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