Jayant Parmar: The First Voice of Dalit Poetry in Urdu: Shafey Kidwai

It looks incredible. A 30- year- old who uses word and brush with equal felicity picks up a language learning guide from the downtown market of Ahmedabad that is famous for” things not with it” as it is the area where  one hardly see any shopping mall, food plaza and multiplex. It is the place that makes him realize that the life does exist beyond selling, buying and sensual pleasures. Soon he becomes fully conversant with the nuances and idioms of a language that is apparently incompatible with his cultural ethos, ideological concerns, value system and religious beliefs, surprisingly within no time he rides roughshod over the complicated and formidable prosody of that language. Eventually his ever- increasing proficiency in that particular language coupled with his creative dexterity, has earned him the prestigious Sahitya Academy award in 2009. It is a piece of fiction but is exactly what has been achieved by Jayant Parmar. His transformation from a Gujarati poet and painter into an accomplished Urdu poet leaves many awe-struck as his second collection of poems “Pencil Aur Doosri Nazmein” (Pencil and other poems) got the Award of the National Academy of Letters – Sahitya Academy – for Urdu last year.

Jayant Parmar who has continuously been haunted by the fetidness of hell pit admits that atmosphere around him was hardly conducive for any creative work. Narrating his childhood experiences he points out:

“My mother was an illiterate Dalit and my father was a factory worker who never attended a school. During my formative years I realized that I have to cling to life all alone. At the age of 14, I took up brush to earn a livelihood. I started selling portraits and soon miniature paintings have become my profession. I would draw miniature painting for a frame seller but here I found untouchability at its peak, a separate water pot was ordered for me and I was not allowed even a running water tap. It left me completely dejected”.

Jayant Parmar lived in the Muslim dominated locality of the walled city Ahmedabad, he developed a strong liking for Urdu poetry and it prompted him to start learning Urdu.

 “I bought a copy of Urdu Script Teacher from a roadside market and I found Urdu the most effective medium of my creative expression. I also laid my hand at Urdu calligraphy”.

Jayant Parmar first started composing poems in his mother tongue Gujarati, and then found it quite appropriate to   express himself in a language that takes pride in taking recourse  in a to sentimental exoticism. Urdu poetry, largely infused with highly suggestive imagery, conjures up multiple meanings but Jayant Parmar’s poetry, betrays a definite deviation as he zeroes in on relentless probing of the human predicament through the prism of his intensely personal anguish which he describes as the “smell of hell pit”. He does not wear his sufferings lightly and peels away layers of ignominy of untouchability accumulated over years in an idiom that is direct and completely devoid of rhetorical flourish.

From the scrap of poetry of committed to romanticism, social realism and modern sensibility, he repudiates feigned morality. With his laconic poems, he tries to transcend the ideological caste and ethnic schisms that had cursed our country. One can hear the voice of   a stolid narrator who refuses to compose a poem on the experiences of the past or wishful past.   The protagonist pays no attention to the beauty around him as he has continuously been dogged by the smell of hell pit. The smell smothers his creativity and it lingers on no matter how hard he tries to ward off it:

The Smell of Hell pit

Used to dog me

To my school

Below the sun umbrella

It would descend

Barefooted

In the hell pit

She wailed

Wet

The animal skin

In the sult and ………..

And cleanse it

With her dead feet

As a reward

For me

Pieces of meat

Even today

Before I leave for my office

When I shine my shoes

With cherry blossom

In the shining

I see my mother’s face

The smell of hell pit

Dogs me to my office

(Translated by G. K. Vankar)

Here the narrator’s evisceration of the past produces poignant vignettes about his upbringing and it surfaces everywhere- be it mother’s face or be it shoeshine

The memory of the mother is peppered with interminable images of indignity and “shine of shoes” calls to mind the face of mother who was taken for ride by the hoity-toity. Such anecdotes spurn out of control and the poet finds it more than what flesh and blood can stand.

