MAN YOU SHOULD EXPLODE
This paper presents a glimpse of the poetry Man You Should Explode by Namdeo Dhasal
Poetic genius who represented the lower strata of the society: It is neither for the political excellence nor for the Dalit Panther’s Namdeo Dhasal will get remembered. He will be remembered for his maverick sprit of poetry. His poetry revolved around the realities of Dalit life and the daily struggles faced by them.Most of the poems are marked by violent language used to express the violence that Dalits routinely faced. He is the one who fractured Marathi literary world which had always been dominated by the upper class writers. All his nine books of poetry speak for the oppressed, is addressed to the oppressed and represent their oppression. Elite writers had established a rosy image of Bombay, as a “ city of dreams". Dhasal came and shook these norms of fancy writers. He never gurgled old narrative of oppression and inferiority. He instead commanded respect, he went ahead and demanded a revolution. People who say that Dhasal broke norms through his writings believe that the real norms are made by the writers of dominant castes . Actually he wasn't breaking norms instead he was making his own norms. His literature was his existence. He desacralized the pen and turned it into a weapon. Dhasal had once said about poetry that it “ is just as natural as eating”. Dhasal belligerently used words which are exclusively heard, understood and spoken by Dalits in their vernacular tongues.
An acclaimed new generation Marathi literary figure Dilip Chitre translated many works of Dhasal into English . In these translations,he reproduced the images,metaphors and hard hitting voice of Namdeo . According to him, “Dhasal's poetry embraced all people discarded by society as useless “ Satish Kalsekar, Dhasal's close friend and fellowpoet, pointed out how his poetry evolved, “ Namdeo's poetry in the early period seems more aggressive where as in later period, it becomes more wise and appears more mature".
Golpitha(1972), his first collection of poetry portrays the plight of the ‘red- street areas’ of Mumbai and speaks about the low class, working people, pimps, prostitutes and other downtrodden people. Vijay Tendulkar famous Marathi playwright and critic even compared him with Tukaram, the famous bhakti Saint-poet of Maharashtra. He summed Dhasal's poetry very perfectly
“The world of Namdeo Dhasal's poetry- the world known as ‘Golpitha in the city of Mumbai- begins where the frontier of Mumbai's white collar world ends and no man's land opens up. This is a world where the night is reversed into the day, where stomachs are empty or half empty, of depression, against death or the next day's anxieties of bodies left over after being consumed by shame and Sensibility, of insufferably flowing sewerages of diseased young bodies lying in the gutters braving the cold by holding their knees to their bellies of the jobless, of beggars of pickpockets, of holy mendicants, of neighbourhood touch guys and pimps..”
Golpitha spewed venom not only at the dominant caste order but also at the sacred texts of all religions. His works are powerful masterpieces on the “literature from and of the low". The acclaimed collections includes Man You Should Explode , Their Orthodox Pity, My Intended College, Allahu Akbar, Mandakini Patel: A Young Prostitute. These were written in the Mahar dialect , the native tongue of Dhasal. More poetic collections followed: Moorkh Mhataryane ( By a Foolish Old Man) inspired by Marxist thought , Tujhi Iyatta Kanchi? ( How Educated Are You?) , Knel (An Erotica) in 1983 ,Ye Sattet Jiv Ramat Nahi ( Life is not interested in this Century) in 1995, Gandu Bagichha ( Fragrant Garden) in 1986, Mi Marale Suryachaya Rathache Sat Ghode ( I Killed the Sun's Seven Horses), Tuze Buak Dharoon Mi Chalalo Ahe ( I walked holding your fingers) and Priya Darshini , about the former Indian P.M Indira Gandhi. His poems are translated into English from Marathi in a book “Namdeo Dhasal : Poet of the Underworld” .He wrote two novels and also published pamphlets such as Andhale Shatak (Century of Blindness) and Ambedkari Chalwal ( Ambedkarite Movement). He also worked for Marathi Newspapers such as ‘Saamana' and ‘ Satyata’.
Last Days
After the breakdown of Dalit Panther , he was deeply affected and got addicted to alcohol. Several serious illness followed which gave way to cancer. He died due to Colorectal cancer in Mumbai on 15th January 2014.
Poem Analysis
MAN YOU SHOULD EXPLODE
Namdeo Dhasal through his poem Man You Should Explode, gives a call to Dalits to protest against injustice. The frustrated poet expresses his fury over the caste discrimination that the Dalits had to face. The poem talks for the people who are considered as the ‘ Scam of earth' . He portrays the vulnerable life of Dalits in an effective manner. By powerful voices he strives for a change, questions the hypocrisy and cruelty of the caste ridden society. He is aware of the rules,norms and customs setup by the Savarnas. He calls brahmins the real culprits and claims that they are responsible for such a disparity in society. He intends to cast all their establishments out of this societal system in order to build a society which is something completely new and to bring justice and order to the scenario.
