I don't know Namdeo Dhasal personally although I briefly met him once in the 70s. He was a thickfaced man with a demeanor that no doubt made fake hipster tough guys uncomfortable since he was the real thing: a product of Bombay's most famous whore and gangster district. Although he never finished school, his self-education was impressive. And somehow threatening. One didn't want to mess with him. Glancing at him, you got the feeling that the most brutal lines in his poems were gentle compared to the thuggery he'd learned in the city's Golpitha area where there were certainly more annual murders and varieties of venereal disease than there were poems written. This man wasn't a pretender to the streets, he was the streets.  
 
        Dhasal's existence must be seen in its political context. Just as the U.S. has been incapable of transcending the social disorders that stem from its history of racism, so India flounders in a casteism that dehumanizes and enslaves the lower castes, particularly dalits. When Namdeo's dalit voice came onto the scene in the early 70s, it didn't just fracture Marathi literature's tranquility and "pornographicize" its language, it also birthed a political movement for dalit power. 
 
        In one of his poems Dhasal describes how caste society and male domination deformed his mother, making her into a "machinery for the production of worms." Identifying with her spiritual butchery at the hands of a bigoted society, he tells her, "Just as I have been stripped bare, so have you." This identification with his mother, however, doesn't lead him to inner healing; instead, it hardens him and gives his despair an unpredictable edge. With a baiting bitterness, he asks her, "On the day you cut my umbilical cord, why didn't you slash my throat with your fingernail?" He then proceeds to rail at her some more, accusingly but also as an act of self-mutilating triumph over any possibility of romanticization -- 
 

                                                                            How easily you lived, wrapped in rhinoceros hide. 
        
        "How easily you lived" is such a simple phrase on the surface, yet it's a tangle of complexity. First, there's the anger, not just against the mother's silence, but against what the author perceives to be a history of too much dalit resignation to oppression. But this anger is misleading in that it initially, although not ultimately, camouflages the author's sarcasm -- i.e., Dhasal is quite aware that the idea that a dalit woman can live "easily" under any circumstances is ridiculous. Being turned into "a machinery for the production of worms" and being "sucked dry all your life" places a border of impossibility around the idea of dalit existence that can't be breached. Concepts like easy life, happiness, freedom to choose, etc. survive outside this border but have no traditional meaning within it. So Dhasal's use of the phrase "how easily you lived" is sarcastic. Yet in spite of its sarcasm, it's also not sarcastic because Dhasal, just like the chamar that he is (the chamar caste is responsible for cleaning the dead), is a scavenger familiar with the art of putting the little he has to multiple uses -- in this instance, squeezing all he can out of a simple phrase. 
        
        So, besides the anger and sarcasm in the phrase's use, the author also employs it as part of a nonderisive attempt to create a theory of being that redefines dignity and destabilizes power at the same time. Dhasal does this by suggesting that for a group (dalits) who have been denied everything material, their sole valuable possession is language itself and its potential power, if it is used to name oppression and detail the forms of its existence, to become a form of insurgency against subjugation. This belief in a dissident language’s liberating character is why in the poem he begs his mother not to "forecast defeat for the weapon" -- i.e., language, poetry -- "that the 20th century has put into your son's hands" and which, if used correctly, will become the voice of all who "have lost their identity." 
        
        This may sound like a naïve conception of language's capacities but it isn't. By opening the floodgates of a suppressed vocabulary (i.e., dalit slang, negations of the status quo, etc.) Dhasal liberates common language by infusing it with the taboo -- i.e., by debasing or ruining its “normalcy” and establishing that just as the farmer fertilizes soil with manure, so the revolutionary must revitalize language by opening it up to absent nutrients; in this case, the smut and muck of the socially excluded's way of life. 
        
        No wonder Dhasal was viewed, in one critic's words, as "not just a bad writer but a disgusting one, a person with no respect for any version of decorum whatsoever." Yet a more sensitive reading of Dhasal"s work shows that far from being a bad writer, he was involved in a revolution of meaning that upended status quo thinking by knocking down its walls and letting in all those things that the mainstream ignores in order to sustain its self-righteousness. In this regard Dhasal's conception of poetry's relationship to reality is similar to William Carlos Williams' notion that opening up oneself to life requires a baptism "in the filthy river" – i.e., requires not just an acceptance of what conventional moralists tell us that life is, but an immersion in life"s fullness, with all its grime and chaos and unfiltered exhilarations and repugnancies. 
        
        To understand Dhasal's poetry's raw power, it's helpful to think in terms of the initially convulsive effect the black blues had on U.S. "good taste" and how there was much white orating against the blues' alleged vileness. Only very tardily did the white status quo admit that what it had mocked as a backward music that possessed no value was in fact (along with the jazz that grew from it) the U.S.'s single most important musical contribution to world culture. So much for what the powers that be knew about creativity. Similarly, Dhasal's liberation of dalit slang and experience from the gutter into the "decorous house of poetry" turned that residence into one filled with more anarchy and insurrectionary creativity than most of its previous tenants could stand. 
        

        Dhasal of course makes no apologies for his writing. Instead, he's relentless in his insistence that the reader know why he writes the way he does. And so he regales us with the real, detailing a claustrophobic world filled with extraordinary deprivation and a garbage that is both literal and spiritual. 
        
        In his poem "Song of the Republic and the Dog" he reports that the dalit inhabits "the dark empire of hunger, the guts which have run dry." This empire is a place where malnutrition is so chronic and good health such a rarity that people have lost the ability, he says, to even think "about crops and water." This is a deprivation so thorough that it isn't just physical but also epistemological: the concept of nourishment is as absent as nourishment itself. In such an economic/psychological hell, peopled by slum dwellers, latrine cleaners, leather workers, laborers, prostitutes and so on, the dalit's life, Dhasal proclaims sarcastically, is mirrored by only one other creature, a leashed dog that 

                                                                                      howls and barks from time to time. 
                                                                    This is his constitutional right. 

                                                                                      His mind is calloused with endured injustice. 
                                                                                      If at a rebellious moment it becomes unbearable 
                                                                                      and he jerks at his leash, tries to break his chain, 
                                                                                      then he is shot.

        The poem's concluding stanzas include images that suggest an unsettling relationship between degradation and spiritual death on the one hand and the possibility of violent transformation on the other -- 

                                                                    The gaping wounds on the body will not vanish.

        
                                                                                     My mind is turning into blood‑bathed doves. 
        
        As far as I know, Dhasal was/is more than a bit crazy. The kind of guy you have to keep your eye on if you don't want your throat slit by a knife of words. Having reinvented his mother tongue -- Marathi -- for a whole generation of writers, he remains until this day a henchman balladeer selling nickel bags of notes in shadows darker than the hair on a young pimp's balls.