Essays

From the 1970s onwards, the democratic tradition of Indian poetry has flowered like never before with the empowerment by democracy and subsequent emergence of several marginalised sections of society.

The Dalit Voice

Dalit poetry has been mainstreamed in Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati and has emerged strongly in Bengali, Oriya, Punjabi, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. It is no more a mere expression of the despair and indignation of the Dalit communities that had been relegated to the bottom of the caste hierarchy for over thirty centuries, but an assertion of Dalit values and of the community’s rightful claim to all the privileges democracy gives its people. The movement has produced an extremely innovative poet like Namdeo Dhasal in Marathi while it has been enriched by the contributions of scores of poets like Siddalingaiah of Kannada; S. Joseph, Vijila and M. B. Manoj of Malayalam; Sivsagar, J. Gautam, Maddoori Nageshbabu, Paidi Thereshbabu and Satish Chander of Telugu; Anpathavan, Yakkan, Bharati Vasanthan, Puthiya Matavi and Idayavendan of Tamil; Soorajpal Chauhan, Om Prakash Valmiki, Mohandas Naimishrai, Susheela Taksore, Asang Ghosh and Kusum Meghval of Hindi; Gurdas Alam, Sant Ram Udasi, Manjit Khader and Lalsingh Dil of Punjabi; Marathi poets like Baburao Bagul, Arjun Dangle, Daya Pawar, J.V. Powar, Arun Kamble, Arun Kale, Sharan Kumar Limbale, Prakash Kharat, Arun Chandra Gavli, Dinkar Manwar, Mahendra Bhavre, Asha Thorat, Meena Gajbhiye, Urmila Pawar, Jyoti Lanjewar and Kumud Pavade and Gujarati poets like Harish Mangalam, Yoseph Macwan, Mangal Rathod and Kisan Sosa, to cite only a few names. Poets like Meena Kandasamy have initiated Dalit poetry in English too.

The Dalit poets have created their own aesthetic that often goes against the injunctions of traditional poetics, using expressions that used to be dismissed as gramya (rustic), chyutasamskara (culturally corrupt) and ashleela (obscene), questioning rules like dhwani (suggestion) and ouchitya (propriety). They have brought into poetry a whole new lexicon rich with community dialects, slangs, street language and rarely known sayings and usages. They have redrawn the map of Indian literature by discovering and exploring many so far unlit areas of experience. The Dalit writers have also overcome the stagnation that was looming large over many literatures through a cleansing renewal. In this attempt they have re-visioned myths and reread the epics from the perspectives of a Sambooka or an Ekalavya, thus subverting the middle class notions of poetry and poetic language. Anthologies like Poisoned Bread (Marathi Dalit Writing, Ed. Arjun Dangle, Orient Blackswan, 2009) No Alphabet in Sight, Steel Nibs Are Sprouting  (South Indian Dalit Writing) Ed. K. Satyanarayana, Susie Tharu,  Harper Collins, 2011, 2013) , Ekalavyas with Thumbs (Gujarati Dalit Writing, Ed. K.M. Sheriff, Pushpam, Ahmedabad, 1999), The Oxford India Anthology of Malayalam Dalit Writing and The Anthology of Tamil Dalit Writing  (Various editors OUP, 2012) have brought Dalit writing into national and international attention.

An example from Malayalam:

These are what my sister’s Bible has:
a ration-book come loose,
a loan application form,
a card from the cut-throat money-lender,
the notices of feasts
in the church and the temple,
a photograph of my brother’s child,
a paper that says how to knit a babycap,
a hundred-rupee note,
an S. S. L. C. Book.

These are what my sister’s Bible doesn’t have:
preface,
the Old Testament and the New,
maps,
the red cover.

(S. Joseph, My Sister’s Bible, translated by K. Satchidanandan)

The Tribal Writers

Along with the Dalits, the tribal communities of India have also begun to claim their rights for land and life and retrieve their history from amnesia. They have realised that they were the first poets, the first philosophers, the first cosmologists, the first peasants, the first myth makers and the first artists and scientists. The vedas, the Upanishads and the epics were created by the ancient tribes. Human history has also been the history of their marginalisation and alienation from the so-called mainstream. They also have a history of struggles against foreign invaders; the Bhils of Gujarat, the Kurichyas of Kerala and the Santhals of Bihar were the first to fight the dominance of the British. It is strange that heroes like Birsa Munda, Siddhu Kanhu, Chand Bhairav, Thilak Majhi, Tantiya Bhil, Khajya Nayak and Rumalya Nayak find no place in official histories. Vinayak Tumram has defined the new tribal literature as ‘the verbalisation of the primal pain of the maimed life of the adivasis’.

