These are Drongo’s with elongated outer tail feather, black plumage with patchy glossy blue. Crimson colored eyes and crest like plumes that fall backward over the nape. Quite a common bird that is seen in and around thick forest, purely arboreal they devour insects. Like other drongos these too are delightful mimics. Namdeo Dhasal
Man’s lost his speech
His god’s a shitting skeleton
Will this void ever find a voice, become a voice?
Born in Maharashtra under dire poverty, grew up red light areas of Mumbai, Namdeo Dhasal is a unique and one of the most brilli
ant contemporary Indian poet. He burst into the scene with his collection of poems Golpitha (a red light area where he grew up…incidentally also the place that is backdrop to iconic debut movie Salaam Bombay by Mira Nair). Writes Vijay Tendulkar to the forward for the collection "This is a world where the night is reversed into the day, where stomachs are empty or half-empty, of desperation against death, of the next day's anxieties, of bodies left over after being consumed by shame and sensibility, of insufferably flowing sewages, of diseased young bodies lying by the gutters braving the cold by folding up their knees to their bellies, of the jobless, of beggars, of pickpockets, of holy mendicants, of neighborhood tough guys and pimps... " These evocative lines from the collection
... I am headless body of a rat with a pyramid rising above me
Meat and fish
Rice and eggs
Bootleg liquor and flowers of white champak
Kisses, embraces, coital postures, jewels,
And beds, and a house with a leaking roof,
And the rhythm of a lullaby.
I am squeezed: in my yearning
Feminine beauty flowers
The Mona Lisa painted by Leonardo da Vinci
In the service of A-B
Rain driving down in sheets, a dying cigarette,
A dehydrated dancing girl,
Contrasting colour harmony
I too have poverty as my own piece of land... .
Namdeo is the only Indian poet to have received a Lifetime Achievement Award from country’s apex literary institution, the Sahitya Akademi. He is the author of nine books of poetry. His works express the anguish and aspirations of dalits, their suppressed urge to emerge out of centuries of darkness and suffering to claim their just heritage and space in society. These lines from the poem Cruelty (contained in the collection Gandu Bagicha-Arsefuckers Park)
I am a venereal sore in the private part of language
The living spirit looking out of hundreds of sad, pitiful eyes
Has shaken me
I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me.
There’s no moonlight anywhere;
There’s no water anywhere
A rabid fox is tearing off my flesh with its teeth
And a terrible venom-like cruelty
Spreads out from my monkey-bone.
Release me from my infernal identity
Let me fall in love with these stars
A flowering violet has begun to crawl towards the horizon
An oasis is welling up in a cracked face.
A cyclone is swirling in irreducible vulvas
A cat has commenced combing the hairs of agony
The night has created space for my rage….
These lines from another of his poems, the wrath is astounding…
Man, you should explode
Yourself to bits to start with
...
You should carry acid bulbs and such things on you
You should be ready to carve out anybody's innards without batting an eyelid
…
Cuss at one and all; swear by his mom’s twat, his sister’s cunt
Abuse him, slap him in the cheek, and pummel him…
Man, you should keep handy a Rampuri knife
...
Launch a campaign for not growing food, kill people all and sundry by starving them to death
Kill oneself too, let disease thrive, make all trees leafless
The poem ends in these beautiful lines
One should regard the sky as one’s grandpa, the earth as one’s grandma
And coddled by them everybody should bask in mutual love
Man, one should act so bright as to make the Sun and the Moon seem pale
One should share each morsel of food with everyone else, one should compose a hymn
To humanity itself, man, man should sing only the song of man.
These lines from “Kamatipura”
Here queue up they who want to taste
Poison’s sweet or salt flavour
Death gathers here, as do words,
In just a minute, it will start pouring here.
O Kamatipura,
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 from another poem
howls and barks from time to time.
This is his constitutional right.
He lives on stale crumbs.
His mind is calloused with endured injustice.
If at a rebellious moment it becomes unbearable
and he jerks at his leash, tries to break his chain,
then he is shot.
The gaping wounds on the body will not vanish.
The marketplace of bones is flourishing.
My mind is turning into blood bathed doves.
This is what Chitre once wrote “Namdeo is a big poet in the sense Whitman, Mayakovsky and Neruda are big. But unlike them, his poetry contains large chunks of a real and dirty world peopled by have-nots and their slang. Henry Miller once said, ‘I am not creating values; I defecate and nourish’. Namdeo did precisely this for Marathi poetry. He restored its soil-cycle by feeding it the very excrement and garbage that could fertilise it for the future”.
I wrote these the other day…
An old man at Turf club
I must tell you about this man
who does post mortem of races
to anyone who cares to listen
“Horse 5 was not ridden properly, the trainer is not on job today. Look at the last run of the horse, it should win next time. Take note”
He isn’t much bothered about his audience
and walks with a gait of self importance
almost a swagger
Is that contempt for loosing punters? I wonder.
He doesn’t care
His grimy cloths and torn shoes doesn’t help the matter
though some do offer him money for winning tips
he pocket these with relish.
A week later he sought to work on this opportunity
and was seen with copies of his scrawled predictions
for a price, not many bought it
and so he is back where he belong
-giving random advice.
Recently though he has gone quiet
and went missing.
Last night I saw him shivering
on the dark corner of an abandoned bus stand.
Seems to be preparing for sleep.
Need any help old man? I ask.
He stood up brushed his tattered cloths
shrugged himself, gave me a cold stare
“Is it conscience motherfucker?
too much trouble these days”
behaved as though he wasn’t expected to be there
and walked into the night
with an intact stride his famished body could manage.
