The universe of young Dalit poets after Rohit Vemula: from stardust to stars

The institutional death of Rohith Vemula on January 17, 2016, charged the atmosphere in the country in an unprecedented way. A watershed moment in the tenure of the current government, the suicide by hanging of this bright PhD scholar brought together not just Dalits but also people from all political shades opposed to tyrannical administration. From campus to campus to other public spheres, India witnessed a new, much-awaited revolution.

The other thing this moment ushered in was a surge in Dalit writing in English – which already has a rich tradition – especially poetry. Young poets and writers shed all inhibitions and rose above mainstream neglect to speak out, especially on social media.

Vemula’s fabulous idea of “man is essentially stardust” may have come forth in print only now, but for his friends and admirers, his presence itself is said to have spurred much in poetic temperament among emerging Dalit writers and poets today. If Meena Kandasamy had blazed a path long ago as a young Dalit writer – she is an icon now to many – what Vemula has done is to clear that path further to accommodate aspiring poets and writers for whom English so far has been a second language. In fact, Vemula’s online writings are now available as Caste is not a Rumour: The Online Diary Of Rohith Vemula, a 40,000-plus word collection of the young scholar’s Facebook posts.

For poet Chandramohan S, Vemula's suicide note was a cry from the heart. He feels it has shocked and provoked the conscience of anyone who reads it and serves the true purpose of Dalit literature. “Many Dalit scholars see the timeline of Dalit movement as pre- and post-Rohith Vemula,” Chandramohan says.

Aruna Gogulamanda began writing in college. Like every sensitive young person, her subjects comprised charity, kindness, pain at poverty, women’s woes, and the like. The pen moved on as well as her awareness of social realities and not too long ago, she wrote a poem titled None of These are India’s daughters (Veerearoo Indiayaa Daatarlukaaru) and went on to express the multi-fold oppression Dalit women face in and outside their families. That was a turning point. This was a poem both in English and Telugu. “That way, yes, I’m a bilingual writer.”

For Gogulamanda, to be a Dalit poet means several things. When her writings slowly moved to the topic of not a generalised humanity but Dalits specifically, she could visibly see an alienation from her regular readers on Facebook, where she actively posted her work, old and new.

“My Brahmin and upper caste readers like my postwhenever I write a love poem and wish that I should write not only on Dalit issues. The latter fetches insults and alienation. It’s a lot more criticism.” But to Gogulamanda, this is how to be real and to be empowered to stand on the oppressed side.

“Now, it is time we defined ourselves to prevent others from defining us.”

Chandramohan was trained in engineering although he reads voraciously.

“I never ever imagined myself to be a writer. In the aftermath of the Nirbhaya incident in December 2012, I was writing placards and posters for protests.”

His first ever poem evolved out of this exercise:

No newspaper carried a headline or a photo feature,
No youth were roused to protests,

No city’s life came to a standstill,

No furore in the parliament,
No nation’s conscience was haunted,

No Prime Minister addressed the nation,

No TV channel discussions,

No police officials were transferred or suspended,
No candlelight marches,

No billion women rising,

A Dalit girl was raped and murdered!

— “Rape And Murder of a Dalit Girl”

The heat and dust of the protest birthed the poet in him as he found out that the pen or the keyboard can be an activist's tool too. Chandramohan is not a bi-lingual writer, although he tries his hands at translations nowadays. For him, being a Dalit writer means trying to actively engage in a literary pursuit with the aim of contributing to our sensibility of what “reality” is. That is the reality Vemula had been striving to unravel, and that is what today’s Dalit poets are highlighting.

Gogulamanda understands the power of writing in English, a global language. But this does not come with particular sops or advantages, she feels. “Being in the first lot of Dalit writers is something very interesting and identity-generating. But, I still fail to look at Dalit writings as a career or a joy ride,” she says.

Given the manifold alienation she still faces for being a Dalit and a woman in a religion-sanctioned caste-fanatic society that doesn’t want to see an empowered woman, Gogulamanda is not yet hopeful of great changes through writing in English alone. “Indeed everywhere it is the hegemonic sections that rule the literary or publishing fields. Even the media frowns at Dalits,” Gogulamanda says.

This, however, doesn’t mean young Dalit poets refrain from writing and expressing.

“The best thing Dalits should do is to write, write, and write,” she says. “When I wanted to write, I was restricted by everyone including family members. I had to face many hurdles to end up here.”

To express her realities and that of the women she represents, and substantiate her viewpoint, Gogulamanda brings comparisons from Hindu holy books where women are thoroughly oppressed and discriminated. She considers her idiom bold and forceful. The language is sparse and direct. Poetic devices are kept minimal. Often, Gogulamanda simply imitates the ordinary speech of oppressed people from her own experience:

This is my country of enormous history…
here infants are burnt alive
for no crime of theirs
but for being born as Dalit heirs.
They are beaten to death
for singing their song of sorrowful lives.
This is my country…
that boasts of worshipping women
but brides are burnt alive in bonfire here,
women are gang raped,
kicked, pushed on to the streets,
killed and burnt like a heap of garbage.
They are paraded naked on the roads
and their men are made to eat
excreta and drink urine of hegemonic castes…
Animals are made gods.
Planets and stars rule our lives.
A poor man’s food
is snatched away for no reason.
Footpaths bleed as
a celebrity drunkard takes it for a racing road.
The poor have no place here,
they are driven to outskirts whenever (not) needed.
This is my country… alas,
that calls itself secular and democratic.
But its subjects are ruthlessly killed
For eating their own food,
walking their own way, and
living their own life
far away from the village.
This is a country of rich heritage,
of Vedas and Puranas…
But does not respect a human as a human.
This is my country
of ancient philosophy that is built on
Varnashrama Dharma…
the doctrine of differences and divisions,
the difference of caste and religion.

