The firebrand Marathi poet-writer and leader
of the Dalit Panthers movement succumbed to a long-drawn battle against illness.
Noted Marathi poet and one of the founders
of the Dalit Panthers, Padma Shri Namdeo Dhasal succumbed to a long-drawn
battle against illness including colorectal cancer in the wee hours of
Wednesday. He was being treated at the ICU of the Bombay Hospital in south
Mumbai. He was 64.
The award-winning writer of ‘Golpitha’ — the collection that was
named after the prostitution neighbourhood in central Mumbai where he grew up —
had a medical history of myasthenia gravis, a rare auto-immune disorder. He had
been in and out of hospitals since the diagnosis of cancer. His funeral will be
on Thursday afternoon.
“Dhasal shook up the white-collar authors and
readers by his own style of writing. He understood the power of literature to
raise a voice against atrocities on Dalits. We have lost an aggressive Dalit
leader,” said Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan.
Mr. Dhasal was born on February 15, 1949 in a village in Pune district. His
father was a butcher and he grew up in the slums of Kamathipura. While working
as a taxi driver, Mr. Dhasal was drawn towards the socialist movement in
Mumbai. His first collection of poems
‘Golpitha’ was published in 1973.
He along with others formed a radical
organisation called Dalit Panthers on July 9, 1972 inspired by the American
‘Black Panthers.’ In 1973-74, the Panthers openly challenged the Shiv Sena in
Mumbai, both ideologically and on the streets. The Pathers’ Manifesto broadened
the definition of the word Dalit. He redefined the term to include all
exploited groups, including women, irrespective of their caste, as Dalits. This
created discontent within the organisation itself and some Panthers parted ways
with Mr. Dhasal, accusing him of propagating a Communist outlook.
Sidelined by the Dalit movement, Mr. Dhasal
was welcomed first by the Congress and then by Shiv Sena. He even went on to
support the emergency and his poem on Indira Gandhi was published by then Chief
Minister Shankarrao Chavan. Though he was never a member of Sena, he regularly
contributed to the party’s mouthpiece Samana. Mr. Dhasal was active as a writer
till the very end. His last poem – on Nelson Madela – was published on January
11.
“His political journey was a disaster. But we
cannot deny his contribution as a poet,” said Subodh More, his associate from
70s, who also said that Mr. Dhasal was bitter about Indian Communists. He
always preferred to be called as a poet of ‘container carriers.’ “I am giving
my political poems in the hands of working class. Shouldn’t I hope that the
downtrodden arise with renewed rage after reading my poem? Words are like
bullets and not a pistol used in Diwali. They should be aimed at right place
and used for friends,” he wrote as an introduction to one of his poem collections.
Mr. Dhasal’s incisive poetry and equally
sharp prose encompassed a wide range of voices from Mumbai’s underbelly. He
wrote about the sexually-exploited, the ugly and savage, the criminal and the
nefarious. He shred to pieces religious beliefs but underlying it all were
cries of pain. His work earned him the Padma Shri Award and the Sahitya
Akademi’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In his “Man You Should Explode” — from
the Golpitha collection — Mr. Dhasal shredded elitist notions of religion,
philosophy and civilization, envisaging instead a world for all humanity.
Eminent poet and close friend Dilip Chitre
who called him the poet of the Underworld wrote the introduction to Golpitha.
In an essay, Chitre wrote that that the work occupied “a position equal to that
of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ not only in Marathi but in pan-Indian poetry
and it could have been written only by a Dalit.”