The ancient caste system of India has resulted in the social and economic oppression of the Dalits. The poem starts by a call for the complete destruction of savarna culture which is, the social stratification based on the Varna caste. "The poet asks the readers to explode in fury and start a franctically dance according to the savage drum music by smoking weed, drinking cheap liquor and chewing tobacco ."
“ Man you should explode
Yourself to bits to start with
Jive to a savage drum beat
Smoke hash, smoke ganja
Chew Opium, bite kalpuri.”
Even when the poet expresses hatred through his work, there is a palpable pain in his words. "He says those who are too poor to buy liquor can empty a can of dalda into their throat, poverty and starvation have darkened the world of Dalits that even their protests can't afford the luxury of expensive ‘boosters'."
“Guzzle country booze- if too broke,
Down a pint of the cheapest dalda
Stay tipsy day and night, stay tight round
the clock
Cuss at one and all ; swear by his mom's
twat his sister's cent.
Abuse him, slap him in the cheek, and pummel him..
Man, you should keep handy Rampuri
Knife
A dagger, an axe, a sword, an iron rod, a
hockey stick, a bamboo.
You should be ready to carve out anybody's
Innards without batting an eyelid.
These lines are an exhortation, a plea for necessary revolution.
“Communist murders and kill the sleeping ones
Turn humans into slaves, whip their arses
With a lash
cook your beans in their bleeding
backsides
Rob your next door neighbour, bust banks
Fuck the mothers of moneylenders and the
stinking rich
Cut the throat of your own kith and kin by
cunning them; poison them jinx them.” India's untouchables are relegated to live in a constant fear of being publically humiliated , paraded naked, beaten and raped by the upper-castes. Namdeo Dhasal opted a profane diction to give vent to his strong emotion ,to reveal that an absolute destruction is the only solution for the Dalit issues. "Because the Dalit discrimination was the result of the impenetrable four tier Hindu caste which marked the former as ‘outsiders'. "Dalits are considered impure from birth, Untouchables perform jobs that are traditionally considered“unclean" or exceedingly menial.
“Engage your dick with every missy you can
find, call nobody too old to be screwed
Call nobody too young, nobody too green to
Shag, lay them one and all
Perform gang rapes on stage in the public
make whore houses grow: live on a pimp's
Cut: cut the women's noses, tits
Make them ride naked on a donkey through
the struts to shame them.”
"When the poet sounds misogynistic in his call for gang rape. He in fact challenges the notion of purity the upper-class forcefully attached with the bodies of their women.The virginity and chastity of women are necessary to keep one's caste pure in blood or it is for avenging the rapes the untouchable women had to endure by the upper-class men."
In case of Dalit women we can see double oppression. A report released by Amnesty International in 2001 found an “ extremely high" number of sexual assaults on Dalit women, frequently perpetrated by landlords, upper caste villagers and police officers. Thousands of pre- teen Dalit girls are forced into prostitution under cover of a religious practice known as devadasi. Keeping all these atrocities in mind,Poet says "that they should bring complete chaos by gang raping all regardless of gender, age, religion and kill as much as they can. "
“Man, one should dig up roads, yank off
bridges
One should topple down streetlights
Smash up police stations and railway
stations
One should hurl grenades, one should drop
hydrogen bombs to raze”
The above lines convey the anguished emotions of Dhasal against the hegemony which keeps oppressing the weaker sections of the society on the basis of caste, gender and occupation. In Dhasal's poetry the idea of Dalit appears different. It indicates that ‘Dalit' is not just caste category, he emphasizes living conditions of the exploited people like workers, minorities, and women irrespective of religion and class. For him Dalit is one who is being oppressed and his poetry is a depiction of the life of the oppressed. He waged a relentless battle against all sorts of exploitation.
“Literary societies, schools, colleges,
hospitals, airports
One should open the manholes of sewers
And throw into them
Plato, Einstein, Archimedes, Socrates,
Marx, Ashoka, Hitler, Camus, Sartre, Kafka
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Hopkins,
Goethe,
Dostoevsky, Mayakovski, Maxim Gorky,
Edison, Madison, Kalidasa, Tukaram, Vyasa,
Shakespeare, Jhaneshwar,
And keep them rotting there with all their
Words.
One should hand to death the descendants
Of Jesus, the Paighamber, the Buddha, and
Vishnu”.
