Blood, gore and beauty POETRY - Navayana

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P O E T R Y
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At a time when most
respectable publishers
think it unwise to bring
out a single volume of
poetry in a year, to publish
four volumes of poetry
in a season would appear
to be an act of reckless
folly. It is also an act that deserves to
be celebrated by all who believe that
the future of literature should not be
entrusted to the purveyors of chick-lit,
wellness and self-help. In publishing
the anthology, Waking is Another
Dream: Poems on the Genocide in
Eelam, edited by Ravikumar, as well as
Namdeo Dhasal’s A Current of Blood,
N. D. Rajkumar’s Give Us This Day A
Feast of Flesh, and Meena Kandasamy’s
Ms Militancy, Navayana has chosen to
embrace literary practices that have
been marginalised by mainstream
publishing. This marks an extension of
its commitment to constituencies that
are in danger of being trapped within
conventional explanatory frameworks,
testimonies that are slipping beneath
the radar of public discourse, and voices
that are too easily subsumed within
some glib narrative of resistance. A
young alternative publishing house,
Navayana combines its dedication to
an Ambedkarite perspective on Indian
society with an infectious enthusiasm
for contemporary cultural theory.
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The carefully curated and elegantly
designed Navayana poetry series
brings back into circulation a selection
of poems written between 1972 and
2006 by Namdeo Dhasal, the poet
of Mumbai’s underbelly. Dhasal
scandalised and revolutionised the
world of Marathi poetry in the 1970s
with his obscenity and expletive-laden
chants: they were powered by the vibe
of the twilight zones of the metropolis,
the tough back alleys and secret dives
of the red light district. Translated
and placed editorially in context by
the late poet, film-maker and editor
Dilip Chitre, some of Dhasal’s poems
still ring out:
Blood, gore
and beauty
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A Current of Blood
By Namdeo Dhasal
Selected and translated from the Marathi by Dilip Chitre
Navayana, New Delhi, 2011,120 pp., Rs 180
ISBN 9788189059385
Waking is Another Dream: Poems on the Genocide in
Eelam
By Cheran, V. I. S. Jayapalan, Yesurasa, Latha, and Ravikumar
Edited by Ravikumar
Translated from the Tamil by Meena Kandasamy, Sascha
Ebeling, and Ravi Shanker
Navayana, New Delhi, 2011, 68 pp., Rs 180
ISBN 9788189059378
Give Us This Day A Feast of Flesh
By N. D. Rajkumar
Translated from the Tamil by Anushiya Ramaswamy
Navayana, New Delhi, 2011, 112 pp., Rs 180
ISBN 9788189059330
Ms Militancy
By Meena Kandasamy
Navayana, New Delhi, 2011, 64 pp., Rs 150
ISBN 9788189059347
RANJIT HOSKOTE
O heartless rock in heaven!
O lover of dawn!
O illustrator of the peopled
world! O distortion of fire!
O vast body continuously
smouldering round the hours!
O owner of the finest glowing
silk!
O eternally potent virile seed, do
I know you?
(‘I Slew the Seven Horses of the
Chariot of the Sun’; A Current of
Blood, p. 82)
While Dhasal’s poetry retains
historical interest, given its point of
origin in a major crisis of caste politics
and metropolitan culture in the India
of the late 1960s and ’70s, much of it
seems exhausted today. Occasional
lines and images remain electric
with disruptive force (“Sparrows of
darkness clustered on the eyes are
flying away”, and “Is that a tree, or a
woman laden with many branches”)
but far too many of Dhasal’s poems
rely on shock tactics that are long past
their use-by date, on overwrought
anaphora and the obtrusive rhetoric
of the deep drive of aggression.
Dhasal has had a meteoric literary
career; his political career has been a
peculiar one. A co-founder, in 1972,
of the militant youth organisation, the
Dalit Panthers, he rapidly fell out with
his colleagues over the relative emphasis
to be placed on Ambedkarite thought
and Marxist-Maoist doctrine. During
the Emergency, he gravitated to the
Congress, then dominated by Indira
Gandhi. This is one of the reasons
why, despite the aura surrounding
him, he is represented only by a single
poem in the benchmark anthology of
Marathi Dalit literature in translation,
Poisoned Bread (Orient Longman,
1992), edited by his fellow writer
and Dalit Panther, Arjun Dangle. In
the 1990s, Dhasal went further down
the path of political compromise,
inaugurating an association with the
nativist and Hindutva party, the Shiv
Sena—an inconvenient fact that his
apologists would prefer to gloss over.
Indeed, many of his literary colleagues
refuse to address the obvious selfcontradictions
in his trajectory.
