Synopsis "In That Mill, I Too Was Forged"
Abandoned soon after birth, Narayan Gangaram Surve (1926-2010) wasbrought up by mill workers, but left to fend for himself once again at the ageof twelve in the chawls of Mumbai. He grew up in the streets of the big city, taught himself to read and write-working as doffer boy in a textile mill, asweeper, a peon-and became a school teacher and a celebrated revolutionarypoet. An abiding allegiance to the workers' movement was the thread that ranthrough his extraordinary journey. His poetry was thus as much ammunition tofight the good fight as it was art. It evolved a new idiom, written in the Marathispoken on the streets, freely borrowing words from Hindi or English, unafraidto break literary conventions upheld by the cultured elite. As he puts it, thepeople were 'my holy books, my scriptures, my gurus'.Surve makes no pretence to objectivity. His verse is unostentatious, unabashedlyso. He wants to write about, and for, the masses. There's no attempt to idealizethem, however-to gloss over the ugliness of life-for he is one of them. Hissubjects let their guard down and speak their minds. Activists crack jokes whileputting up posters, a sex worker hustles her client, and a butcher remembershow he lost his leg in a riot trying to save a woman from his co-religionists.The mill worker and farmer know exactly who oppresses them; there is angerin them. For all the misery we come across, though, these are not poems ofdespair, but, instead, of a dogged optimism.Jerry Pinto renders a broad selection of Surve's poetry into colourful yeteffortless English verse, retaining both its raw energy and immediacy, and theessence of its unyielding commitment to a better future.