Jayant Parmar’s laconic poems question established truths, as he cannot ingest the fiendish attitude of the society. He has set Dalit poetry in motion in Urdu and his three collections Aur (And, 1999), Penci Aur Doosri Nazmein (Pencil and other poems 2006) and Manind (Similar 2007) unfailingly makes it clear that his poetry is not being written for astral beings. His poems touch the subject of affliction and also turn attention to a savage impulse that exists beneath all human actions, the pervasiveness of exploitation of have-nots. The pitiable and dolorous condition and degeneracy of the outcast makes the narrator to take refuge in ironic posing and his clear-eyed account is generally wrapped in opprobrious terms in a language modulated on speech rhythm:

I had asked for home

And they buried me alive

I had asked for a small piece of land

And they put a stone of migration on my head

I had asked for bread

And they out live coals on my tongue

I had only asked for a book

And they poured the molten lead in my ears

(Hath-Hands-Translated by G. K. Vankar)

The apparent reference to some common possessions such as   book, pencil, paper, pen, ink, brush and colour hardly make one inquisitive but these common place belongings become the most sought after things for those who were not allowed to use t them by the snooty ruling class. The simple demand was rejected with contempt and the seekers were severely punished. It is an appalling situation that is depicted through irony.

Jayant Parmar touches the theme of humiliation time and again and his each poem is scorched by the blazing sunshine of denial and disavowal. Wrapped in everyday conversational idiom his poems on above-mentioned themes are born as a result of angst.

The inflamed narrator no longer prates about the infidelity of the lover and his medium of expression-pencil- suddenly turns into a grieving witness of the sensitive poet:

A polio-stricken hand

Asks a broken blue pencil

Lying next to one foot

Can you write?

The pencil hesitates and says:

Yes, I can write

And make your pictures too

But only if

You can remove the plaster of my frail body

With the help of a pen-knife

Surprised

I keep listening to Hussain Baksh

On Zee TV

Leave the cup and the flask……..

………I

(Translated by Bedar Bakht) ¹

For him the paper is not made up of leaves or pulp but it resembles with his body that is dotted with untold tales of the torment and miseries.  Sordid tales of the untouchability can only be written on the naked body of the Dalits and no one seems bother about it.  Dehumanization gets widespread approval that leaves the narrator dumfounded:

In the olden times

They used to write

On ordinary leaves

On the back of a tree

On palm leaves

On chests of palm trees

On stones

On animal leather

The four Vedas

Were also written

On the back of a tree

But the black accounts

Of tyranny

Were written

On my body

Even today

(Translated by Bedar Bakht) ²

Instead of the broom and scrubbing brush, the narrator picks up the pen, pencil, brush and paper through which he asserts himself as he wants to get a distinct recognition these not based on his caste or profession. Pen empowered him and he uses it as a poisoned knife to tear apart the Brahmincally defined social system. The omniscient narrator reacts subjectively to various forms of subjugation. Now the Dalits appear as a newly created social, religious and political community.³

With sledgehammer irony, Jayant deflates the myth of metaphoric precision of poetry and weaves filigreed word pictures with satirical and epigrammatic endings. For him love is not a panacea for derivation   but courtly love and romantic excess is a charismatic weapon for manipulating the toiling masses.

 With consummate ease Jayant strives for self indulgence and in his poems the distinction between the personal and universal pains becomes extraneous. Death is nothing but a form of mindscape that delineates complete split up of words and meaning

The migration of words and meanings

From the street of heart

On the leaves of passion

The footprints of autumn

Dalit poetry uses the diction, which is somehow not the same that we are used to.

