admin Jyoti Lanjewar
Begging won’t get anything here
not sympathy, not love
A suit in court wins injustice,
Tears are of no value,
Getting water is a struggle,
Wrapping yourself in smoke from a dead fire won’t work
You have to plant the cinder of revolt in your own body.
At times there is a firefly of revolt flickering -maybe
counterfeit –
But at those times give it outside air to see if it glows.
“The revolution will come through poetry”
Once I accepted that.
But poetry does not live by making revolution.
The same faithless faces of yesterday
extend the hand of friendship
while wounding with a sword…….. and
in their struggle with the enemy were
made impotent.
They burned houses down with words
But after the house burned, the words died.
For the sake of the poetry of humanity
one must be so very human,
But they change with the wind…….
And these green parrots of the dry desert turn out to be
a mirage.
They turn their eyes where they wish, according to their
own convenience.
When there is no strength
in their own wings
They find the convenient words
to cut the wings of others.
They make palaces of words!
But I have seen them crumble.
“Kala Ram” and “Chawdar Tank” –
the history of pain
is carved on each of our hearts
But even if they could carve words on water
The Indrayani will not save them.
~~~
Eleanor Zelliot’s translation of Jyoti Lanjewar’s poem ‘anamikas‘. Jyoti Lanjewar is a professor of Marathi in Nagpur university. “The nameless ones” is a criticism of those within the Ambedkar movement itself. Kala Ram and Chawdar Tank are places that witnessed Satyagraha between 1930-1935. The last line of the poem refers to the poet saint Tukaramwho threw his poems into the Indrayani river at the behest of critical brahmins.
Source: Images of women in Maharashtrian literature and religion.