Book review: Into an Unborn Age: A Review of Shyamal Kumar Pramanik,The Untouchable & Other Poems

In Can Literature Promote Justice? Kimberly A. Nance (2006) writes:

This is the difference between the poetics and the prosaics. Poetics is the realm of the imagination and of multiple possibilities, while prosaics is the realm of concrete choices and of consequences. Deliberative testimonio finally does offer something to its audience: neither purity nor certainties but rather lessons in how to construct, maintain, critique, and when necessary change a set of essentially contestable foundations that help to decide what to do at each of those points of decision—a do-it-yourself ethics. (p. 164)

What does a collection of poems that stands witness to not just its speaker-narrator-poet’s private life but to an entire historiography of his society, culture and times have to offer us by way of knowledge? Factual information, certainly; but more than that, what poetry lays bare to its readers is the epistemology of the soul, the emotive geography of being and experience and the imaginative possibility of transcendence and change. In poetry, more than prose, is felt the acute striving towards possibilities, the ethics of envisioning and the cartographic formulation of a subjectivity that endears and inspires by its consistent honesty and truth. Reading The Untouchable & Other Poems by the Bengali Dalit activist, Shyamal Kumar Pramanik, translated from the original Bengali by writer-academics, Jaydeep Sarangi and Anurima Chanda, leaves the reader with an experience that is as heart-wrenching as it is transformative and memorable.

Belonging to the Poundra Kshatriya community, one of the major Scheduled Caste communities in West Bengal with a bitter history of discrimination and abuse against it, Pramanik articulates, in his poetry, the quintessential Dalit voice characterized by rage, defiance, resilience and hope. For Pramanik, as he states in the interview that prefaces his poems, the term ‘Dalit’ refers to ‘those people from the depressed classes who are exploited socially and economically on the basis of their birth, by the system of Manuism and Brahmanism as propagated under the Hindu religion’ (p. 17). Kneaded out of a cultural experience of pain, slavery, victimization, oppression, humiliation and injustice, Pramanik’s poems uphold the Dalit literary thinking that caste is not an obsolete inheritance of the past being borne, cross-like, in the present but a burning social issue in contemporary India. Like race, gender and sexuality, caste remains a subtle form of everyday power exercised through definition, discrimination and surveillance. As a Dalit activist, Pramanik expresses his staunch commitment to envision and bring about a casteless society: ‘to establish equality and fraternity among Indians, irrespective of their caste and religion’ (p. 24). The fifty poems that comprise The Untouchable & Other Poems are strong, evocative expressions of revolt and self-assertion against a hegemonic savarna culture that thwarts at each turn the identity and aspirations of the lower castes. These poems, writes Pramanik, ‘are based on my holistic autobiographical experiences, and are not about a particular kind of Dalit experience’ (p. 26). The Dalit autobiographical mode of writing, while it is expressive of personal emotions, articulates a communal representation of the experience of suffering and deprivation and constitutes a valuable sociopolitical document that both archives and subverts the status of victimization and control.

Examine the very first poem of the volume, ‘I Know’:

I know

I know everything is right.

Yet I didn’t face you upright.

I sit in the turn of the road,

Heart full of sufferings.

I look at the Eastern sky

Watch the rise of

The fourth world from the dark. (p. 25)

The very title, ‘I Know’, in its assertion of knowledge, historical, social, cultural and political, subverts the logic of domination in claiming a free subjecthood. In this English translation, the semantic juxtaposition of ‘right’ and ‘upright’ with connotations of in/justice and oppression and the hopeful promise of the dark, largely sets the tone of Pramanik’s oeuvre. One finds embodied here all the ideas that watermark this intricate and urgent volume of poems—the consciousness of the liminality of space, the essential Dalit double consciousness, a sensitivity to the natural world as a repository of wisdom and harbinger of change, linguistic and ideological resistance and, above all, the looking forward to change—slow but definite.

