Mandakini Patil:

A Young Prostitute:
The Collage I Intend
By Namdeo Dhasal
On a barren blue canvas
Clothes ripped off, a thigh blasted open
A sixteen year old girl, giving herself to pain.
And a pig: its snout full of blood.

The seemingly attractive face is not the real face

Behind it lies the bitter skull, the common truth.
When someone’s flesh is ripped apart
How far can you go with the skeletal elements?
Love’s backyard overhung with the fruits of fear and disgust.
The sovereignty of infinite nothingness pursuing us.
People we think of as our own are merely heaps of dust, or smoke.
A for apple
B for baboon
C for cat
D for dagger
E for elephant
Worship of the body’s varied geography
And the romance of ass-fucking.

Manda,
Your mind is made of neither ash nor marble
Your hair, your clothes, your nails, your breasts
I feel as my own: they reveal with me
Ghettos of the dead, hunchbacks left in the streets to die.
Sandwiches: streets: milk of a bitch who’s just given birth –
These things keep me from reaching you, your lips, your eyes.
Until now there was nothing between us.
Our voices, calling each other, could not dig themselves free.
This moment is 10 miles long, 10 seconds short
And in its recapitulation
You: me: seeds: a splinter of glass gets under our skin
Under the skin of a thousand ways of being.
I had never seen a face so pale,
It belongs to you and thousand other women like you,
Flashing out of many countries, many cages
And assuming various names.
Now, I not only love the dried tree, but also its bark
I am dazzled by the bark of your pale face
And from that paleness you descend into me, making me your own.
Your screams begin to flow within me, and using them, you capture me.
Is the scream itself the end, or is it the end the scream?
The scream is the end, the unregretted event.
Constitutions are amended, but the changes are hollow.
People stunned in darkness becomes like the darkness itself.
From darkness the sparrows fly in, dropping their dead.
Their wings, expanding, overcome war.
Through imagination
Through reality
Through laws
Through the water fall
Through the tree
Through the shadows
I see the whirlwind within you, its force grinding the grain.
Sorrow is spoken of and moves toward the grave.
The woman loved: a prostitute wearing a pious face.
The man loving: a pimp
Wives are licensed whores of men.
Men are the pimps and lovers of their wives.
The male/female conjunction:
Take a handful of whores, the same number of pimps and some disposable toothbrushes.
After brushing, spit out the bristles and gargle with the holy water of the Ganges.

Manda, my peacock
Look out the window, a new world waits
Here, the unreal, hypnotic whirlpool of embraces and skin-love
Contains silt, with which wounds are smeared.
Cut off the legs of an ant
And it will go on scrawling till it collides with the own end.
Then flesh, shit, hair will not mean a thing.
The movements of your men have winds that cut the life of the foetus.
Isn’t what you’ve given, and taken from one man, enough?
The darkness of the tree, the sky, the sea, the flower, the bed is your hallucination.
But hallucination deceives and seduces you toward the grave.
The ancient madam who’s imprisoned you is known as destiny.
She captures animals and turns them to dust.
Those who defeat her overcome nothingness, pioneer new lives.
Now I see the furniture in the cafe dancing:
The chairs, the tables, the glasses, the waiters dancing,
The customers, the bread, the owner, the butter, all dancing
Deep in a lukewarm silence
You sit crouched
Grazing at the light
In a cat’s eyes, and the light in the glass,
Delving into the luminous green waves with your hands,
Recovering from them pity instead of minerals.
That which is crusted is the surface.
The crust is not seen by the flames of your eyes
But by ash, that sneezes and lives on.
People merely entangled in life are dead and love coldly
Getting entangled with the body and the mind.
Your eyes, flames: your touch revolutions:
You are sandalwood, you are the bark of the thorny babhool,
That heals
You are the sword and the blood dripping from the neck,
You are the electricity pulsing in bones, and you are water
Touch all things
With your dry, wet fingers
And witness the alchemy of your own paleness.
At the touch of your finger
The stone will turn into platinum
And you will forget your untimely slaughter.

On a barren blue canvas

Clothes ripped off, a thigh blasted open,
A sixteen year old girl giving herself to pain,
And a pig: its snout full of blood.

