A year on, the storm called Namdeo Dhasal continues to rage

Mumbai, majhya priya rande tujhyatun mee phatkya bhananga sarkha jaanar nahi (Mumbai, my beloved whore, I won't leave you disgraced), wrote Namdeo Dhasal, in Golpitha 45 years ago, baring the ugly, blood-dripping entrails of society's underbelly... disturbing and unshackling an established upper-caste comfort zone which held Marathi literature in a stranglehold from the early 13th century.

Even as preparations for marking his first death anniversary on Thursday are on across Maharashtra, the storm that Dada (as Dhasal was called) unleashed with his pen shows no signs of abating.

"How can it?" asks noted Marathi poet-columnist and Dhasal protégé Vaibhav Chhaya –– who was encouraged to put together his anthology of poems on caste, exploitation and society, Delete Kelela Saara Aakash (All Of The Deleted Sky), by the legend.

"Dada lit the torch of aggressive assertion for dignity and equality at a time when the movement was beginning to flounder. Caught between caste-persecution and arrogant administrative apathy, the average Ambedkarite found hope and inspiration in the whiplash of Dhasal's poetry. It kept three generations inspired."

Calling the late legend "a rare poet who dared spit fire on the sun with his words," Chhaya who is spearheading a series of day-long seminars, discussions, poetry, a photography exhibition and documentary-screenings in Dhasal's memory at the Ravindra Natya Mandir on Thursday, adds: "The onus is on us to keep marching with Dhasal's torch."

Dhasal's wife Mallika Amar Sheikh who will read some of his unpublished poems, told dna: "When an idea struck him, he'd write on anything he got. In fact, his desire to complete his book saw him make a come back from coma six times after doctors had given up hope," she reminisced, "There are over 1,000 such poems strewn about in the house. I have been finding them everywhere."

Like her, photographer Sudharak Olwe, too talks about this habit of Dhasal. "When I went to see him with some b/w photographs in hospital, he looked at the prints and inspired by them began writing poetry straight on the pictures. In doing so, he made my pictures priceless," Olwe said. The planned photography exhibition will have these pictures too.

Sheikh, herself a powerful writer whose book, Mala Udhavasta Whayachay (I Want To Be Ruined), talks in detail about the strife in her marriage to the celebrated poet-activist Namdeo Dhasal characterised by infidelity, loss of love and disillusionment, admits to the friction. "But he knew and understood me. Often at his hospital bedside when I read out my poems written for him, he'd smile through the oxygen mask."

She said she's blocked out his demise completely. "As far as I'm concerned, he's just gone out after another argument at home and will be back any moment," she said, her voice quivering with emotion. "When I saw him lifeless, I just got up and left (for home). I didn't even attend the last rites as I couldn't bare the thought of a man so much in love with life, dead."

Others like poet-writer author-poet Arundhati Subramaniam remember the quintessential Mumbai poet's work as "raw, raging, associative, almost carnal in its tactility; his poetry emerges from the underbelly of the city — its menacing, unplumbed netherworld. This is the world of pimps and smugglers, of crooks and petty politicians, of opium dens, brothels and beleaguered urban tenements. In his poetic world, you see a Mumbai without make-up, Botox, power yoga; an unruly Mumbai that seethes, is menacing, yet vitally alive beneath the glitzy malls and multiplexes, high-rises and flyovers. The Mumbai of the non-gentrifiable, the untameable, the non-recyclable."

Dada would have approved. "After all, poetry is politics," he had told this writer in 2004 for a television interview. Showing little patience for those uncomfortable with his sensibility, he had observed: "My works speak in the language of those robbed of their human dignity a thousand times daily till they are reduced to a sub-human existence."

Founder of Dalit Panther movement
Namdeo Dhasal was born in 1949 in a village in Khed taluk near Pune. He and his family moved to Mumbai when he was six. A Mahar, he grew up in dire poverty. Following in the footsteps of American Black panther movement, he and his founded the Dalit Panther in 1972. This militant organization supported its radical political activism with provocative pamphlets. In 1972, he published his first volume of poetry, Golpitha. More poetry collections followed: Moorkh Mhataryane (By a Foolish Old Man) – inspired by Maoist thoughts --; Tujhi Iyatta Kanchi? (How Educated Are You?); erotic Khel; and Priya Darshini (about former prime minister Indira Gandhi). Dhasal wrote two novels, and also published pamphlets such as Andhale Shatak (Century of Blindness) and Ambedkari Chalwal (Ambedkarite Movement), which was a reflection on the socialist and communist concepts of modernist movement founder Babasaheb Ambedkar. Later, he published two more collections of poetry: Mi Marale Suryachya Rathache Sat Ghode (I Killed the Seven Horses of the Sun), and Tujhe Boat Dharoon Mi Chalalo Ahe (I'm Walking, Holding Your Finger). He wrote columns for Marathi daily Saamana. Earlier, he worked as an editor for the weekly Satyata. Dhasal was diagnosed with colon cancer and died in a Mumbai hospital on January 15, 2014.