|
Challenging Upper-Caste Sensibilities
Set and written in a desperately poor red-light district in the Kamathipura area of Mumbai, Golpitha extended the photo- graphic realism of other important dalit writers such as Baburao Bagul. Dhasal presented the deprivation and degradation of lives in Golpitha (where he himself had grown up) by drawing upon the languages spoken within the area, including Bombay Hindi, Urdu, Telegu, and Marathi, and leavening them with the cant of the underworld, and with more literate vocabularies drawn from Persian and Sanskrit to create a poetic outburst against the status quo.35 'Man you should explode/Yourself to bits' begins one poem of the same name:
Jive to a savage drum beat
Smoke hash, smoke ganja
Chew opium, bite lalpari
Guzzle country booze - if too broke,
Down a pint of the cheapest dalda
Stay tipsy day and night, stay tight around the clock
Cuss at one and all; swear by his mom's twat, his sister's cunt
Abuse him, slap him in the cheek, and pummel him...36
Dhasal insisted that a place like Golpitha was incomprehen- sible even for radical intellectuals:
These great intellectuals are roaming with blazing torches in their hands
through lanes and bylanes, chawls and chawls,
claiming that they understand
the darkness in our huts, where even rats die of hunger
they are great like horny whores
those who don't know that there is darkness under their arses
can exhibit coquettish excellence with ease.
As is well known, Vijay Tendulkar wrote an introduction to Golpitha that registers precisely this shock of encountering the slum in poetry:
The world of Namdeo Dhasal's poetry - the world known as 'Golpitha'
in the city of Mumbai - begins where the frontier of Mumbai's white
collar world ends and a no-man's land opens up. This is a world where
night is reversed into the day, where stomachs are empty or half-empty,
of desperation against death, of the next day's anxieties, of bodies left
over after being consumed by shame and sensibility, of insufferably
flowing sewages, of diseased young bodies lying in gutters braving the
cold by folding up their knees to their bellies, of the jobless, of beggars,
of pickpockets, of holy mendicants, of neighbourhood tough guys and
pimps ... Dhasal's Golpitha where leprous women are paid the price and
fucked on the road, where children cry nearby, where prostitutes wait-
ing for business sing full-throated love songs, from where one cannot run to save his life, or if he runs, he comes back - that's Golpitha.37
Tendulkar lists 26 words and phrases he could not under- stand in Golpitha.38
Dhasal himself seemed to embody the anger of his poems. Like other Panthers, he proudly claimed to be a lumpenproletariat; in an interview, he said that he admired Frantz Fanon for his belief that the lumpenproletariat could be revolutionary if they were given political training: 'even a pimp could be committed to a revolution if he was provided political education.'39 Chitre describes how his wife Viju was terrified when Dhasal came knocking on their door in 1996: 'she felt he was dangerous, someone I should keep away from. He carried with him the ambience of an unfamiliar world, a strata of society that was unknown to us but threatened out idea of life in some way.'40 But Viju perceptively suggests that ultimately it was not Dhasal's persona or political activities but his poetry that really shook middle-class sensibilities:
At the time Namdeo started writing, his poems were the sort people
couldn't bear to go near. The words he used were the kind educated
people would never even think of. That's why most people can talk
politics with him, but they don't want to go into his poetry, because
they get scared, even now. When you ask why he's not better known,
it's because of that. He's too rough for the sensibilities of even literary
people like Vijay Tendulkar.41
|