Translated from Marathi by Dilip Chitre

With an assistance of Mick Fedullo.
 The Song of Our Shirt

By Nirav Patel

We are a fashionable caste

Or tribe you may call:

Our forefather Mayo Dalit

Had a shirt of three sleeves,

His father had a shroud as his shirt

And his father wore a shirt of his skin.

I am no less fashionable –

Just got a pocketless, sleeveless, buttonless

Peter England, the second

From the pavements I sweep.

Every passerby is tempted to pay his respect

To the label of the lords

But without touching my collar-bone.

Our shirt has a song to sing

Of bizarre fashions.

Note: In medieval Gujarat, untouchables were forced to wear three-sleeved shirt so that caste-
Hindus can identify them and keep away from them. The Dalit folklore has a hero called
Mayo Dalit who sacrificed his life for doing away with such humiliating practice.

Translated from the Gujarati by the poet.

Question Paper
-------------------------
MR Renukumar

Why doesn't the house

have doors for the birds to knock at
and for the wind to push open?

Why doesn't the house have cots

for one to wet the bed in sleep
and fall down thud from them?

Why doesn't the textbook

for Standard I have any front cover?
Why does the sky appear
at the corner of the slate?
Why do my fingers alone
get cut when the pencil points
are stone sharpened?

Why are the buttonless shirts

and the tattered shorts
not of my size?
Why do the fingers thrust
in the pocket become embarassed?

Why does mother cry

when she smoothens the wrinkles
of soiled currency notes?
Why does father laugh
when he shaves off grief from his face?

Why does the elder sister go

to the house next door
with a coconut husk
groping in the darkness
to borrowing fire?

Why does mother blow out the lantern

when the moon rises?

Why does mother say

that I will get the answers
to all my questions
once I grow up?

Translated by K M Ajir Kutty

THE OUTCASTS (Beganian)
By Lal Singh Dil

Cleaning up the mangers

Gathering cow-dung
Or wheat spikes:
They work very hard
These gentle outcast daughters.
Spiky straw, hot plates,
Sharp-edged vegetable cutters,
Needles -
As if all these had been trained
To hurt their hands and feet.
This iron basin,
Resembling the helmet
On her soldier husband’s head,
That one of themalways carries on her head
Makes her look like a warrior
I have seen her dance
I have seen her sing
Ouf! When they cry
It seems colourful walls were soaking:
Who can watch this?
---

From Dil’s first collection of poems:

The Breeze from the Sutlej
(Sutlej Di Hawa) (1971)

Translated from Punjabi by T.C. Ghai

 My Old Man
By Balbir Madhopuri
My old man
still believes
lines drawn on water
are lines etched on stone.

Watering other’s flowering plants

he himself blooms into a flower;
gently patting the backs of milch cattle
he prays for the family’s well-being.
As he holds the plough’s handle
he wishes for the welfare of all;
becomes mud with mud.

With his hands he has brought

the green, the white and the blue revolutions;
but through his body
still flows a dry river.

Out there, in the peak of summer, scorched weak bodies

and inside
shining smooth shapes,
hearts seeking bodily pleasures;
and his inherited-ancestral belief
tells him again and again
this is just the play of destiny.

Now and then, he wonders,

even though crocodiles infest the seas
yet so many fish swim there freely.
There’s the sky for birds to fly
and places to build nests.
And what do I have?
This land of a glorious Sanskriti!
My own progeny
to perpetuate the tradition of slavery!

Occasionally, he reflects
and searches
for meaning in the words:
‘There’s delay, but not darkness’,
and looks at his horny palms
for the vanished or vanishing lines.

My old man
still believes
lines drawn on water
are lines etched on stone. (Translated by T.C. Ghai from Punjabi)
We Will Fight
By Mohandas Namishrai

They may have come

on horses
or on foot.
They may have attacked
and
deserted our women folk.

They were not certainly attackers

but
for us they were Wolves
out on a prowl.

They have changed

their weapons
but not their hearts.

Very Often
they attack us.

Defeated may be
but
we have not surrendered
as yet.

When we will get our chance

we will fight
to the last breath
We will not compromise with
our honour.

Translated from Hindi by the poet.

Beat of a Thousand Feet
Rajni Tilak

I am-
No more a helpless Dalit damsel
But a harbinger of the new epoch,
Mother of Creation,
The voice of the new era.

