Ashraf Engineer
April 5, 2025
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to All Indians Matter. I am Ashraf Engineer.
A strange thing happened recently when ‘Chal Halla Bol’, a film on Namdeo Dhasal, the late Dalit poet and author, and founder of the Dalit Panther movement, went before the censor board. “Who is Namdeo Dhasal?” asked some of the officers reviewing the film. It seemed they had no idea who Dhasal was or of his contributions to literature and Dalit activism. Subsequently, the film faced delays because of objections the censor board raised.
The filmmaker, Mahesh Bansode, said the film was funded largely by crowdsourcing and submitted or nominated for 252 film festivals in India and abroad, winning 32 awards. He said the youth need to be told Dhasal’s story and that is what the film aimed to do.
Not surprisingly, the officers’ ignorance and comments sparked something of a political storm, with several parties pointing out how central Dhasal’s work had been to the Dalit narrative, especially in Maharashtra but also across India.
Dhasal gave voice to the Dalit experience. He was not just a great of literature; his words transformed into action which, in turn, transformed into inspiration. That inspiration lives on in the lives of all those pushed to the margins, exploited and forgotten.
So, since the question has been asked, let us understand who Dhasal was and why he matters.
SIGNATURE TUNE
Dhasal was born on February 15, 1949, in Pur village in Pune district’s Khed taluka into a Mahar family. Mahars have been historically discriminated against and branded ‘untouchables’. It was his experiences of this atrocity as a child that led to Dhasal using his poetry to wage war against every form of exploitation.
Dhasal’s father, Laxman, moved to Mumbai to make ends meet, working as a porter in a butcher’s beef shop in Central Mumbai. The family lived in the Dhor Chawl neighbourhood and Dhasal’s youth was spent amid drug peddlers, thugs and sex workers. These themes and experiences feature prominently in his writings.
After his schooling, Dhasal read Ambedkar and was drawn to Dr Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialism. He saw parallels between that and Ambedkar’s vision of a secular, socialist and republican India.
Dhasal was never educated beyond school but was self-educated through a voracious reading habit. Fluent in Marathi and the hybrid Mumbai lingo known as Bambaiyya, Dhasal could converse knowledgeably about unlikely subjects like cubism and surrealism.
His poetry, meanwhile, embraced the harsh reality around him. It spoke of sex workers, pimps, criminals, street urchins, mujra dancers, labourers and others. Dhasal’s poetry embraced all those used by society and then rejected by it. It seemed to be staging an uprising against the upper classes and castes, forcing them to notice the underbelly they were otherwise blind to. This is why poet Dilip Chitre christened him ‘Poet of the Underworld’.
Dhasal said: “Both my individual and my collective life have been through such tremendous upheavals that if my personal life did not have poetry to fall back on I would not have reached thus far. I would have become a top gangster, the owner of a brothel, or a smuggler.”
He once described his life thus: “I boozed. I visited brothels. I went to mujra dancing women’s establishments and to houses of ordinary sex workers. The whole ambience and the ethos of it was the revelation of a tremendous form of life. It was life! Then I threw out all the rulebooks. No longer the rules of prosody for me. My poetry was as free as I was. I wrote what I felt like writing and how I felt like writing.”
In all, Dhasal wrote nine anthologies of poems and a lot of prose, including a novel. His most celebrated work was ‘Golpeetha’, his first collection of poems, published in 1971. Golpeetha was a rough locality perceived as the hub of prostitution and gang wars.
The harsh, unfiltered language shook up the Marathi literary world and angered many upper-caste writers. Dhasal’s words were like a hammer taken to the cultural edifice. The poetry brought alive the life of Dalits. It spoke also of the red-light district – caged women preparing to sell themselves to keep at bay the hunger and insecurity that gnawed at them. Dhasal raised several questions about the women’s plight. However, his words were not laments but angry, leaping flames.
Here’s a sample translation:
The sun leaked
And was dying in the arms of the night
At such a time was I born, on a footpath
I grew up in tatters
And became orphaned
The mother who had given birth to me
Went towards the skies, to my father
Sick of the tortures of the ghosts of footpaths
To wash off the darkness of the earth
Like a fused man
I kept on moving
On the filth of the path
Give me five paise
Take five abuses
On the path to dargah
It is often thought that each of Dhasal’s works was inspired by some real-life incident. ‘Golpeetha’ was the same. Namdeo was in love, but the relationship ended because he was a Mahar. Despondent, Dhasal took refuge in liquor and the dark underbelly of Bombay – as it was known then.
On the political front, Dhasal came to be disillusioned with Lohiaite socialists, although not with Lohia himself. Subsequently, he was briefly attracted to Marxism. It seemed to fit well into his vision of widening the idea of who a Dalit was – beyond caste location to the global proletariat.
Eventually, Dhasal married Mallika, the then teenaged daughter of Amar Shaikh, a member of the Communist Party of India and who was known as ‘Shahir’ or people’s bard. Shaikh was a renowned lyricist and singer, who became a major figure during the ‘Samyukta Maharashtra Movement’ for a Marathi-speaking state.
