HYDERABAD: Literature of Resistance. It has been there since the caste system divided human race. And its context might differ in different geographical areas, but the content remains the same – of oppression, marginalisation and a seclusion that exists and increases in mental landscapes of a nation’s citizens.
Brahmanical division of caste, in India, from a long time, has forced poets and writers to let their words create a riot and demand what they otherwise have been deprived of. Noted Dalit poets/writers like Namdeo Dhasal, P Sivakami, have brought forward to the world their struggles and a wall of segregation they have to crumble everyday in order to find themselves.
But the same is constructed as immediately as it is destroyed. The works of young Indian poets like Meena Kandasamy and Chandramohan S document the social divide in a chemistry of words whose atoms break to make visible the politics behind it.
That’s how in the recently published book ‘Letters to Namdeo Dhasal’ of Dalit poet Chandramohan one finds oneself brought closer to zoomed-in portraits of agony that demand the inner eye of readers to see what’s not shown. Sample these lines by the poet:
“The streams flow to this day Cartographers always miss it.”
The lines are from the poem ‘Nangeli’. The poet describes the insult of the a woman Nangeli, who chopped off her breasts and killed herself to avoid the shame of savage practice of collecting taxes from Avarna women, who went out in public covering their breasts.
He measures her pain in the ink of a cartographer, the streams, the woman’s blood that flew when she decided to cut off her breasts. He takes the voice of both a subaltern and a feminist and chronicles what a reader’s mind even till today registers as ghastly. The shadows lurk in his mindscape for a long time making the head of humanity hang in shame.
“So we have decided to collectively Scream in this darkness”
The poet decides to shovel more coal from the belly of darkness and to light a fire. In this interplay of light and darkness one also sees the struggles of a Dalit who chooses to write and that also in English. His voice echoes louder than bells, posing a threat to those who want to silent even a whisper suppressed in broken mouths for generations.
While writing his poems, the poet also points to the ‘selective food policy’ going on in the country especially on beef. He goes ahead and names one of his poems as ‘Beef Poem’ on the so-called ‘controversial’ food.
Chandramohan with this verbal documentation of social torture plants landmines inside the readers’ minds that blast off the falsehood otherwise drummed in their heads through tools of opinion. Centuries have borne the burden of their oppression, and books by the subaltern are what will
introduce sensitive readers to the pain that Dalit community has gone through even though the poet writes:
“We are one people We are one voice.”