My past could have been

One of bondage.
On my back may be the baggage
Of the history of serfdom
And the weight of oppression.

Now-
I shall not remain a slave
And shall snap off all shackles
Even of love
That hinders creation.

My sorrow-
Is not sorrow
But the hurricane of hopes.
My tears are not tears
But the waging of the war.

Not a lonesome voice,

I am beat of a thousand feet,
Not a dumbo
But a voice loud and clear
Rising from the muted half of the world,
All set to bring about the new era.

Translated from Hindi by Anamika.

 Water
Challapalli Swaroopa Rani

Just as water knows the ground’s incline,

It knows the generations-old strife
Between village and wada
Like dampness on the well’s edge that never dries,
It knows that untouchability never disappears.
Water knows everything.

It knows race
The difference between the woman from Samaria and
Jesus, the Jew.

It knows caste and sub-caste too

The subtle difference between leather and spool.
It knows the agony of the Panchama,
Who waits, with empty pot near well
Everyday
Not having the right to draw water
Until a Shudra arrives.

It knows the humiliation of

The wad girl
When he, who kept his distance
When he poured water
Falls all over
And touches her.

It knows righteous rage

Karamchedu Suvarthamma’s anger*
She, who opposed the Kamma landlords
With her water pot and asked them
Not to pollute the pond water.

Water has been witness

To centuries of injustice.

When I see water

I remember
How my wada would thirst all day
For a glassful
For us water is not the simple H2O,
For us water is a mighty movement
The Mahad struggle at Chavdar tank.

A single drop embodies

Tears shed over several generations.
In the many battles we fought for
A single drop of water,
Our blood flowed like streams.

But we never managed to win

Even a small puddle.

When I see water,

I remember
How we welcomed our weekly bath
As if it was a wonderful festival and
The entire village bathed luxuriously …
Twice a day.

When I see water I remember my childhood,

When we walked miles to reach the canal
And carried back heavy pots,
Muscles and veins on our necks straining, bursting.

I remember
The malapalli burning
Its thatched roofs aflame,
And then ashes
All for want of a pot of water.

Water is not a simple thing!

It gives life but also devours lives.
Water that refused to quench parched throats
Returned as the tsunami killer wave that swallowed
Village after village.
The poor, mere playthings
In its vicious hands.

Often, it turns villages into dry deserts

and at times it drowns them in floods.
Between the village and wada
Between the one and the other,
Water can ignite struggle and strife.
Make blood flow like a rivulet
But it can also sit in a Bisleri bottle
All innocence.

This water from our village well

That forces us to do many a circus feat,
Now slowly, surreptitiously
Dances its way into the Pepsi man’s bottle
A new name for it, ‘mineral water’
It takes to the skies, raises a storm.

Now water is no mean matter.

It is a multinational market commodity.
As they say
Water is omniscient.
It contains the world.

*Suvarthamma’s raising of her water pot (toward off the knife that was lanced at her) was
taken as an offence and was the ostensible reason for the Kammas going on a rampage,
killing over a dozen Dalits in Karamchedu village in 1985.

(Telugu: “Neeru”, translation, Dr.Umamaheswari Brugubanda, Dept of English, English and

Foreign Languages University and published in K Satyanarayana & Susie Tharu (eds), The
Exercise of Freedom, 2013.)
Prayer
By Basudev Sunani

Come,
Let’s take off our clothes.

Let’s take off Mahapatra’s coat

From Brahma’s body
Let’s take off Mohanty’s suit
from Vishnu’s waist.
Let’s strip off Tandi’s dhoti
from Ekalavya’s body
And Satnami’s langot
from Shambuk’s bottom.

Let us all line up

naked, in front of god
Stripped of our ego
we must muster our courage
for it is not easy to be naked.
It is a hundred times
more difficult
to strip off our surnames
from our first names.

When we are able to do that

we may stand before god
in our nakedness
And pray to him:
Oh God
We offer you here
in one single bowl
all our surnames –
Mahapatra, Mohanty
Tandi and Satnami.
Can you, in all fairness
return these to us
each his own surname
by simply looking at our faces,
listening to our voices
and sampling our blood?
Then we shall be grateful
for your godliness
and respect your
power of cognition.

Can you do that, God

Pick from the bowl
our respective surnames
and return them
each to his own?

(Translation from Odia: J. P. Das)