grace”. The urge to creativity is there among the formerly inarticulate lowly. Their voices may- find different instruments in the future, but they will not be stifled.
NAGAS TOWARDS AD 2000 Dr. M M THOMAS
The just dismissed Governor of Nagaland on Naga culture, politics and Civil Society Special Pre-Publication Price Rs. 60 1992 pp 220 Centre for Research on New International Economic Order No.1, First Street, Haddows Road, Madras-600 006.
