1. The sun fastened to a knife
We are the ones living below your habitation
And we are the lighter ones
We are the ones inhaling the stink
Discharged by your elevated mansions
When I was amputated
Pounding stones to fortify your foundations,
It was the limb that I lost
The limb that grew into such a tall mansion
When I collapsed, neck wounded,
Pulling the cart of manure on an untrodden way
When our feet suffered sores
Carrying you in a palanquin and
Massaging your unstrained bodies,
Haven’t you called me a buffalo?
Haven’t you termed us beggars?
We are the ones living below your habitation
And we are the lighter ones
How long can you keep the lids shut on our eyes?
To open the eyes with vengeance is imminent.
Fastening the sun to a knife,
When we walk thunderously
Filing my waist’s knife on flint stones
When the sickle’s handle in my fist squeaks
While chopping diagonally,
The forest should now shudder;
It should now produce
The sound of an uprooting tree
The minority caste-Hindus
Should now step down
At the shrieks of chendalas, the wretched
Who gauged the earth
Telugu original: “Poddunu Kattiki Gatti”
2. Stench of Cemetery*
I am the one burning dead bodies
Thrusting down the blazing body with a stick
Shoving the burning pyre-wood into a heap.
I am untouchable
I gather in my loincloth fistfuls of rice
Left at the penultimate destiny of the body
Only after the bier is shifted
When I was the crow among the crows
Awaiting the food offered to the souls of the dead
When I was the one
Offering a couch to the dead body
Fastening sticks of length and breadth
Scaling hillocks and cutting the trunks
Chipping thorns and chopping twigs
When I was the log burning the body into ashes,
It’s you who would
Knock away everything, as an eagle grabs chicks
You, the one who penned the stinking-nonsense of
Cock and bull stories,
In the mind’s silt my body is stirred
By the crowbars of repeated atrocities
Dvija, the twice born!
You branded me the wretched
I set my foot in the hymn of your incantation.
You only know the delight of incense sticks
I would show you the burial-stink
And the stench of the cemetery.
Here you listen now
I will sing with my filthy voice
The noise of your skulls
Even before you reach the pyre
*Telugu original: “Begaronni”, one belonging to a Dalit sub-caste
whose traditional occupation is to burn/bury the dead bodies.
3. Faeces*
Carrying on the back
A bucket, a broom and a tin tray
My trace on the earth having been slippery
At the site that’s touched by me
Outcast that is
Drawing faeces from shitting-enclosures
Washing the stink and odour of time
In the manholes of sewers,
I would cap the stench into a snuff-casket
I wouldn’t mind being termed a pariah
In the lingo of your tongue
But when I’m called the wretched caste
It rings in my ear as a buzzing fly
Offering a pitcher of water for washing your anus
And shoving off heaps of shit,
When I stretched out the tin tray for a copper
Didn’t you name me a scavenger?
Being scolded, sporting an innocent face,
Did I ever scorn anyone?
Having endured the stench,
I covered myself
With my occupation as the quilt.
I’m not a rogue to drag into the street
Someone’s squabbles.
The service of the priests,
Filling their bellies to the brim in temples
Chanting credible hymns and the clans of devotees
Was it of any use to anyone?
I am the only one who’s authentic
I would plaster you with faeces
Till the roots of your caste are crumpled
*Telugu original: “Jaathnaara” (Excommunication)
4. Hard bullock meat
Attending to the time’s turns
Being the residue of hunger around the threshing floor
Being the hard meat of cultivation’s services
Our labour agreement the floor on which we are threshed
The bonded labour having become a yoke
Is anyway stirring on our necks!
When my skeleton keeps sentry
At the ridges of wet-fields,
The merciless thorns of the caste fence
Shredded my body
While your caste is the sunflower
At the way of your farm-shed;
Either a dry palmyra frond or a worn-out chappal
Beckons as a symbol of our occupation and
The trace of our house
We could outline the imprints on leather
Only when your feet moved about on our finger-tips;
My face a round black stone beneath your white feet
Folding together
The travails of hunger and
The stirring bowels of the belly,
The yield of my skin processed leather
Melting cassia
Soaking in lande, the trough1
While chewing a piece of the liver
As the solid walk of your chappal
Trampled on my heart,
I am the one who could see
The generations of my ancestors
Crushed under your walk
It’s anyway known to me -
The knack of skinning by
Binding the feet of the calves of caste.