 Having been subjected to the worst atrocities, the Dalit poet remonstrates about all forms of exploitation based on class, race and occupation. Jayant deliberately rejects traditional poetic restrictions and assiduously conjures up the feeling of aversion and detestation. His poems are filled with the voice of oration, arguing and exhortation. His poem “The Last Will of the Dalit Poet” appears to be a vestigial symbol of the staggering painful effort to find some sense in the world of non-sense:

A Dalit poet

Leaves several things behind;

A paper dripping wet with blood,

A black sun,

On the night’s head,

A river of blood,

A lantern of his ancestors,

He never assaults you with

Symbols,

Metaphors,

Or personalities

A heavy burden on a donkey’s back,

He is himself a wounded shadow

He has no existence

There is little difference

Between Him and a broken cup

He who makes images with cow-dung

Has at least the sense to know

That in the hour glass

In the smell of exiled earth

In the sunflower of rebellions

In the spear of the pen and the ink

And lives forever

But now

He is looking for his existence

He is looking for himself

He is proud to call himself

A Dalit poet

(Translated by Baidar Bakht) ⁴

Without words, his poetry becomes a question mark even for himself.   It is time for exultation   as the newly- acquired identity ‘Dalit Poet’ has made him proud. Caste liberation discourse pervades these poems and they have their own idiom, which has no bound, but they can not be laid aside jeremiad. With his gleaming poetic candor, Jayant merges his poetic individuality into a nameless mass. In an unjust moribund society, the poet is impelled to use pen and ink as a spear but it cannot untangle the knot of human predicament. Jayant seeks a new kind of freedom that is peppered with strong disapproval, alienation and informality.

 Jayant avoids   obscure vocabulary, Persian idioms, and compound words deliberately and unlike his contemporaries he does not repeat himself conversely as Balraj Komal points out  he takes birth in his poems time and again and every time discovers  a new dimension of his awe-inspiring creativity.  Title of one of his famous poem “sapne dekhne wale hath’ betrays an extreme form of suppression and exploitation as the narrator is impelled to use his hands for having   dreams  as he can not make use of his imagination .Even for creative urge he has to use hand through which he earns his livelihood. Imtiyaz rightly points out his dreams are ought to be of making knives and draggers and putting heads on the draggers. It is violent protest unheard in Urdu poetry.   

Delineating the contours of the poetic creation of Jayant Parmar, eminent Urdu critic Gopichand Narang aptly observes:

 “Urdu is the cultural language of minority, but Jayant Parmar’s predicament represents a minority within minority. In other words this marginalized voice is subaltern within subaltern. Subdued in the haze of pain, this is sigh of leaves falling in the autumn sun; In the backdrop of sad colours; poems with the themes of ‘mother’ shock the reader. If one could be lost into the text, one can discover it in words of rags of historical pains and discrimination that has been taken for granted and has been going on for ages”.⁵

Jayant too writes romantic poem but they too are meshed with his commitment to the causes he lives for. His desire for securing an honourable place in the society and anguish at poverty runs through all his poems.

 Explaining the symbolic meaning of the title of his second collection ‘Aur’ (And), Jayant points out:

“There is an invisible mountain behind the elevated peaks. Apparent is not always the truth and I intended to go beyond it. The word ‘Aur’ (And) joins words and sentences and I try to bind hearts together through my poems. In my creative world, lion, bear, leopard, flavor, darkness, sunshine, seasons, paper, pen, pencil, brush, canvass, easel and man, all have their distinct identities. My symbols and metaphors are drawn from routine type. My poems do reveal a deep sense of agony and pain. One might hear in them a tone of assertion rather than a note of an apology”.

References:

1. Indian Literature, Issue 252, July-August 2009, New Delhi, page no. 74
2. Ibid, page no. 69
3. Dharnandkar Vinay; The Dalit Poetry in Marathi,  World Literature Today, Volume 68, Issue 1994, page no. 1994
4. Indian Literature, Issue 252, July-August 2009, New Delhi, page no. 81-82
5. Gopichand Narang: Jayant Parmar: Poems on the Easel, Indian Literature, Issue 252, July-August 2009, New Delhi, page no. 68