A Female Dalit Poet Fights Back in Verse

Read this article byMargherita Stancati

Here is a poem from the collection “Ms. Militancy,” published in 2006:

One-eyed

the pot sees just another noisy child

the glass sees an eager and clumsy hand

the water sees a parched throat slaking thirst

but the teacher sees a girl breaking the rule

the doctor sees a medical emergency

the school sees a potential embarrassment

the press sees a headline and a photofeature

dhanam sees a world torn in half.

her left eye, lid open but light slapped away,

the price for a taste of that touchable water.

Margherita Stancati/The വാല്‍ Street Journal

Meena Kandasamy takes on Hindu myths in her politically-charged poetry.

The categories into which Meena Kandasamy falls—Dalit and female—have put her among those Indian society has historically tended to oppress and marginalize the most.

Repeated humiliation pushed the 26-year-old to fight back—through her social activism and her inflammatory writing, in verse and prose.

In a recent interview at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Ms. Kandasamy, who is from Tamil Nadu in south India, said the aim of her poetry is to send a social message.

In her poems she addresses issues of caste and untouchability—something that stems from her being a Dalit, considered the lowest and most oppressed of India’s castes and formerly known as “untouchables”.

She said she embraced her identity as a Dalit partly because there was no way of escaping it. “People will force that label on you so you might as well make the most of it,” said Ms. Kandasamy.

For Dalit women, oppression often means sexual subjugation too. Ms. Kandasamy’s poems are informed by a sense of gender relations that suggest being a woman in a largely patriarchal society is another form of being lower caste.

“You don’t have to be a Dalit—by being a woman the caste is in you,” she said.

In her poems, it’s her identity as a woman that she engages with most explicitly. Ms. Kandasamy’s woman, like female figures in a lot of feminist literature, makes unbridled sexuality the main weapon of her social militancy.

One of Ms. Kandesamy’s top targets is Hindu society and in her poems she repeatedly goes back to Hindu and Tamil myths—which she seeks to debunk.

“So, my ‘Mahabharat’ moves to Las Vegas; my Ramayan is retold in three different ways…telling my story another way lets me forgive you,” she wrote in the preface to her collection of poems “Ms. Militancy,” published in 2006.