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Purushotham K: Telugu Dalit Poetry – An Overview 'Just as the working classes have the potential to establish a classless society the oppressed castes have the potential to establish a casteless society.' - K.G. Satyamurthy (Sivasagar) Telugu literature in general and poetry in particular was sluggish in the 1960s, and the much needed jolt was provided by a group of eight poets under the pseudonyms of Cherabandaraju, Bhairavaiah, Jwalamukhi, Nagnamuni, Nikhileswar and Mahaswapna who christened themselves 'Digambhara Kavulu', the naked poets. Avant-garde in nature, the poets deviated from the well established literary conventions, and wrote poetry in the manner hitherto unimagined and unaccepted. They disturbed the complacency of the writers challenging their fixed traditions, rigid ways of looking at reality and their literary canons. Literature, subsequently, overcame stagnation through a cleansing revitalization. The Naked Poets made news in everything they had done including the way they launched their anthologies. The first of their anthologies was released in 1965 at a street corner meeting by Nampalli Pandu, a rickshaw puller and the second in 1966 by Jangala Chitti, a hotel servant. Their third anthology, which had kick-started the modern Dalit literature, was dedicated in 1968 to an untouchable man from Krishna District Kanchikarla Kotesh, who was burnt alive by the caste-Hindus accusing him of theft. A series of other atrocities and massacres against the Dalits at Karamchedu, Padirikuppam, Neerukonda, Thimmasamudram and Chundur brought the Dalits together for the first time to launch concerted and sustained protest movements and socio-political outfits like Dalit Mahasabha (1985) against oppression and for social justice. The thirty eight Dalit communities in A.P, Malas and Madigas being dominant, organized themselves launching agitations and movements. Telugu Dalit writers, as part of the discourse building and activist movements, contributed to the Dalit praxis. Taking inspiration from the first modern Telugu Dalit poet, Gurram Jashua, the modern poets asserted their Dalit identity: 'I am Manu / Humanity is my enemy / There is a conspiracy by the un-coloured / To outcaste me'. Poetry became a means of expressing the personal and collective experience of marginalization. Vemula Yelllaiah expresses his anguish: 'I am the one burning dead bodies / Thrusting down the blazing body with a stick / Shoving the burning pyre-wood into a heap. / Wrap the shroud around me'. Modern Dalit poets, continuing the Dalit tradition set by Jala Rangaswamy, Kusuma Dharmanna Kavi, Nakka Chinavenkataiah, Nutakki Abraham, Premaiah and Boyi Bhimanna, dealt with such themes as untouchability, denial of public places like schools, temples, streets, hotels, and village-wells. While the first generation educated Dalits were content with the spoils they gained in the form of politics and employment without making contribution to the liberation of their brethren, the second generation educated Dalits, being responsible and responsive, took part in agitations, rallies and meetings besides making intellectual contribution in the form of media write-ups and literary output. The forms of agitation the caste-Hindus adopted against OBC reservations in the state and implementation of the Mandal Commission Report resulted in the rise of Dalit consciousness with an active role played by Dalit activist-poets like Kathi Padmarao and others. One of the important offshoots of the Dalit assertion is the launch of the Dandora movment – an agitation for the classification of the Dalits into ABCD for the benefits of reservations. Over the years, this has set in a divisionist schism between the Malas and the Madigas positing one against the other. Kathi Padmarao writes in 'I am Manu': 'Mala and Madigas clash / I am there now / Not only in the Brahmin streets / In the barrel of Madigas and horn of Malas too / My job is to upset rhyme and rhythm between the two'. The Dalit poets destroy and reverse the established symbols and myths, and construct their own myth. The poets create an 'alternative aesthetic redrawing the map of literature, by discovering and exploring a whole new continent of experience that has so far been left to darkness and silence.' The writers bring to focus ignored, suppressed and marginalized aspects of experience, world view, and reality. Dalit poetry rejects the norms set by Sanskritic poetics and establishes traits like propriety, balance, restraint and understatement. Sivsagar writes reversing the myth: 'Needles thrust into eyes / The tongue being cut off / Lead having been poured into ears / Manu is rolling himself round / In the cemetery'. The diction of these poets is deliberately subversive as it challenges the middle class notions of linguistic decency. One of the problems of the Dalit thought has been to fight the enemy within resolving the conflict between the caste and class. When it comes to the question of Dalit liberation, certain poets believe in class. For instance, balladeer Gaddar, whose songs and ballets inspired thousands of Dalits, is uncompromising about the class based solution: 'Having been scorched again and again / Turned into an atom bomb / Having become an atom bomb, / We detonate to reform society in exploitation / We will build another world that would / Treat humans as the humans.' Another