Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworld Poems 1972-2006

Namdeo Dhasal the maverick Marathi poet who hardly had any formal education. Born in 1949 in a former untouchable community in Pur Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra as a teenage taxi driver he lived among pimps prostitutes petty criminals drug peddlers gangsters and illicit traders in Bombay/Mumbai's sinister and sordid underworld. In 1972 he founded Dalit Panther the militant organisation modelled on Black Panther. The same year he published Golpitha that belongs to the tradition in modern urban poetry beginning with Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Since then he has published eight collections of poems from which this representative selection is drawn. In 2004 India's national academy of letters Sahitya Akademy honoured Dhasal with the only Lifetime Achievement Award it gave during its Golden Jubilee celebrations. Dhasal's long time friend and bilingual poet Dilip Chitre acclaimed for his translations of the seventeenth century Marathi poet saint Tukaram considers Namdeo Dhasal to be one of the outstanding poets of the twentieth century