In their Introduction to Dalit Studies, the editors, Rawat and Satyanarayana (2016) write:

In rural India, spatial configurations have played a significant role in the perpetuation of inequality. Dalit groups typically live in separate villages that are normally situated at some distance away from the main caste Hindu village. Dalits’ autobiographies have underlined spatial exclusion as a prominent method through which discrimination is practiced in rural India. (p. 19)

Pramanik’s poems evince such spatial consciousness in diverse and complex ways. To begin with, there is the immediate physical/geographical space from where the poet speaks—‘a mud house’ (p. 59) in the soil of his birth in ‘one of India’s backward villages’ (p. 69) which is marked by ‘a restricted sky’ (p. 73), a ‘secluded river bank’ (p. 64) ‘surrounded by shit and vomit’ (p. 65). Permeating this geographical space is the cultural space of family memories and folklores, community gatherings, rituals and patterns of celebration:

We had families and homes here

My own people lived by this old waterscape

We used to sing songs of Maa Shitala staring at each other

Used to watch Kalpurush at night. (p. 79)

Compounding these spatial dimensions is the poet’s acute awareness of inhabiting a space that extends beyond the personal to the sociohistorical. The personal pronoun ‘I’ in his poems easily lapses into a shared ‘we’ that is sharply demarcated against a ‘they’ that believed themselves to be ‘equipped with Brahmatya’ (p. 52), a blind, malevolent ‘they’:

They who had destroyed our houses

They who had destroyed our lives

Played Holi with our blood

And they, who did not speak

They saw but did not see. (p. 74)

Looming large over these poems is the poet’s acute double consciousness of his lot and his realization of the need to reconcile the category of Dalit with the universal human on the one hand and the particular Indian on the other. In ‘My Existence in Ruins’, for instance, he writes:

All my life I have searched for our civilization’s ancient history

In the spread of this land’s depths

In never-ending dreams.

Am I such a nobody! (p. 76)

The reader is startled in these poems by a language that resists, both aesthetically and functionally, the materiality of subjugation and the incarceration of the imagination by bending its standard syntax and semantics in unthought of ways. What must not be missed in this coding of resistance is Pramanik’s acute consciousness of the natural world from which most of his images of upheaval, transgression and resurrection are drawn. Although almost every poem in this volume brings in images of the natural splendour of the rural Bengal countryside, nature far more than a mere background to Pramanik’s poetry, is of essential ideological and aesthetic value within it. First, the natural world manifests itself to the poet as both companion and refuge in his relentless struggle with inequality. It represents, second, the principle of destruction, renewal and change, offering a vision to the poet that this phase of social victimization too shall pass. Third, it is a trope of continuity, linking the poet to his community and the community to its history. This is a site where temporal distinctions diffuse and the past, present and future coalesce to foster experience, wisdom and hope. Finally, and most importantly, a kinship with nature allows the poet to reclaim the space of primitivity and primordiality which is beyond the discriminatory logic of civilization and culture. This, then, is the poet’s utopia towards which he strives. The poem, ‘Here, Earth Narrates Its Birthstory’, envisions a return to a pristine geological glory where the essential humanity of man glows untarnished:

And Kalpurush comes walking from another planet-

He tells me of songs sung by enlightened birds,

Tales of primordial rocks and ancient forests;

A wondrous worldly life emerging out of destruction.

Awake, awake O world’s primitive man. (p. 49)

In the Preface to this collection, the translators, Jaydeep Sarangi and Anurima Chanda, aptly remark that Pramanik’s poetry, ‘does not simply manifest itself in torrid descriptions of Dalit life. Rather, it attempts to derive out of these experiences a new value system that would help Dalits to carve out a new social reality’ (p. 11). Pramanik’s poems, despite their moving agony and insistent rage, assert the predominance of hope and unwavering faith in a better tomorrow. It is impossible to not mention the authenticity and remarkable fluidity that characterizes these translations, the translators having negotiated deftly and creatively between two different linguistic and ideological systems to ensure that vital meanings are retained, both factually and stylistically. A word also must be said for the gifted illustrator, Arpita Pandey, whose illustrations offer new metaphors for the aesthetic exploration of these urgently beautiful poems.