Summer 1997
Volume 23, Number 4
Another memory that has persisted through the years has been of the man who lived in a tiny hut beside 25 R. D. He would sit wrapped in a faded cotton dhoti beside the hut's straw wall that I remember as being always covered with gourd leaves. That man, who used to bow silently when my grandfather, a peasant-landlord, passed by, was a leper. He was also a member of what is still regarded as the unouchable caste. He was an outcast. When my grandfather died, I came back from the city where I had been studying for fifteen years. According to the Hindu tradition that rules that a Dom, or an untouchable, give the fire to the eldest son of the dead person, my father received the flame for my grandfather's funeral pyre from that same leper.
I have never spoken to this man, I do not even know his name. I'm not about to make the liberal claim that it is in the poetry of Alokdhanwa, a contemporary Hindi poet whose poems I offer in translation here, that I make a more satisfying acquaintance with the subaltern figure in a space other than that marked by dominant culture. But what I do want to claim is that Alok's poems always raise the question of other possibilities: What if the flames in the hands of the outcast were used by him not to burn a corpse but to set fire to the body of a decadent feudal order? And, going further, these poems return us to the limits of poetry. Was it ever the spark of poetry that kindled those flames?
Amitava Kumar teaches cultural studies in the English department at the University of Florida. He is the columnist for Liberation (India) and a photographer for the New York-based co-op Impact Visuals. He is preparing two book-length manuscripts for publication: Passport Photos and Poems for the I.N.S..