" The poet tells the reader to abandon the rule books, the writings of scholars and the thinkers. "His approach is a contrast to Gandhian Ahimsa. He asks the readers to smash the entire system of law and order and to renounce the teachings of the acclaimed thinkers and Scholars.
“One should crumble up temples, Churches,
Mosques, Sculptures, Museums
One should blow with cannonballs
Priests.
And inscribe epigraphs with cloth soaked in
their blood
Man, one should tear off all the pages of all
the secret books in the worlds.
And give them to people for writing shit off
their arses when alone
Remove sticks from anybody's fence and go
In there to shit and piss, and muck it up
Menstruate there, Cough out Phlegm
Sneeze out go”
Again the poet is asking the readers to give up all their religious practices and their sacred books. The practice of untouchability can be seen stronger in rural areas. The underlying principles of Hinduism dominates crudely in these areas. Based on religious principles they are considered impure from birth thus they traditionally performed the jobs considered as unclean. The four fold hierarchy of Hindu religion is ordained by the Hinduism's sacred texts notably the Manusmrithi so the poet is asking to throw away this religious text. He spewed venom not only at the dominant caste order but also at the sacred texts of all religions. His experiences of caste discrimination turned him into a rebel and an outcaste. He threw out all rule books and sharpened his weapons as a poet.
“Choose what offends one's sense of odour to
Wind up the show
Raise hell all over the place from up to
down and in between
Man, you should drink human blood, eat
Spit roast human flesh, melt human fat and
Drink it.”
"Poet says that the reader should perform and should commit every crime against ‘purity’ to challenge the notions of upper . He realises the political parties offered nothing to Dalits. Dalits are regarded as the ‘cleaners' of all the impurities and in this process they became impure. Even when minorities of India such as Muslims and Anglo Indians were given separate electorate in Communal Award of 1932 the Dalits were denied such rights in the name of their inclusion in Hindu religion even though they were ‘outside’ of it."
“Smash the bones of your critics shanks on
Hard stone blocks to get their marrow
Wage class wars , caste wars, communal wars
Party war, Crusades, world wars.
One should become totally savage
Ferocious and primitive
One should become devil-may-care and
Create anarchy.
Level a campaign for not growing food
Kill people all and sundry by starving them
To death.
Kill oneself too, let disease thrive, make all
Trees leafless
Take care that no bird ever sings, man, one
Should plan to die groaning and screaming
In pain
Let's all this grow into a tumours to fill the
Universe, ballon up
And burst at a nameless time to shrink.”
The element of destruction is clearly visible in the above lines. The same poem, however was marked with hopeful tones, later.
“After this they should stop calling one
Another names white or black, Brahmin,
Kshatriya, Vaishya, or Shudra;
Stop creating political parties, stop building
Property, stop committing
The crime of not recognising one's kin, not
Recognizing one's mother or sister.
One should regard the sky as one's grandpa,
The earth as one's grandma,
And coddled by them everybody should
Bask in mutual love.
Man ,one should act so bright as to make
The sun and the moon seem pale
One should share each morsel of food with
Everyone else, one should compose a hymn
To humanity itself, man, man should sing
Only the song of man.”
In the final lines poet states that once he will outlive this utter chaos. Once the caste system gets vanished completely,we should start anew by creating a peaceful world where everyone is treated equally and there everyone will cherish mutual love. Love is the only solution for all the problems in the whole world.
In this poem we can find the appearance of nihilistic and destructive tone, but with an inner core tenderness. Photographic realism is one of the prominent qualities of Dhasal's poems. He takes poetry as a weapon against class and gender. Dhasal radically changed the ornamental vocabulary of the hitherto upper caste dominated literature. His poems, instead of being sharp manifestations of a cruel past, stay sadly and strikingly relevant today thus marking the failure of wretched caste ridden society.
References
Bedide, Naram. “ Man You Should Explode". Roundtable ,6.July.2010
https://roundtableindia.co.in/lit-blogs/?P=512
Bheemaiah, J. “Counter-Writing Dalits and other subalterns",12 April.2016
Satchidanandan, K. “An Orpheus in Hell” The Hindu, 19 May.2016.
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/theatre/lost-in-translation/article/9359343.ece
Stenza. “Man You Should Explode”. WordPress, 2019
https://augustinestenza.wordpress.com/2019/12/27/man-yiu-should-explode-an-analysis-dalit-writing-m-a-english-kannur-university/
Sharma ,Unnati .”Poet and Dalit Panther Namdeo Dhasal's Poetry embraced those discarded by society". The Print, 15 January.2021
https://theprint.in/features/poet-dalit-panther-namdeo-dhasals-poetry-embraced-those-discarded-by-society/585363/
Arsha.V
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