Chandramohan quotes an African proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the story of the hunt will glorify the hunter.” He sees Dalit literature as the documentation of the resistance of Dalit Bahujans against the Brahmanical social order.

“I believe we are at the cusp of a big change. Our voices are beginning to be heard.”

Chandramohan finds English handy for leveraging his position. “The advantages are many for a Dalit writer in English. Our voice could reach a larger audience or maybe get registered in the echelons of power, if not penetrate down to the underbelly of our society right away.”

Reacting to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous question –Can the subaltern speak? – Gogulamanda points out that the subaltern has been speaking since long, but has not been heard because of the institutional oppression that exists in Indian society.

“But no doubt more voices from the oppressed sections will be heard in no time. The government should get ready to answer about its authorised discrimination and oppression,” Gogulamanda says, adding that the current political situation feels its worst now, for women and the marginalised, and particularly for Dalits, hounded by the Manuvadi forces.

Gogulamanda cannot but revert to what Vemula has so aptly spelled out for a generation after him.

"’Our feelings are second hand,’ he had said,” she recalls. “And that a human being's identity is reduced to a number, a vote. I suffered reading this.”

As a young Dalit poet she knows what those words meant for Vemula. There is hardly any space to speak facts in a system perpetuating terrible discrimination. The dangers are many. One might lose one’s job, one’s identity or even one’s life for speaking up.

Vemula is an inspiration to fight for freedom of speech and expression.

“My major work area is poetry and short stories. Though I haven’t yet published any short stories about Dalit lives in English, I have a handful of them in Telugu, which will be soon translated into English,” says Gogulamanda.

Other than the saga of Vemula, what else inspires these young poets or defines their philosophy in the current times?

Chandramohan cites observations by writer UR Ananthamurthy on the lack of original English writing by Dalits themselves. In an essay for Poisoned Bread, an anthology of Dalit writing from Maharashtra, Gail Omvedt had pointed this out that a sense of cultural capital to produce poetry, short stories or novels in English is yet to emanate from the Dalit community.

But Chandramohan says that disparaging comments like there will never be “Indian English literature from our midst” are to be examined now. “The pertinent questions raised by Ananthamurthy on why there are no subaltern literary movements like Dalit or progressive movements in Indian English writing could be settled in this era.”

Chandramohan stresses that there is a dearth of “down to earth poetry” or “poetry of witness and social concern” in the Indian English poetry biosphere. “A sense of urban; upper caste /class elitism permeates everything. Maybe my poems run separate from the pack.” He for one uses the anglicised vocabulary of the privileged:

Caste in a local train can be deceptive
Like the soul of a Pakistani fast bowler
Camouflaged in a three-piece suit
And anglicised accent.

Though seated opposite me
I can feel him charging on to me.

If my surname is too long
I could be – caught behind.

Will I be trapped leg before wicket
If I attempt a bloodline crossover?

Hope I do not lose my nerve
At abrasive queries like bouncers.

I try to find myself a place
In his skull
Beyond his caste mark amidst his eyebrows

Like trying to find my way around
An ever changing map!

He tries assessing me with an in swinger first
“What is your full name?”

Then he tries an out swinger that seams a lot
“What is your father’s name?”

By this time he loses his nerve
And tries on a direct Yorker
“What is your caste?”!

— "Caste in a local train"

The recent Gujarat protests have drawn the battle lines further, Chandramohan surmises. “I try to write all of this – political, lyrical, songs, laments, etc. Some of my poems/songs co-written with a friend are being set to the rhythm of rap. We have begun working on it.”

“I feel blood boiling within when I read Black poetry,” Gogulamanda, 38, says. “But I feel inspired for life by Robert Frost’s the woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep…”

For inspiration she also looks to Maya Angelou’s lines from Still I Rise:

Does my haughtiness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard ‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard.

Not too long ago, Gogulamanda wrote, in her straightforward finger-pointing manner:

She was told…
not to wear a blouse
to allow every male…
to watch her as a device.
She was told…
to bend her back
and not walk straight
to fill the tender tummies…
keeping herself a bait.
She was told...
to toil all day long
at her hut or in her master’s field…
…as a human machine…

— From “She Was Told”

If today Dalit poets and writers are to test their own mettle, Gogulamanda feels, “it’s your responsibility to write your stories, on your own. It’s a right as well as a responsibility.” Chandramohan echoes this, expressing hopes for a literature conceived in Indian English that documents the underbelly of India, “conceived at sites of protests, be it university campuses or Dandakaranya or North-East or Kashmir.”

“Maybe we have a big job ahead. We get this opportunity because our previous generation concentrated on the civil rights of Dalits. The onus is on us to take the caravan forward,” he says.