Vasant Abaji Dahake: A Treasurer and a Prodigal of Words

18 januari 2006 We may appear to be merely emphasising the obvious when we describe Vasant Abaji Dahake as a multi-faceted literary figure. But it is particularly important to record such an emphasis in an age when narrow specialisation, rather than a universal breadth of concern, has become the norm, even among writers, who are expected to take the entire world as their canvas. Indeed, Dahake epitomises that rare and vanishing breed of writer, the man of letters who is equally at home in poetry, fiction, autobiography, criticism and discursive prose. As a writer active over the last three decades, Dahake has registered an impressive presence, both in terms of his range and the quality and consistency of his output.

Dahake the poet has given us three collections of poetry: Yogabhrashta, 1972 (translated into English as A Terrorist of the Spirit, by Ranjit Hoskote and Mangesh Kulkarni, 1992); Shubha-vartaman, 1987; and Shunah-shepa, 1996. In his role as a fiction-writer, Dahake has offered his readers two novels: Adholoka, 1975; and Pratibaddha ani Martya, 1981. In the avatar of essayist, Dahake is represented by a recent collection titled Yatra Antaryatra, 1999; his literary criticism has been collected, periodically, into three volumes, Kavita Mhanje Kai, 1991; Samakaleen Sahitya, 1992; and Kavitevishayi, 1999. Acting as editor, he has prepared a selection of the late poet Sadanand Rege’s work, published in 1996 as Nivadak Sadanand Rege.

At the same time, Dahake has not been content simply to inhabit his own private universe as a writer. Reticent and even reclusive though he is by nature, Dahake takes his responsibilities as a contemporary intellectual seriously. He has no patience with intellectual posturing: he does not issue broadside manifestos, declaim his position on social issues, or seek a broad public constituency. Instead, he has committed himself, as an anthologist and encyclopaedist, to sustained projects that draw attention to the broader landscape of Marathi literature, its past exponents and its contemporary masters. This commitment, that of the indefatigable activist in the cause of the Marathi language, assumes a vivid significance at a time when the juggernaut of the globalisation process has threatened local cultures and regional languages all over the world with extinction.

In this aspect, we come upon a different Dahake: the writer who submits himself to the routine of academic life (he is a lecturer at the legendary Elphinstone College, Bombay), impelled by the desire to keep alive the saliency and relevance of Marathi literature to fresh generations of students. He is the co-editor of a school-level Marathi lexicon, Shaleya Marathi Shabdakosh (1997), and the joint compiler of an encyclopaedia of Marathi literature, Sankshipta Marathi Vangmayakosh (1998). He has also served as one of the editors of the volume, Kavita Visavya Shatakachi (2000).

Dahake, then, is both a treasurer of words and a prodigal of words: before our description immures him within the academy and the library, let us return to a consideration of his poetry, that marvellous ground of battle where he confronts reality with a versatile range of weapons, including acute images drawn from various registers of culture, and superbly lavish metaphors. Dahake’s poems reverberate with the clash of opposites: they speak of the displacement of a solitary consciousness from the countryside to the metropolis, from the expansiveness of landscape to the constrictions of architecture, and the anxieties and the exhilarations that such a traumatic experience can produce.

While his poems resist any reduction to autobiography, Dahake’s oeuvre does indeed reflect the formative stresses of his early life, and continues to act as a ‘parallel text’ to the text of his literary career. Born in 1942, a year made famous in the subcontinent’s history by Mahatma Gandhi’s call to the British colonial regime to “Quit India!”, the poet was five years old when India gained its independence, and entered adulthood in the turbulent 1960s, a paradoxical decade characterised by boundless optimism and paralysing doubt, the birth of internationalist dreams and the death of nationalist aspirations.

Principally, the 1960s marked the coming of age of independent India’s first self-conscious and dissenting youth subculture: the certitudes of the nationalist struggle were now behind the Republic, and to young people of Dahake’s generation, there was a completely different political and cultural reality to be confronted. Nehru passed away, and the country made its transition into a period of profound crisis: as the post-colonial polity began to reveal its continuities with the oppression and paranoia of the British colonial regime, Dahake’s generation became seized by a sense of betrayal, a disillusionment and a gradual loss of idealism. At the same time, they experienced a vast widening of mental horizons: Martin Luther King Jr., Che Guevara, Regis Debray, Elvis Presley and the Beatles beckoned from other quarters of the globe.

If the world beckoned in that sphere of activity, Dahake also committed himself firmly to his regional context, belonging as he did to Vidarbha – Maharashtra’s eastern heartland, arid and hot, which has nonetheless been the fountainhead of Deccan culture for millennia, marking Maharashtra’s ancient connections with the Andhra region. The Satavahana and the Vakataka empires held sway there, extending their patronage to Brahminism and Buddhism alike; popular dissent took the form, there, of radical devotional sects like the Mahanubhavas.

The history, the language, the people, and the landscape of this region are imprinted into Dahake’s poems, which are linked together by metaphors of dryness and burning summer; the recurrent images of rocks, endless roads and mirages (especially in Yogabhrashta, 1972) are also gestures through which Dahake memorialises his home territory. In some sense, it may be argued that this is a project of visibility: a conscious programme of keeping the provinces visible, both as a source of private inspiration and as a political issue, against the dominant claims of the metropolis.

In a directly literary sense, the legacy of the 1960s, with their combination of the local and the international, may be seen in the rich breadth of Dahake’s inspirations and references: if he upholds the dissenting tradition of the Bhakti saint-poets on the one hand (including such luminaries as Jnanesvara, Tukaram and Namdev), his work is attuned to the anguish and stoicism of those angels of failing light, the Existentialists (including Kierkegaard, Kafka and Camus).

The tension between Bombay and Vidarbha, the twin poles of Dahake’s existence, forms a constant dialectic in his writing. And, in accounting for Bombay, Dahake deploys a formidable and visionary sense of the city as modern-day Inferno: the mythic and the contemporary merge into a nightmare vision of the metropolitan experience in his poetry and fiction. The sights, sounds and smells of the city permeate his writing like an intoxication that is also a toxicity. The crush of urban traffic, the clatter of printing presses, the shadow of guerrilla warfare, the presence of terrorism and violence just at the margin of civic life – all these overwhelm the reader, coming at him or her through passages of harshly hewn prose or robustly cadenced verse, both discourses informed by a muscular Romanticism.

Although he has now lived in Bombay long enough to have become a native of that city, we sense from his poems that he continues to regard himself as an outsider who has not exchanged his right to critical engagement for a residency permit. As resident alien, questor-hero and anti-martyr, the poet’s persona stalks through empty avenues by lurid streetlights, imagining horrid masks and evil eyes as he goes: invoking the demonic in all its folkloric and epic guises, Dahake layers it over with the paraphernalia of modernity to create a modern grotesque. Which is not to say that his poetry does not also aspire to a modern sublime, fleeting and intermittent though it might be: we glimpse it in the moment snatched from the flux of time, beside the wall of the cemetery by the sea, in the luminous forest above which the moon charges like a beast gone amok. At such moments, Dahake demonstrates his gift for recognising the essential contradictoriness of experience: he attends to the most shocking wounds and the most exhilarating joys which experience can present the human subject, recording the wounds in images of surpassing beauty and indicating his awareness of the terror that can lie at the core of joyousness.


This essay was written for a brochure on Dahake, published by the Sahitya Akademi and Gomantak Marathi Academy for a ‘Meet the Author’ session on 6 November, 2001.