Introduction

K M Sherrif

Dalit poetry as a distinctive mode arrived in Malayalam literature at the end of the
Eighties of the last century. Not that poetry with a distinct Dalit sensibility by Dalit
writers was absent in Malayalam literature before that. Pandit Karuppan’s Jathikkummi
(Caste Songs) were written in 1904. Karuppan, a Dalit from a fishing community called
Dheevaras from Cheranalloor, a village in Ernakulam district, went on to become one of
the early Dalit poets in the language. Poykayil Yohannan (Apachen) or Kumaraguru who
was an activist and a writer wrote several hymns which proclaimed the ideology of his
Prathyaksha Raksha Daiva Sabha (PRDS), a dissenting sect which had split from the Mar
Thoma Church. His poems have been compiled in a volume titled Ratnamanikal. The
political energy released by early Dalit poet-activists like Karuppan and Poykayil
Kumaran seems to have dissipated before the first half of the Twentieth Century ended.
What is remarkable about the poetry of these early Dalit poets is the political vigour that
galvanized it. Readers who are not cognizant with the history of Malayalam literature in
the first half of the Twentieth Century has to be informed that these poets operated at
least two decades before Changampuzha wrote Vazhakkula(1936) which was later hailed
by the literary establishment as the first poem to protest against the oppression of the
Dalit peasants by Savarna landlords. It would take another decade for the Left-leaning
Progressive Literary Movement to gain a foothold in Malayalam literature.

Dalit poetry went into an eclipse with the ascendancy of the Progressive Literary
Movement and re-emerged only in the Eighties of the last century. The reasons are
obvious. Caste and gender as determining categories were pushed under the carpet by the
Progressive Literary Movement which considered class as the sole basis for discerning
social inequality and marginalization. Of course, there was, and still is, a lot of overlap
between caste and class. Dalits and Adivasis are the poorest communities in Kerala. But
what is often not realized is that the overwhelming majority of Dalits and Adivsis are
doubly oppressed due to their class and caste positions. It was also not realized that
upward mobility of castes is a slow and excruciating process. The history of postcolonial
India shows that the caste hierarchy has changed little in most parts of India and that even
in regions where social changes have created the illusion of its disappearance – Kerala is
the most obvious case in point – it continues to exist in disguised forms, becoming much
more dangerous through such disguises. Mao remarked that it might take a thousand
years for a classless society to be established. Given the fact that caste has demonstrated
its tenacity through three millenniums, surviving even the massive wave of Budhism that
swept the length and breadth of the country three centuries before the Common Era, one
has to face up to the frightening possibility of having to live with it for another ten
thousand years.

Caste and gender have emerged from hiding as categories to be reckoned with in
postmodern and postcolonial discourses. Although formulations about the conflict
between classical Marxist positions and postmodern/postcolonial theoretical positions
from both sides of the dividing line are still being subjected to skeptical analysis, it is
obvious that Dalit studies and gender studies are today witnessing an unprecedented
surge of activity, drawing its strength mainly from the former. Although the
marginalization of Dalit and feminist discourses in India, especially in Kerala by
classical Marxist intelligentsia does justify some of the latter’s anti-Marxist positions, it
is far from clear whether an outright theoretical counterpoising of Marxist and
Dalit/feminist discourses can be sustained. What are amply clear are the ways in which
Left political movements in the country have marginalized both dalits and women in both
their theory and praxis. This marginalization continues to haunt Dalit writers and poets.
It provokes the kind of bitter sarcasm against communist platitudes one finds over and
over again in the poetry of Raghavan Atholi, the first poet to emerge in the Renaissance
of Dalit poetry in Malayalam in the Eighties of the last century.

Identity politics has played a major role in the vicissitudes of Dalit writing in
many literatures in India. Identity, for instance, has been recurring theme for the major
Dalit poets in Gujarati. The question of identity is more often than not addressed from
the point of social marginalization. But it can assume a more fundamental form when the
Dalits are perceived as a sub-cultural group with its own worldview and lifestyle. Dalit
writers and intellectuals are divided on this issue. But most Dalit writers and activists
today stridently oppose the cultural stereotyping of Dalits. They rightly point out that
such stereotyping would perpetuate the marginalization of Dalits. Narayan the first
Adivasi writer in Malayalam has emphatically stated that he would prefer Adivasis to
wear shirts-and pants and Saris-and-blouses instead of their traditional dresses. It is also
true that the apprehension expressed by Dalit intellectuals recently about the tendency of
Savarna and ‘savarnised’ writers and critics in Kerala to insist that Dalit writers should,
for the sake of authenticity, write in their own dialects, or at least in ‘simple Malayalam’,
rather than in a highly Sanskritised idiom is also well-founded.

