Opinion Homage to a Comrade Poet

The last time I remembered Narayan Surve was a day before he passed away. It happens,sometimes. A person who is dear and important to you knocks on the doors of your memory before departing from this world....

August 22, 2010 02:53 AM IST First published on: Aug 22, 2010 at 02:53 AM IST

The last time I remembered Narayan Surve was a day before he passed away. It happens,sometimes. A person who is dear and important to you knocks on the doors of your memory before departing from this world. I was participating in an Independence Day procession and rally of tribals in Ganeshpuri,on the outskirts of Mumbai. I was invited by Vivek Pandit,an independent MLA who is immensely popular with the tribal folk because of the numerous struggles that his organisation,Shramajeevi Sanghatana,has waged for the protection of their rights. Witnessing the new awakening,militant enthusiasm and irrepressible optimism in hundreds of its activists,both women and men,I remembered a celebrated poem by Surve (Maazhe Vidyapeeth). With vivid description and authentic self-reflection,he asserts that the pavements of life and struggle are the true universities that will produce the builders of a better tomorrow.

News came the following day that 84-year-old Surve,the beloved Lok Kavi (people’s poet) of Maharashtra,was no more. The news made every lover of good literature in Marathi,and every believer in the ideal of a just society,shed a tear of genuine grief. It rarely happens that a poet dies,and in dying he brings alive the dreams of millions of people. For Surve’s poetry had touched the hearts and minds of all sections of the post-1960s Maharashtra,uniting them,across socio-political barriers,with an invisible bond of shared hopes,aspirations and disillusionments. Not many of them subscribed to his communist ideology. (He was himself never a dogmatic communist. “If bookish Marxists seek to control man and art,” he declared,“I shall stand on the side of freedom of man and art.”) Nevertheless,such was the power and beauty of his poetry that,like the timeless films of Guru Dutt (who too had leftist beliefs),his poems appealed to communists and non-communists alike. Moreover,their appeal remained undiminished long after the communist world collapsed. This is because his poems were neither slogans proclaiming an ideology nor products of “fashionable frustration”. Rather,they were born in the pain,suffering and struggles of the proletariat,the class to which Surve himself belonged.

A destitute child who was raised by a poor working class couple in Mumbai,Surve experienced deprivation,injustice and exploitation first hand. However,he also witnessed an undying light of compassion among those whose life was filled with unrelieved darkness. For example,his poem Moneyoder paints the portrait of an illiterate village woman who is eking out an accursed living in a red-light district. With the help of a professional letter-writer at a nearby post office,she sends a money order back home to buy books for her children,with a touching instruction: “Give them ten paise daily so they run to school”. In dictating the letter,the woman also takes a contemplative off-the-record detour into the fallen state of the male-dominated society,in a way that renders the poem’s message universal. (“I laugh and cry simultaneously at all the men in the world.”) In another poem (Tumchaach naav liva),a prostitute,keen to enroll her child in a primary school,tells the teacher to “write your own name” as the child’s father in the school admission form,adding,“Don’t ask me about the caste.” The two poems,like many others penned by Surve,must find a place among anthologies of the world’s best poetry in the 20th century.

As in the case of all those students and youth in Maharashtra who took to Marxism in the troubled ‘70s,Surve’s poetry was an inseparable part of my own political education and activism. One never became a committed communist only by reading Marx and Lenin,or Dange and Namboodiripad. The poetry of Surve,Mayakovsky and Faiz,the novels of Gorky and Premchand,and the movies of Eisenstein (The Battleship Potemkin) and Guru Dutt (Pyaasa) were essential nourishment for the agitated soul. The effect of that nourishment has survived and remained undiminished,although disillusionment with communist theory and practice set in many years ago.

Which is why,Surve’s poetry continues to speak to me with its quintessential message of struggle: “Bhaago nahin,badalo”—Don’t run away,change. The Mumbai that he lived in,and in which I spent my own rebellious youth,has no doubt changed dramatically in recent years. Flashy malls advertising limitless hedonism have displaced textile mills,where once Surve’s poems (and the songs of revolutionary balladeers like Shahir Annabhau Sathe and Amar Shaikh) inspired numerous agitations for workers’ rights and an egalitarian India. But has this change made progressive poetry outdated? Judge for yourself by reading these lines from a poem in which Daud Chacha,a butcher who loses both his legs while saving a Hindu woman in a communal riot,tells the poet: “Manoos jhaala sasta,bakara mahaag jhaala. Jindagi madhye poraa,poora andher aala. Aaani sabdaala jagavel asaa,kaun hai dilwaalaa? Sabko paise ne khaa daalaa!” (Man has become cheap,sheep have become costly. Boy,life is filled with darkness. And is there a true soul left who practices what he preaches? Money has consumed one and all.)

So long as we have a society which values money above man,and power above principles,the flame of good poetry will never get extinguished. Laal Salaam,Comrade Surve!

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