Read poems by Namdeo Dhasal, translated by Dilip Chitre.
Namdeo Dhasal was born in 1949 , in a former 'untouchable community' in Pur-Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra. As a teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps, prostitutes, petty criminals, and gangsters in Bombay's underworld. He has had very little formal education. In 1972, he founded Dalit Panther, the militant organisation inspired by the Black Panther movement. The same year he published Golpitha. Since then he has published eight collections of poems from which this selection is drawn. In 2004 Sahitya Akademi hounered Dhasal with the Lifetime Achievement Award.
Dhasal's long-time friend and bilingual poet Dilip Chitre, acclaimed for his translations of the seventeen century Marathi poet-saint Tukaram, has translated Dhasal into English.