Dalit poets in many Indian literatures have certainly adopted a stridently

subversive idiom. It often verges on the scatological or the pornographic. This is
particularly noticeable in Tamil Dalit poetry. But one comes across instances in other
languages too: Narsingh Ujamba in Gujarati, Raghavan Atholi in Malayalam. This
subversive idiom is a feature of all protest poetry. One finds it abundantly in American
Beat poets like Ginsberg or Black poets like Amiri Baraka. Ginsberg advised the
American establishment to “fuck yourself with your atom bomb” (“America”). Even if it
is not desirable to adopt a particularly ‘Dalit language’, it is certainly one of the tasks of
Dalit writing to subvert the Brahminic discourse as it is manifest in conventional poetic
idiom.

Subversion in Dalit poetry occurs at other levels too. In Gujarati Dalit writing, for
instance, there is the invocation of a subaltern mythology as a foil to Classical Hindu
mythology which has served as the bulwark of caste-hegemony for centuries, effectively
disfiguring, assimilating or marginalizing sub-cultures outside the pale of the
‘mainstream’. There is also a quest for a ‘golden age’ when ‘all men lived as equals’ and
Dalit ideology and culture were the mainstream. This tendency is less visible in Tamil or
Malayalam Dalit writing. Although the combat value of the construction of such a
mythology in resisting the orchestrated glorification of ‘mainstream culture’ by Hindu
fundamentalists, the invocation of the past is essentially regressive. Letting the dead past
bury its dead would be a more effective strategy.

Dalit poetry has also attempted a radical transformation of poetic forms. In

Gujarati poets like Bipin Gohel and Kisan Sosa have liberated the ghazal from its gilded,
pseudo-romantic confines, and revitalized it to express the agony, the ecstasy, the hopes
and frustrations of a poetic sensibility tuned in to the struggles of Dalits and other
marginalized sections of society. In Malayalam, this transformation is visible in the
rejection of the craft and clichés of both modernism and its ‘red tail’ (the expression used
by Narendraprasad, critic and theatre activist), political modernism.

The poems in this collection present a cross-section of Dalit poetry in Malayalam.

The poems of Poykayil Appachen and K K S Das give a diachronic representation to the
collection. Appachen’s poems express the agony, longings and hopes of the exile and the
marginalized, much like the book of psalms in the Bible. Das’s poem begins as a lament
on the predicament of the Dalits and ends as a resolve to change it. Kallata Sasi’s poem
is an ode to the great messiah of Malayali Dalits, Ayyankali, whom traditional
historiography has, to quote the Gujarati Dalit poet Bipin Gohel, tried to ‘stamp out from
the walls of time.’ Equally evocative is G Sasi’s homage to Ambedkar “Ambavade” S
Joseph’s poems are noted for the detailed portraits of Dalit life he draws. It is
remarkable, however, that the disintegration of the family in ‘When We Part’ has none of
the idle wistfulness of romantic lyrics, of which there have been hundreds in Malayalam.
Renukumar’s unique imagery and idiom comes through, even in translation, in “Closed.”
The agony of the dispossessed comes through a few cryptic lines in Sajin P J’s “What I
Have.” Kaviyur Murali’s “Screw-pine” conducts a postmortem of the history of the
Dalits in post-decolonized India using the screw-pine as a metaphor.

Binu Pallippad’s “Civilization of Love (and Death)” is an unusual poem in which

scenes of oppression and torture unfold like in a cinematic sequence. Kalesh S in “When
the Moon Comes Out” compresses the moonshine of hope into a little child’s eyes.
Raghavan Atholi’s “Where Hunger is Sold” throws stones at the glass houses of opulence
and arrogance from which rises the cacophony of the bidding for the lives of the
wretched. In “Silence”, Johnson Cheeranjira breaks out with a single shout of assertion
and relapses into silence again. In his two ‘university poems’, “Children Writing the
Exam” and ‘University: A Lesson” M B Manoj expresses the haunting realization of a
Dalit intellectual that he cannot really belong to an academic culture in which he is
powerless. Manoj’s third poem in the collection “Children of the Woods conversing with
Christ” is rather unusual: It is perhaps one among just a handful of texts in Malayalam
literature which articulate the Christian Dalit’s sense of alienation. A K Vasu’s poem
“Rocks, Rivers, Machines” in a brilliant flash of imagination draws a comparison
between bonded Dalits and machines, Sivadas Purameri’s “Water Lessons” is
remarkable for its economy of diction and its politicization of images. Bhasi Arankath’s
powerful statement in “Subaltern talking to a Bull” is a shocking reminder that Dalits in
many parts of the country are worse off than animals and that, in the poet’s own words,
‘only a tale’ separates them from the latter. The street palmist in Sunny Kavikkad’s
“Street Palmist” can only discern the horrifying images that come alive at the end of each
line on the palm. K K Sivadas’s “Vegetative Life” is certainly a green poem, but not the
conventional environmentalist daydream. It embodies a Dalit vision of ever-renewing,
sustainable life.

This selection of Malayalam Dalit poetry in English translation is the first of its
kind. The editor, the translator, the publishers and the Dalit collective which actively
worked for its publication deserve acclamation. I am honoured in being chosen to
introduce it to readers.

Thalassery

August 2008.