TBR @ 40 Looking Back

Come, screaming with all your fourteen mouths, You speechless hysteria hurting in each limb of my nation, Come to me in the loneliness of your rage Come out foaming You the ‘Satvik’ blood of the centuries, I, a small poet Stand hankering for your language, Include me in your speech.

With the untimely death of Dhoomil in February 1975, modern Hindi literature lost one of its most promising young poets. … .Dhoomil had managed to attract attention with his clear and refreshingly new imagery and his adroit use of the Hindi language as it is spoken on the streets.

Dhoomil’s poems form a good basis for examining a new offshoot of modern Hindi poetry of protest and political involvement. … . In contrast to the lachrymose and subjective poems of the early post-Independence era, these are blood and gut poems which make no apologies of any kind: Time runs short, let us now start discussing our poems so the cities will lean closer to hear us … .

The acceptance of the peasant’s world and language also leads him to accept his old primitive belief in the inferiority of woman. His women are passive and primitive beings surrounded with menstruations, pregnancies and abortions, singings songs of childbirth and fertility; ignorant and dumb. But he spares us the deliberate demeaning and abusing of women that is so disgustingly recurrent in the works of many other young Hindi poets. Dhoomil portrays the average Indian’s reaction to women subtly: Burning with his half desires, He is a would-be hell. Careful of himself, Whenever he sees women Dogs growl out of his pupils.