Consider the following passage of
self-disclosure, from the appendix,
‘Namdeo on Namdeo’, in A Current
of Blood. Having asserted that, “[f]
rom the very outset, I was clear in my
mind that our organisation—Dalit
Panther (sic)—was not Marxist”, he
goes on to exculpate himself for his
collaboration with the government
during the Emergency in the following
bizarre terms: “The support I gave
later to Indira Gandhi was according
to the ideal of the Communist Party
of India and because I rationally
understood the situation. I wanted
revolution. I wanted to overturn the
government.”
Having secured himself within this
extraordinary logic—his revolution
evidently having nothing in common
with Jayaprakash Narayan’s ‘total
revolution’ against Mrs Gandhi’s
government—Dhasal continues:
“In the event, Mrs Gandhi ordered
all the pending cases and charges
against me and the Dalit Panther
(sic) to be withdrawn, including
those concerning the caste riots
in Worli in Mumbai. Mrs Gandhi
urged me repeatedly if she could
do anything more for Dalit Panther
(sic) or me. However, I felt awkward
and embarrassed—almost guilty—to
ask. I did no bargaining with her.
All I wanted was a revolution.”
(A Current of Blood, pp. 114-115)
Has Dhasal been charmingly naive
or astonishingly confused; is he a
fantasist, or merely disingenuous?
Was he a pawn in the games of
Congress and the Sena, or was he
simply unable to resist opportunity?
It is important to read Dhasal today,
not only because of the place his
poetry occupies in Indian literary
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g e n d e r s t u d i e s
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history, but also because his political
career is a tragic cautionary tale.
Waking is Another Dream is a
courageous act of testimony by five
Tamil poets to the genocidal war
against the Tamil population of Sri
Lanka. Edited by the poet, critic and
legislator Ravikumar—who is also cofounder
of Navayana—this anthology
recalls us to the horror, anguish and
continuing suffering of the victims of
the war between the Sri Lankan State
and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE). Just as importantly,
it invites us to consider the fraught
(and perhaps to many readers outside
Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu, unknown)
history of writings by Tamil poets and
intellectuals in response to the ethnic
riots of 1983 and the accelerating
conflict between the Sri Lankan State
and Tamil insurrectionary groups
in the north and east of the island
republic. In the intensely latticed
world of the present, no crisis can be
someone else’s alone, no predicament
can exclude us. As Cheran writes, in
‘The Aftermath of the Apocalypse’,
transposing military violence to
the cycles of ecological collapse
(translated by Meena Kandasamy, with
inputs from Sascha Ebeling):
I may be across the seas
yet it rained blood
on my computer screen.
In this melting river engulfing me
a colossal iceberg floats.
On it, with wet feathers,
a wounded seagull.
(Waking is Another Dream, p. 24)
Powerful liminalities, threshold
moments of transit and transformation,
are at play in the poems of N. D.
Rajkumar, translated by Anushiya
Ramaswamy under the title Give Us
This Day A Feast of Flesh. These are
poems that unsettle and provoke us,
carry us into a forest of the imagination
dominated by devil mothers and
shamans in a trance, the god of the
cemetery and vampire magicians: a
world that is not the fevered product
of hallucination, but is really the
kingdom of our own desires and
hatreds, our struggles for power and
appeals for love. Rajkumar writes, his
images visceral and hypnotic, nectar
mixed with poison:
Dancing cobra eyes
Twist into the body
Striking at the corner
Of the soul asleep,
Sticking the tongue out
On those full moon nights
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Drunk with the saliva
Sucked from the dripping mouth,
My poetry lies
Like fragrant flowers
With a tiny viper at their heart
Waiting to strike.
(Give Us This Day A Feast of Flesh,
p. 20)
Anushiya Ramaswamy provides, in
her essay, ‘Where Reason is Dazzled and
Magic Reigns Supreme’, a theoretically
sophisticated reading and meticulous
contextualisation of Rajkumar’s work
within the contexts of Dalit politics,
Tamil poetry. She engages with his
poetry through a productive mode of
critical ethnography, which, far from
reducing the artist to an illustration
for some abstruse doctrine, permits us
to understand his art as the complex
precipitate of his negotiation with
multiple inheritances of conflict,
multiple social and cultural arenas.
“Rather than be tempted into reading
Rajkumar as a dalit poet,” writes
Ramaswamy, “we owe him the respect
of reading him as a poet capable of
showing us our deeply unequal world
as a fabulous construction.” (Give Us
This Day A Feast of Flesh, p. 98)
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In Meena Kandasamy’s Ms
Militancy, we encounter a series of
self-dramatisations, each the result of
an acute consciousness of having to
address the pressures of perception
that attend poets, women, and poets
who happen to be women. Sometimes,
this self-consciousness summons
forth a generic response, cast in the
approved form of resistance essayed
by numerous women poets who draw
on subversive mythic exemplars while
affiliating themselves to heterodox
woman saint-poets from the Bhakti
teaching lineages. In this spirit,
Kandasamy writes ‘Should you take
offence...’, which serves this collection
as a Preface:
My Maariamma bays for blood.
