Vasant Abaji Dahake

Vasant Abaji Dahake Poems

Vasant Abaji Dahake Biography

Vasant Abaji Dahake is a well-known Marathi poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, short story writer, artist, and critic from Amaravati district in the Maharashtra state of India. He is awarded Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection 'Chitralipi' for the year 2009. His first collection of poems, Yogabhrashta (1972), instantly established him as a successor to the early modernists in Marathi literature such as Mardhekar, P.S. Rege and Vinda Karandikar. Taut, complex, richly metaphorical, and yet by no means apolitical, Dahake’s work – informed as it is both by decidedly regional and unapologetically international influences – has been marginalised by the more nativist forces of the Marathi literary mainstream. Writes noted poet and critic Ranjit Hoskote of his work: “Vasant Abaji 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.” Hoskote locates Dahake as a poet who entered adulthood in the 1960s – the era of Che Guevara and the Beatles, also characterised more specifically by a young nation’s growing disenchantment with the realities of the post-Independence landscape. In 1992, Ranjit Hoskote and Mangesh Kulkarni translated Dahake’s first book, Yogabhrashta, in a volume called A Terrorist of the Spirit. This made accessible to a wider readership a poetic voice of many resonances. This was a poetry that could speak of the impulse to “read the astrology column furtively/ when no one’s looking”, as well as register a note of political and moral dissent when evoking “legislators’ lying arguments/ that scratch in the same old groove,/ playing out the same old tunes/ from the capitalist jukebox”. It was a poetry that could speak of the private terror of being “caged in our separate solitudes” under a “terrifyingly empty sky” but could also savagely denounce an entire system: “A generation: its shoulders stunted under the weight/ of a ditchwater system; on whose dwarf heads,/ wartlike, aimless universities sprout;/ squalid slums of the mind . . .” Ranjit Hoskote revisited Yogabhrashta recently. In this first Indian edition of PIW, he shares some of his new translations of that compelling book. Also included here is his essay on Dahake’s literary and cultural context and contribution. His writings show an influence of existentialist writers like Kafka. His poetry is often dark and provocative. He is associated with the Little Magazine Movement in Marathi during the mid- fifties and the sixties. Dahake is married to Prabha Ganorkar (प्रभा गणोरकर), also a writer. He also has a son Ritwik who is married to Tahira Thekaekara and a daughter Rahee.)

The Best Poem Of Vasant Abaji Dahake

Amitabh Bachchan

Holding my six-year old daughter's hand
I watch your screen-stirring presence, laughter, dance and song.
Watch you talk and act rebellious in the face of this life.
I don't particularly like this life either.
And I've now sheathed that dislike.
This is what I keep sensing: through the screen she has smoothly
entered your world, the way you operate smoothly
in enemy territory, and of late I often find myself
in a seat at the theatre,
holding the rusty sheath in my hands.
At times you act for a moment, only for a moment in a way that could
trigger a tremulous remembrance of my generation's watchwords.
Before me, tomorrow's generation is mouthing your lines
even before you've moved your lips.
As if you were a reaper sure to gather
the first harvest of tomorrow's generation on your threshing-floor.
When my daughter grieves
at turns in the plot that threaten your life,
my words of solace have the ring
of a reality beyond her grasp.
They are quite pointless, actually.
She pulls herself together in a while
— the way she'll often have to do in the future;
and you'd have been left far behind by then.

[Translated from 'Shubhavartaman', a collection of poems, by Mangesh Kulkarni]

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