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Here she points out that it may be easier to acknowledge the existence of a place like Golpitha than to come to deal with the challenge it produces, through the poetry of Dhasal, to accepted norms of civility and literature. A recent admirer of Dhasal writes that upon reading this poetry, 'One's hair stands on end. One feels slapped and spat upon.'42 Dhasal conveys the dalit experience of being constantly 'spat on' by positioning the reader as the one who is being violently assaulted. Of course, the further the reader is from the world of Golpitha, the more violent this assault will be.
In KANYADAAN, it is apparent that Tendulkar wants to induce in the audience a similar experience of being spat upon - it is not just the Devalikar family, but the audience who feels shaken, provoked and angered by Arun. Arun deliberately espouses the identity of a lumpenproletariat, as Dhasal did; both he and other characters talk about his actions and his speech as an assault on upper-caste sensibilities. But the key question is: does Arun allow the audience to understand the daily dalit experience of being spat on, or does he simply confirm their existing prejudices about caste? In other words, how are they positioned? I should clarify that I am not suggesting that Dhasal or others like him were actual models for Arun, al- though such a suggestion has often been made, mostly casu- ally. I am arguing, instead, that Tendulkar's own engagement (and indeed non-engagement) with such poets and activists profoundly shapes his portrayal of Arun. In other words, what is important for us to understand are not precise parallels be- tween Dhasal and Arun, but the fact that such a play could not have been written without Tendulkar's own placement within a new poetic and political discourse enabled by the Panthers.43
I will return to this question later, for the moment, let me note that in KANYADAAN the terrain on which such discussion takes place is neither politics nor poetry but sexuality. Of course, sexuality was a key component in the writings of Dhasal and others who not only evoked sexual acts and sexual bodily parts as metaphors to convey the experience of exploitation, but also drew attention to the sexually and economically exploited female dalit body. The prostitute and the mother, polarised in the upper-class imagination, coalesced in dalit literature. Dhasal's generation of dalit writers were also remarkably open about their own personal lives. Dhasal admitted to frequenting brothels, drinking heavily, and imbibing opium and hashish: 'It was Life! ...My poetry was as free as I was.'44 His wife Mallika Shaikh, daughter of the communist folk singer and poet Shahir Amar Shaikh, and herself a poet, was equally frank, writing about her tur- bulent relationship with Dhasal, the difficulties of coping with his womanising and drinking, and the stress caused by his political life.45 In V S Naipaul's account of his conversa- tions with Mallika, what merges is a deeply conflicted rela- tionship with her own self as a result of her deep love and deep mortification at her own dependence upon Dhasal.46 In one of her poems, she writes:
In her breasts and thighs
You seek the meaning of the world
Or seek the answers to your questions
Or amusement or change
Wife, mistress, and whore
What is the difference between these? Only of numbers ...47
While these lines are not addressed to a dalit lover, they indicate the heavy burden ('the meaning of the world') that is borne by inter-caste relationships.
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