Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld Poems 1972-2006

by Namdeo Dhasal, Dilip Chitre (Translator)

Namdeo Dhasal the maverick Marathi poet who hardly had any formal education. Born in 1949 in a former untouchable community in Pur Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra as a teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps prostitutes petty criminals drug peddlers gangsters and illicit traders in Bombay/Mumbai's sinister and sordid underworld. In 1972 he founded Dalit Panther the militant organisation modelled on Black Panther. The same year he published Golpitha that belongs to the tradition in modern urban poetry beginning with Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Since then he has published eight collections of poems from which this representative selection is drawn. In 2004 India's national academy of letters Sahitya Akademy honoured Dhasal with the only Lifetime Achievement Award it gave during its Golden Jubilee celebrations. Dhasal's long time friend and bilingual poet Dilip Chitre acclaimed for his translations of the seventeenth century Marathi poet saint Tukaram considers Namdeo Dhasal to be one of the outstanding poets of the twentieth century

Genres: Poetry

180 pages, Hardbound

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Namdeo Laxman Dhasal is a Marathi writer and Dalit activist from Maharashtra, India.
Poetry
1) Golpitha (1973)
2) Tuhi Iyatta Kanchi
3) Khel
4) Moorkh Mhataryane
5) Priya Darshini
6) Ya Sattet Jiv Ramat Nahi
7) Gandu Bagichha
8) Mi Marale Suryachya Rathache Sat Ghode
9) Tuze Boat Dharoon Mi Chalalo Ahe
10) Dilip Chitre translated a selection of Dhasal's poems into English under the title Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld, Poems 1972-2006

Prose
Ambedkari Chalwal (1981)
Andhale Shatak (1997)
Hadki Hadavala
Ujedachi Kali Dunia
Sarva Kahi Samashtisathi
Buddha Dharma: Kahi Shesh Prashna

Awards and honors

Dhasal received Soviet Land Nehru Award (1974) for Golpitha.
He received the Maharashtra State Award for literature in 1973, 1974, 1982, and 1983; and Padma Shri award for literature from the Government of India in 1999.
In 2004, he received Sahitya Akademi's Golden Life Time Achievement Award

Reviews

[aani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dilip Chitre brings together in this volume some 40-odd poems from the books that Dhasal published. Starting from "Golpitha", published in 1972 to "Holding your Fingers, I walk on", published in 2006, the book represents different aspects of Dhasal's literary and political career. Here is a minority voice, someone from the urban dispossessed, uprooted from his rural place, planted in the megapolis of Bombay at the age of seven to grow up in that urban underbelly that no one notices. Dhasal writes in free verse of the depravity of existence; about the people living in the urban underbelly of the city. The work concerns itself basically with that life in the metropolis which has prostituted humanity. There is this strain of defiance, rage and restlessness that runs through his poetry, also typical of the Satthothari Marathi poetry. What distinguishes Dhasal from other poets of his age is his radically innovative language and use of semiotic registers, something other Dalit poets have not been able to achieve. Such a complex use of what Chitre calls ‘bastard language’ makes Dhasal’s poetry ‘complex and barely accessible to either an average Dalit listener or a highly literate reader. Like Several other poets of his generation, Dhasal is drawn irresistibly into conversation with Ambedkar in his work.

I wish Chitre would have also written on the political positions of Dhasal that he took in the course of his literary and political career. In an otherwise brilliant introduction, Chitre is equally shy about mentioning Dhasal's strained relationship with his wife Mallika, who had published her a frank account of her life with Dhasal in her autobiography "I want to Destroy Myself". it might have been more illuminating to throw these things together with the poetry, to thus allow the poem of Dhasal's life to emerge.
But Still, A MUST READ book. A work I will never be finished with.

[Debarun · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Shed your skin, shed your skin from its very roots
Skin yourself
Let these poisoned everlasting wombs become disembodied.
Let not this numbed ball of flesh sprout limbs
Taste this
Potassium cyanide!
As you die at the infinitesimal fraction of a second,
Write down the small ‘s’ that’s being forever lowered."

[Dustin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Namdeo Dhasal is a badass.

[Saradhi Rajan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest living poets. The violence of his language coupled with his clarity of thought makes for a riveting read. Inspirational.