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The Dalit Panther Manifesto struck a similar note:
We will not be satisfied easily now. We do not want a little place in
the Brahman Alley. We want the rule of the whole lane. We are not
looking at persons but at a system.
The analysis offered by Dalit Panther is more detailed and precise than that of Black Panther, but what is also important is the relationship with the latter claimed by them:
Due to the hideous plot of American imperialism, the Third Dalit
World, that is, oppressed nations, and dalit people are suffering.
Even in America, a handful of reactionary whites are exploiting
Negroes. To meet the force of reaction and remove this exploitation,
the Black Panther movement grew. From the Black Panthers, Black
Power emerged. The fire of the struggles has thrown out sparks
into the country. We claim a close relationship with this struggle. We
have before our eyes the examples of Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa and
the like.
Such analogies keep alive the equation of racism with colo- nialism, while also offering another analogy between racism and casteism.28 Therefore the Dalit Panther's simultaneous invocation of the analogies between colonialism and race on the one hand, and caste and race on the other indicated that dalits continued to be oppressed in free India, and could claim a kinship with both the Blacks in the US, and colonised peoples in the rest of the world.29 As Manan Desai thought- fully observes, the forging of such connections 'fostered the ability to imagine the dalit subject outside of the liberal dis- course of the Indian nation-state and the restrictive language of the caste system itself.'30
Beyond political manifestos, the Dalit Panthers and Black Panthers also famously shared poetic sensibilities. Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) declared that
Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
...
We want 'poems that kill.'
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons.31
Whether or not dalit poets were aware of Black writing, their poems can be read as answering such a demand for 'poems that kill':32
OK
We're turning our backs on you right now.
Right now we're becoming assassins
Taking off even the doors as we leave,
Running war-tanks over you
Spit on you; I Spit on you; Spit! Spit! Sky Us. Sky. Us.33
So writes Namdeo Dhasal, the most accomplished and important of the Panther poets. According to Dilip Chitre, himself a poet and Dhasal's translator, Dhasal's first volume of poetry, Golpitha (1972), 'burst like a bombshell upon the placid precincts of Marathi Poetry' and offered a militant challenge to upper-caste sensibilities, literary and cultural.34 Like other dalit writings of this period, this volume offended established literary norms in part because it relentlessly described the dirt and filth, sexual degradation and squalor that were forced upon dalits. Chitre writes: 'To understand Dhasal's poetry's raw power, it's helpful to think in terms of the initially convul- sive effect the black blues had on US 'good taste'.'
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