revolutionary poet, Salandhra puts it: 'What if I am called by whatever name / When I become a drop of tear / Blossomed in the eye of a comrade / When I imagine the goals of the martyrs in my wounds.' The revolutionary Dalit poets valorize the fighting spirit, sacrifices and immortality of Dalit activists who lose their lives working in the cadre of the underground Left. Contrarily, the Dalit activists question the class based violent struggles in which it is the Dalits who are used as the pawns. U Sambasivarao, a noted activist/writer would question: 'Those that hack my throat haunting us / Are certainly my tormentors / They keep professing us to / Join the class war / As all the labourers are of one class / They give up Dalitism of uprisings / We may be poor devoid of food / But we are rich by caste.' Several other Dalit poets denounce that revolution is not a panacea of solution to the Dalit problems. Thinkers like Sivasagar, intellectuals like Kancha Ilaiah and Chandrabhan Prasad would argue that the Dalit problem need Dalit solutions as Shikhamani would satirize the class poetically: 'I who sang heartfully / The heroic death of revolutionary warriors / Couldn't be moved by / The mercilessly chopped bodies inflated / Having been stuffed into gunny bags and / Trampled into marshland.' J. Goutam would critique the class based solution: 'Sacrifices! Heroic march-pasts! The prisons of the State / Glue them all on the face of this fellow / Let's surge ahead / 'Let hundred flowers blossom, and / A thousand thoughts contend' / Hail Marx, hail Mao and Lenin / Beware of Maoism'. Any liberation struggle has a double responsibility, as Paulo Friar would opine, to liberate themselves and to liberate their oppressor. There is a need for the Dalit writers and activists to visualize a Dalit world view, which in the process of negotiating for the socio-cultural and political spaces: 'The real heinous thing / Which is in their minds / Let's be united, my Dalits / Let's cleanse the shit of their minds / Let's transform them into humans / Let's unveil a new human of togetherness.' Dalit women poets like Challapalli Swaruparani, Darise Shashinirmala, V. Rani, Seetha Laxmi, Sandhya, Satya Laxmi and Madduri Vijayasree have represented the double repression of the patriarchy as well as the casteist repression. Their poetry is more thoughtful and less given to anger and abuse. Shashinirmala would ask the caste-Hindu women to join hands in the struggle giving up her own oppression of the Dalit women: 'Crossing over these cordons / Will you come down a step? / Shall we walk on the same track?' Sandhya writes: 'What if house-flies swarm her / What if she is a soiled beggar / What all you need is skin / What all you need is / Leather that contracts and expands.' Sky Baba demands on behalf of women the choice of procreation: 'When the pains are mine / How is it that the decisions are yours? / When the physique is mine / How is it that the authority is yours?' The new phase of Dalit writing seems to be more mature, sober, larger in its concerns, more conscious of form, less angry and complaining. There is even a tone of celebration of Dalit identity in the new generation of poets. Shikhamani questions, 'I question / How the black colour / Is allotted to me / When it's not there / In the circus-feats of / Rainbow and the five-colours.' Again: 'I am writing off / The aesthetics of a thousand years / That made the verse untouchable / That made the verse a Vedic ritual / I am the bard / The Dalit bard / Who has come to split the bow of colour.' He apologises: 'Forgive me my Dalit! / In the entire poetic history of a thousand years / I couldn't pen a single line about you except / The blindfolded devotion and salivating erotics.' One of the unique and the rarest Telugu literary features is the genre of songs being used for coscientising the Dalit subjects. The most famous among them are Gaddar, Gorati Enkanna, Guda Anjaiah, Masterji and Andhesri who spread the message of liberating the Dalits through song. The whole Dalit poetic discourse has been not merely a protest and dissent; the ultimate goal is to wrest the power; to look at what the index finger of Babasahab Bhimrao Ambedkar points: 'You, scoundrel / I understand now / What the four closed fingers of Babasahab / Mean!' The Dalit poets also visualize how the caste-Hindus would try to assimilate: 'The day when a crow heads a country / The cuckoo too claims to be a crow. / It would say we don't differ in colour / But only the tunes differ.' Whatever be the case, Vemula Yellaiah, a Madiga poet asks: 'The minority caste-Hindus / Should step down now / At the shrieks of chendalas, the wretched / Who gauged the earth.' True to what a seventeenth century seer/reformer, Potuluri Veerabrahmam's caste-dialectics predicted: The time is impending When every one subordinates you The fortune of reigning the empires would be ripe My words are but sure to materialize The same people that scolded you Will be healed of their stupidity When themselves begin to adulate you. The day was not too far away as proved by Mayavathi, the poets would muse. ------------------------------------ ---- INFORMATION OVERLOAD? Get all ZESTCaste mails sent out in a span of 24 hours in a single mail. Subscribe to the daily digest version by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], OR, if you have a Yahoo! 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