Panther poetry

The internationalist outlook of the Dalit Panthers has been described as fitting 'into the global mosaic of anger, protest, demonstrations, violence, and youthful revolutionary upsurge'

When V S Naipaul was researching for the book India: A Million Mutinies Now, he visited Namdeo Dhasal in Mumbai and was taken around Golpitha — the heart of the city’s red-light district. The area had given the Marathi Dalit poet the title of his first collection and Dhasal would often give guided tours to more polite practitioners of literature, such as Vijay Tendulkar and Dom Moraes. His friend Dilip Chitre described the area as a black hole, an inferno, and wrote: “Namdeo has played Virgil to many a literary Dante, though Dante was only inventing a Virgil, and Virgil was no native of the Inferno.”

 
Also a translator of Dhasal’s poetry, Chitre described it as scatological. In his poem “Man, You Should Explode”, Dhasal writes: “Man, one should tear off all the pages of all the sacred books in the world / And give them to people for wiping shit off their arses when done / Remove sticks from anybody’s fence and go in there to shit and piss, and muck it up / Menstruate there, cough out phlegm, sneeze out goo / Choose what offends one’s sense of odour to wind up the show”. This poem was included in Golpitha, published in 1973; the year before, inspired by the Black Panther movement in the US, Dhasal and his friends founded the Dalit Panthers.

 
“Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale, J V Pawar, Arun Kamble, and other members of the Panthers were poets from the slums of Bombay (now Mumbai) whose experiences of the violence of caste oppression were expressed through angry, shocking, disrespectful, but poetic language,” writes anthropologist Janet A Contrusi in her essay, Political Ideology: Text and Practice in a Dalit Panther Community. These poets also engaged in public acts of outrage such as attacking images Hindu gods and goddesses, burning the Bhagavad Gita, and engineering an election boycott. In their manifesto, they identified with movements across the world, declaring: “We will not be satisfied easily now. We do not want a little piece in the Brahmin Alley. We want the rule of the whole land.”

 

The internationalist outlook of the Dalit Panthers has been described by Chitre as fitting “into the global mosaic of anger, protest, demonstrations, violence, and youthful revolutionary upsurge that swept across France, Germany, parts of Europe, Africa, America, and Asia”. It was acknowledged by the Black Panthers, a militant group founded in 1966 to defend black citizens of the US from attacks of the police. Described by legendary FBI director J Edgar Hoover as the greatest internal security threat to the US, the Panthers were engaged in several gunfights with the cops and were accused of assassinations and violent acts.

 
By the early 1970s, however, they had become mainstream enough to have fundraisers organised for them by Manhattan-based conductor Leonard Bernstein. The party, held in Bernstein’s fashionable Park Avenue duplex was ridiculed by journalist Tom Wolfe in his essay “Radical Chic”, a term that has entered the cultural lexicon to describe the adoption of radical causes by the ultra-wealthy to upgrade their social status. Over the past couple of weeks, however, the Black Panthers have been evoked in the media and social discourse as protests against the police murder of George Floyd has roiled several cities across the US. While President Donald Trump, staring at a difficult re-election bid, has responded by dog-whistling to his white supremacist voter base, the ugly incident has also revealed the endurance of racism in the US.

 
In India, too, caste discrimination has endured in subtle and not-so-subtle forms, as revealed by the suicide of aspiring writer and activist Rohith Vemula in January 2016, and several others in the following years. The Dalit Panther movement — which split as early as 1974 before folding up in the 1980s — did not manage to achieve its aspirations. Dhasal himself seemed to betray his early radicalism by writing paeans to Indira Gandhi during the Emergency and later associating with the Shiv Sena.
 
Yet, he has continued to be a source of inspiration for a newer generation of Dalit poets, especially those writing in English, such as my friend Chandramohan, whose second volume of poetry is called Letters to Namdeo Dhasal, or Yogesh Maitreya, who has set up Panther Paw Publications to translate and disseminate works by Dalit writers. As a new mood of “protests, demonstrations and youthful revolutionary fervour” sweeps across the world, one waits with bated breath for the next radical turn in Dalit writing in India. 

 
The writer’s novel, Ritual, was published earlier this year