Having become the bubbling up of
Marking nuts boiled in the earthen casket of oil,
I am filing my tools, awaiting
The moment of glimpsing my full length shadow
In raw blood
Telugu original: “Saanem Tunakalu” (hardened pieces of dry bullock-meat)
5. A novel knock on the eyes2
My harvesting-floor, when an animal dies,
Is but the slaughtering slab.
Peeling off the skin to mix with lime
Smearing alum with the hands that butchered
Sifting cassia to soak the skin in lande, the trough1
Carrying the stench day long,
We processed the skin stubbornly.
Fastened the leather of bucket-hose3
Wetting with drops of tears.
My caste's
The early factory of artisan occupations
We’re the ones who honoured our occupation
The tail of life being a bullock’s neck-strap
Our trace having become a blister in the knot
Our pot being at the end in the row at water,
Our abode is wailing behind the village
Maadiga,
A grand name for the bonded labour.
What’s there to find by measuring immeasurable depths
Each step of this pit has a generation of insult
How else can my crushed pulse throb
Except as pain when compacted by trampling feet
Being a leader either ritually or as a ploy
Bowing to the one of the caste Hindu
How’s it that you’re fishing as a beggar ra?
Did you negotiate to mortgage the caste
In the mystical game of dice?
Do you feel ashamed or insulted?
Hasn’t the chewed up residue dried out?
You the Dalit betrayer,
Don't ever bow as a hangman!
If the reserved seat goes astray in future
Is there anyone to pity you?
Is there a term to address you?
Struggle to walk on
The moulded path laid by the leader4
Join the Dalit masses
Lest you might spill over or get disturbed in the pathway
Be vigilant!
As a knocking-bird(2) on the magical banyan tree
As the one serving from our bowl,
He, the caste-Hindu, is ready
To prick these eyes ra!
Telugu original: Kallameeda Kotha Varnasaaruva
6. Feats of drum-beats
I am the one who glued my palm
To the heel of your foot's thinned sole
I am the one
Who adorned your worn-out chappal
Grafting my skin
Lacing my nerves into strings of your tender feet,
When the bullock’s eyes wailed as flowers
On the straps of your chappal that I decked,
I joined them wailing!
My grits are the grains
Under your feet in the washing-pan5.
I’m the butcher sharing raw meat on the slaughtering slab
When offered an aged bullock for slaughter
I am the one who lifted first
The fathoms-deep fountain-spring
In the bucket-hoses2.
Is there someone to calculate
The perforations on my palm?
My resonating drum at your ritual is
The very skin flattened with moulds and tools
Yet … When the chisels of 'whore son' and 'widow son'
Pierce my bosom,
The scrap left in the lande1 is our treatment
You, the one of caste-arrogance
The one of amorous tunes and bathing games
My drum, hanging on the peg, knows my gushing agony
I am the one
Who picked up a rupee placed in the soil
Tumbling myself – the belly and the brow – in the dust
To present you amusement
I remain untouchable in spite of the feats I perform
This body had been mortgaged before we were born
This wealth sank in the marsh of your caste men
Beckoning us with waving hands,
It's our own drum that begot tinkling flames
Dripping tender rhythm
The skin that we peeled the layer from with the knife
The leather that’s fastened on the frame of the dappu
The drumsticks have changed the rhythm
We are now stepping our feet to approach with
The feats of the tiger
Telugu original: “Oddulu Tirukkuntu”
Notes
1 Lande is a huge oval-shaped earthen container dug into the ground up to the edges; it is used by the madigas for soaking and processing animal leather.
2 The predator bird that strikes the eyes of the rabbit-prey to kill and eat it.
3 A bullock-drawn spherical bucket of about 100 litres, fastened at one end with a diameter of 12-inch leather hose, that holds and releases water as the bullocks tread to and fro drawing the bucket. This device, called mota, was the means of irrigating fields, especially in Telangana, till the emergence of diesel pump-sets in the 1970s.
4 Dr B.R. Ambedkar.
5 As the bride’s mother pours water, the father washes the feet of the groom who stands in a brass pan in the Hindu marriage ritual. The left-over grains of rice used in the ritual are taken away by the maadigas who beat dappu for the ceremony.