The new tribal writing opposes the varna system that pushed them out of the society and upholds the ideal of an egalitarian, non-hierarchical, non-exploitative and non-violent society. Prakriti, sanskriti and itihas (nature, culture and history) equally inspire their writing and they celebrate the positive tribal values of camaraderie, sharing and concern for nature.

Besides Santhali and Bodo that have found a place recently in the eighth schedule of the constitution, languages like  Bhili, Mundari, Gondi, Garo, Gammit, Bhartari, Mizo, Lepcha, Garhwali, Pahadi, Kokborok, Tenydie, Adi and Ho have thrown up a lot of new writing that connects with the specific oral traditions through their mythopoeic imagination and yet are distinctly contemporary. Anil Bodo, Ramdayal Munda, Nirmala Putul, Mamang Dai, Paul Lingdoh, Bhujang Meshram and Vinayak Tumram – some of whom write in English – are only some of the champions of the new tribal writing of dissent and assertion.

The Nativists and post-Modernists

The nativist or desivadi writers have been celebrating cultural pluralism and questioning the hegemonic canons of the market and of the revivalists seeking to create an India that suits their projects. They feel that our geo-political and linguistic federalism is being undermined in the everyday practices of governance and reassert the need for multiculturalism and heteroglossia that have defined Indian culture through the ages. The attempts by the bandaya poets of Kannada like Chandrasekhara Patil, P. Lankesh and Siddalingaiah to retrieve the cultural memory of the Soodras, the de-Sanskritisation of Malayalam sought by poets like M. Govindan, N. N. Kakkad (in his later years) and Attoor Ravivarma, the conscious employment of local dialects by several poets in Malayalam and Telugu, the use of local history and poetic tradition provincial archetypes, myths and nature in Kadammanitta Ramakrishnan, K. G. Sankara Pillai, P. P. Ramachandran, P. N. Gopikrishnan, K. R. Tony, P. Raman Anwar Ali, Anitha Thampi, Mohanakrishnan Kalady or Rafeek Ahmed of Malayalam, Arun Kolatkar of Marathi or Kanji Patel of Gujarati, the use of orality and the evocation of rural life in the uttar-adhunik Bengali poets like Anuradha Mahapatra, Ekram Ali and Amitabha Gupta, the deliberate assertion of Tamil tradition and identity in Tamil poets like Jnanakkoothan, Manushyaputran, Vallikkannan, Pasuvayya and others, the return to Bhakti to initiate a contemporary spiritual discourse in poetry as in H. S. Shivaprakash, S. R. Ekkundi or Dilip Chitre, the evocation of Meithei history and Manipuri landscape by Manipuri poets like Y. Ibomchasingh,  Thangjom Ibopishak and Saratchandra Thiyam: these are all attempts to bring back regional hues into the cultural map of India that is turning increasingly monochrome under the pressures of market forces as well as Hindu theocrats. Several poets have now taken to blogs and are experimenting with the new possibilities offered by technology to create hyperlink poetry and multimedia poetry. Poets like Latheesh Mohan, Kuzhoor Wilson and Vishnuprasad have led Malayalam poetry in new directions. Performance poetry is also on the comeback trail spurred on by poets like Jeet Thayil, Anand Thakore, Jerry Pinto and Vivek Narayanan.

Look at a poem by Anitha Thampi:

The back aches,
as the broom sweeps
into memory, at dawn
soil-pimples sprouted,
on the front yard
of the house in slumber
eyes deep shut.

Perhaps the rain could have
eased the ground
last night.
Earthworms must have
stirred it under,
toiling, may be sleepless, to
build tiny homes of earth.

Only to be razed,
to be spread,
in finger-streaks
the broom leaves behind.
After the sweeper girl's
morning dance, 
her Bent Backstep.

The sweeping done,
dawn alights
Light falls, the eyes
of the house open
No footprint,
Not even fallen leaves,
how clean it is!

The newspaper arrives
having scoured
the depths of night, it falls
stumbling against the door.
Then she rises from clearing the shreds
So thirsty, she'd drink the coffee to its lees.

(Sweeping the Front Yard, translated by K. Satchidanandan.)

This is the period of the ‘flowering of the backyard’ – to borrow a phrase from U. R. Anantha Murthy – in Indian writing in general and poetry in particular. It is not confined to literature; it is a reflection of the democratic aspirations of the subaltern sections of the Indian people, a collective step towards fuller democracy. While these movements cannot be called post-Modern in a Western sense, they have happened after the heyday of ‘high Modernism’ in Indian poetry and share with post-Modernism certain features like the emphasis on difference, suspicion of universal generalisations, the blurring of the borders between the ‘popular’ and the ‘high’ in art, a non-atavistic retrieval of the past, rejection of Modernist solipsism and an acceptance of polyphony in society as well as in literary texts and movements.