My Kali kills. My Draupadi strips.
My Sita climbs on to a stranger’s
lap. All my women militate. They
brave bombs, they belittle kings....
Call me names if it comforts you.
I no longer care. The scarlet letter
is my monogram.
(Ms Militancy, pp. 8-9)
Fortunately, there is a considerable
current of surprise and elusiveness
that does battle with the strain of
predictability in Kandasamy’s poetry;
even when she rehearses a wellestablished
choreography of feminist
self-assertion, she does so with a
sharp eye for detail, a grasp of worldly
insight, and an appetite for phrasal
shape-shifting. Her poetic personae—
actors, commentators, drama queens,
rebels—segue through history, cinema,
television, myth and the venues of
metropolitan culture. In ‘Pride goes
before a full-length mirror’, she writes
of the divine custodians of the old
order:
Some were frog-born, some
dog-born,
and the famous one, the mediadarling,
actually carried an elephant’s head.
A hatred of mirrors lent them
character.
They forgot to see, to foresee,
to make out the shape of things to
come.
Sinful as scars, they sowed evil
with a dozen hands
meant to be used for warplay,
fairplay, foreplay.
(Ms Militancy, p. 44)
Far from being an indulgence,
Navayana’s embrace of poetry signals
its concern with amplifying the project
of renovatio, ‘a making new’, the
creation of new grounds for cultural
action and critical discussion, the rereading
of older texts and the sharing
of new ones.
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Market fodder
Gender and Green Governance: The Political
Economy of Women’s Presence Within and Beyond
Community Forestry
By Bina Agarwal
Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2010, 488 pp., Rs 625
ISBN 0-19-806863-8
Bina Agarwal’s most recent
b o o k p r o v i d e s s o m e
valuable insights on the
gendered nature of peoples’
relationship with forests,
and on the implications of
women’s participation in
institutions of governance.
But it is also marked by a series of
striking silences, and underpinned
by assumptions which potentially
allow her contributions to be
incorporated unproblematically into
dominant neoliberal models of forest
management.
On the basis of extensive fieldwork
in Gujarat’s Panchmahals, Sabarkantha
and Narmada/Bharuch districts and
Nepal’s Baglung, Parbat, and Gorkha
and Dhading districts, with further
material from six other Indian states,
Agarwal demonstrates how both the
gender division of labour and gendered
inequality of access to economic
resources ensure that women’s
dependence on forests is “different
from, greater, and more everyday than
men’s”. With “rural women …largely
responsible for cooking and cattle care
and for gathering fuel and fodder”,
they bear the brunt of firewood and
fodder shortages on a daily basis. Men
are affected by shortages of timber,
as they are generally responsible for
constructing and repairing homes
and agricultural implements, but this
is an occasional rather than a daily
requirement. At the same time, with
less control over land and access to
alternative earning opportunities,
women, even those in households
owning some land, are more likely to
depend on common pool resources
like forests.
This means that there are gendered
differences in the impact of forest
decline and degradation, but also in
the effects of rules restricting access
kalpana wilson
to forests under community forest
management, which have frequently
meant acute firewood and fodder
shortages. It also means that women
and men may have different priorities
for planting in the context of forest
regeneration, with women prioritising
fruits, fodder, firewood and nonwood
products, while men prioritise
species which provide timber. Further,
for fuelwood, women differentiate
between smoke-producing and
smoke-free species, highlighting the
major health hazards for women and
children associated with cooking with
wood fuels.
However Agarwal emphasises that
an individual’s relationship with forest
resources is also crucially mediated
by class differentiation within forest
communities. For example, poor
landless women are more dependent
on the local forest and would need
more and earlier extraction from it
than women from landed households,
as well as having different priorities
for planting and different uses for the
same product.
The book also explores questions
of women’s participation and
representation in institutions of
governance, critiquing approaches
which merely advocate formal and
tokenistic inclusion. As Agarwal notes,
exclusion of women from community
forestry institutions (CFIs) frequently
results not from formal exclusion but
from social structures and ideologies.
The gender division of labour in which
women are responsible for “childcare,
housework and the collection of
firewood and water, in addition to
their share of agricultural work and
cattle care” means that they face
major time constraints in attending
meetings. When they do, they are
constrained in their participation by
pressures to conform to gendered
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