Meanwhile, atrocities against Dalits were on the rise. On May 24, 1972, the socialist Madhu Limaye raised the issue in the Lok Sabha – which seemed to ignite a social spark. The Republican Party, meanwhile, was seen as apathetic to the plight of Dalits and soon splintered into various factions.
According to activist writer JV Pawar, he, poet Daya Pawar, social activist Arjun Dangle, Dhasal, activist writer Raja Dhale and poet Prahlad Chendwankar met at an Irani cafe in Mumbai’s Dadar locality to discuss how to deal with the situation. They decided to write a memorandum on atrocities against Dalits and launch a signature campaign. Eventually the effort coalesced into the Dalit Panthers organisation, which was inspired by the American Black Panthers movement. Its first meeting was held at Siddhartha Nagar in Bombay on July 9, 1972.
Dhasal became a leading light of the organisation, working tirelessly to build it. The Dalit Panthers would go on to play a major role in Dalit politics through the 1970s. That was also a time when youth movements, protests and demonstrations were springing up across the world. So, the first wave of Dalit Panthers protests in 1972 and 1973 fit right into that mosaic, bringing Marathi Dalit poetry to the middle- and upper-classes across India. Dhasal was one of the most prominent writers of such poetry.
Eventually, ideological cracks began to appear in the Dalit Panthers movement and Dhasal was accused of being a Marxist. He was expelled in 1974.
The Dalit Panthers’ radical anti-caste movement helped to fundamentally alter the cultural and literary space of resistance and it continues to inspire anti-caste activists born well after the 1970s. Dhasal’s words were central to the movement, challenging caste structures and influenced by traditional theatre, a Marathi art form known as tamasha and the anti-caste thoughts of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar.
Dhasal pointed out that untouchability was so entrenched in villages that it could not be shaken off even by migrating to the city. It was a life destructive to not just the body but also the soul. In one of the poems in ‘Golpeetha’, ‘Man, You Should Explode’, he zeroes in on this element of destruction:
Kill oneself too, let disease thrive, make all trees leafless
Take care that no bird ever sings, man,
One should plan to die groaning and screaming in pain
Let all this grow into a tumour to fill the universe,
Balloon up and burst at a nameless time to shrink.
However, as I said earlier, his thoughts were not confined to caste but to all those discriminated against by society. So, Dhasal reimagined sex workers and the transgender community as activists. In 1971, he organised a march of sex workers and transgender people at a time when both groups were politically invisible.
The combination of his activism and writings gave the Marathi language itself a boost. From the harshness of his words emerged a new vocabulary and grammar, which seemed to override the well-established Brahminical Marathi.
Coming back to ‘Golpeetha’, many equate it with TS Eliot’s classic ‘The Waste Land’. It is considered not just a Marathi classic but one of Indian poetry and it could only have been written by a Dalit.
Another example of this is the poem ‘Kamathipura’, part of the 1981 collection ‘Tuhi Yatta Kanchi, Tuhi Yatta?’ which translates as ‘What Grade Are You In, What Grade?’, Dhasal writes:
This is hell
This is a swirling vortex
This is an ugly agony
This is pain wearing a dancer’s anklets
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.
Here queue up they who want to taste
Poison’s sweet or salty flavour
Death gathers here, as do words,
In just a minute, it will start pouring here.
O Kamathipura,
Tucking all seasons under your armpit
You squat in the mud here
I go beyond all the pleasures and pains of whoring and wait
For your lotus to bloom.
– A lotus in the mud.
This translation depicts life and social relations in Mumbai’s red-light district of Kamathipura. In a crowd, no one is visible and the narratives of such localities have also remained largely invisible.
Dhasal is important not just because he was a Dalit or Marathi poet. You could argue that he is among the literary greats of the last century because his poetry was born from his own experience of oppression. It was brutal enough to create a new vocabulary, like I said. It was from his own life that the metaphors and imagery he left us with emerged. His words express the sentiments of all those who are exploited and desperately seek equality, liberty and justice.
For this, Dhasal was awarded the Padma Shri in 1999 and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sahitya Akademi in 2004. He was conferred the Maharashtra State Award for literature four times — in 1973, 1974, 1982 and 1983.
Dhasal died in Mumbai at age 64 on January 15, 2014, after a long battle with colon cancer.
So, to the question ‘who is Namdeo Dhasal?’, he is undoubtedly one of India’s most significant poets of the 20th century. His words gave shape to the aspiration of freedom and democracy that are so out of reach even today for millions.
It is Dalit literature in general and Dhasal’s poems in particular that capture this asymmetry at the core of our society and also what pushes so many to its fringes.
Who is Namdeo Dhasal? Perhaps this quote of his captures it best: “I enjoy discovering myself. I am happy when I am writing a poem, and I am happy when I am leading a demonstration of sex workers fighting for their rights.”
Thank you all for listening. Please visit allindiansmatter.in for more columns and audio podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at @AshrafEngineer and @AllIndiansCount. Search for the All Indians Matter page on Facebook. On Instagram, the handle is @AllIndiansMatter. Email me at editor@allindiansmatter.in. Catch you again soon.
