Namdeo Dhasal

                                NAMDEO DHASAL

                     Namdeo Laxman Dhasal  was a Marathi poet, writer and Dalit activist from Maharashtra, India. He won the Padma Shri in 1999 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sahitya Akademi in 2004. In 2001, he made a presentation at the first Berlin International Literature Festival.

                              Namdeo Dhasal was born in 1949, in a small village Pur in Khed taluk near Pune, India. He and his family moved to Mumbai when he was six. A member of the Mahar caste, he grew up in dire poverty.Following the example of the American Black Panther movement, he founded the Dalit Panther with friends in 1972. This militant organization supported its radical political activism with provocative pamphlets. Dhasal wrote two novels, and also published pamphlets such as Andhale Shatak  and Ambedkari Chalwal , which was a reflection on the socialist and communist concepts of modernist movement founder Babasaheb Ambedkar. Dhasal wrote columns for the Marathi daily Saamana. Earlier, he worked as an editor for the weekly Satyata. Dhasal was diagnosed with colon cancer and admitted for treatment in a Mumbai hospital in September 2013.

                     In 1982, cracks began to appear in the Panther movement. Ideological disputes gained the upper hand and eclipsed the common goal. Dhasal wanted to engender a mass movement and widen the term Dalit to include all oppressed people, but the majority of his comrades insisted on maintaining the exclusivity of their organization.Serious illness and alcohol addiction of Dhasal overshadowed the following years, during which he wrote very little. In the 1990s, he once again became politically more active. Dhasal held a national office in the Indian Republican Party, which was formed by the merger of all Dalit parties.The Dalit literature tradition is old, though the term was introduced only in 1958. Dhasal was greatly inspired by the work of Baburao Bagul, who employed photographic realism to draw attention to the circumstances which those deprived of their rights from birth have to endure. Dhasal’s poems broke away from stylistic conventions. He included in his poetry many words and expressions which only the Dalits normally used. Thus, in Golpitha he adapted his language to that of the red light milieu, which shocked middle class readers. Dhasal died of colorectal cancer at Bombay Hospital on 15 January 2014.