Biography
Born in 1949, Namdeo Dhasal is ’s leading Dalit poet and the only Indian poet to have received a Lifetime Achievement Award from country’s apex literary institution, the Sahitya Akademi. He is the author of nine books of poetry.
Dhasal is a quintessentially Mumbai poet. Raw, raging, associative, almost carnal in its tactility, his poetry emerges from the underbelly of the city — its menacing, unplumbed netherworld. This is the world of pimps and smugglers, of crooks and petty politicians, of opium dens, brothels and beleaguered urban tenements. In a recent articleon Dhasal, I described his poetic world as that of “Mumbai without her make-up, her Botox, her power yoga; the Mumbai that seethes, unruly, menacing, yet vitally alive, beneath the glitzy mall and multiplex, the high-rise and flyover. The Mumbai of the non-gentrifiable, the untamable, the non-recyclable.”
A recent book entitled
Namdeo Dhasal: Poet of the Underworldfeatured English