002: In that mill I too was forged
First installment of Reading Currently, where we read a a boy who was abandoned at birth, went on to become a revolutionary poet, and a thief who has a change of heart.
Ever since I read this book, which was about three months ago now, I knew I had to write about it. My discovery of Narayan Surve, and my attraction towards him had several roots: wanting to read yet another book by Jerry Pinto, discovering more Marathi literature, and wanting to find some communist poets who don't give me the yucks. This book was a repository of all this, and more.
Surve, abandoned at birth, was adopted by mill workers, went on to become a mill worker himself, and later a teacher, found a drive to poetry and became a loyalist to the communist party, even as the party wasn't loyal to him:
My nature drew me to the Communist movement and this proved to be an association of great importance to me. The benefit of this was that instead of a caste-based movement or one that was all smoke and mirrors. I got bound to a scientific and universal movement. It gave me from the very beginning the basic scientific understanding that you have to change the interior landscape before you change the world outside, that it is the community that counts but the individual that is paramount. This philosophy was much more eye-opening to me than all the scriptures and texts of the pundits. Its name was Marxism- Leninism. It was with this third eye that I moved forward. It helped me confront reality as it exists, to make use of the understanding I had developed, to turn experiences into questions, and to use these to change myself into an activist who could engage with the world and would also help the other person change. Truly, it is important to have clarity in one's thought process.
Surve couldn't have formal high education at the age when he should have had, and learnt poetry from the rhythm of work in the Mumbai proletariat. Mumbai, the city that gave him praises and scourges. About the city he writes:
Sleep does not come that night. My eyes burn in the dark.
My soul splutters and sizzles, damp firewood to the spark.
My father wore out like sandalwood rubbed upon a stone.
What of my buds? Will darkness claim them for its own?
My heart is full to bursting. I yearn for catharsis.
These words don't work; my father too wrote inspiring verses.
Structurally, the book has a lot more to offer than just his poems. It contains a foreword by the translator Jerry Pinto, who was chiefly the reason I picked the book. I have come to depend upon Pinto for my dose of Marathi literature, and while I have no way of ascertaining the loyalty of his translations to the original text, the sheer pleasure of reading him makes up for the uncertainty. He writes:
I did drop in this time but it was in the middle of the shooting and there wasn't much time to talk. So I did the next best thing. I translated him. I'm not going to tell you tales of the losses of translation: they bore me. I believe that the gains in translation far outweigh the losses. If we did not have translations, what would we know of Akhmatova, Basho, Cavafy, Dnyaneshwar, Eknath, Fuzuli, Guillevic, Popati Hiranandani, Ibopishak, Juvenal, Koziol, Lalleshwari, Muktibodh, Neruda, Oberg, Pessoa, Qabbani, Rengetsu, Szymborska, Transtromer, Ungaretti, Mahadevi Varma, Cai Wenji, Xu Zhimo, Yevtushenko, Zanzotto... make your own list and recite it every time someone brings out that old shibboleth.
Then comes a foreword/life-sketch by Surve himself, which affords us the deep insight into his life and the constitution of his poetics that we rarely get for poets. Not only that, the book also contains transcribed and translated an interview of Surve for Arun Khopkar’s film “Narayan Gangaram Surve.” I haven't watched the film yet, I'll be honest. But I plan to, and so I'm just putting it here for anyone (including myself) to watch.
In the winding department there are 41,500 spindles that are constantly turning. If one stops, the machine stops. The doffer boy's job was to run up and unstuck the spindle, pull off whatever yarn has stuck and let the spindles turn again. Then they reconnect the thread. Sometimes the ends of the thread have to be removed. That was the doffer boy's job; he was on the lowest rung of the pecking order. The job left calluses on my hands. So I used the image of the callus in my poem. There are calluses on the hands of the carpenter, on the hands of the ironsmith, but there are none on the hands of the supervisor. It is the difference in the work they do
And of course, there are the poems. The flow of the verse, the almost journalistic reportage, the almost academic analysis, the almost divine hope. Surve’s work was born in the soil of working class Mumbai, educated by Marx, and fed by the Marathi traditions of popular rhythms. The result is a beautiful map of the city and its people, and the future these people want.
What prompted me to write about this book was a serendipity. Just as I finished reading the book, an odd but amazing story surfaced, which made headlines for a while. The house where Surve lived, where his descendants now live, was robbed one night. The news broke the morning after that there was a robbery in Narayan Surve’s house. The thief, upon learning this, went in again the next night, kept the possessions back and left an apology note, stating that they didn't know it was Surve’s house. You can read the story here, and the note is here:
I have seen my fair share of instances where a poet is entrenched in the heart of the masses, but never anything like this. This is how massive a shadow he has cast on his people. This is what Surve was, and this is the strength and solidarity that his poems continue to teach:
Monsters may descend on you,
Thundering on the door. They may raid the house.
They may take you away.
Don't you tremble. Not for a moment.
Stand firm.
This is interesting! Adding the author and the film to my list )
this was wonderful! thank you for introducing me to him :]