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february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 64

Lal Singh Dil and the Poetics of Disjunction
The Poet as a Political Cartographer
Rajesh Sharma
Rajesh Sharma (sharajesh@gmail.com) teaches English at the
Punjabi University, Patiala.
Lal Singh Dil was a revolutionary poet born into a dalit
family. He is among the most significant modern Punjabi
poets for his political vision and aesthetic practice.
Arguably the only contemporary Punjabi poet who deals
comprehensively and fearlessly with capitalisms
historical geography in this part of the world, he had a
lucid grasp of the ways of the neo-liberal economic
order and its investments in an unequal and oppressive
social order. The article argues that Dil invented a
peculiar poetics of disjunction to deal with a world that
called him to battle again and again.
an enormous enclosure
as far as the eye can see a wall
an immense pond
all dried up
Dil 2009: 89
L
al Singh Dil (1943-2007) is, quite markedly, a poet of the
contemporary historical geography of east Punjab. His
poetry makes the reader acutely aware of the transfor-
mation of the Punjabs lived spaces through time. These are
fraught spaces, traversed by gures of the dispossessed and
the precariat.
1
The gures are often minimally drawn, and
drift in anonymity. Sometimes, though, Dil touches them with
a memorable detail: you cannot forget Billa, the protagonist of
Ajj Billa Phir Aaya (Billa Came Again Today), with his per-
petually oiled long black hair, bright eyes, chain around the
neck with a goddess framed in silver, and rings on several n-
gers (2009: 34-35).
Beginning in the 1960s, Dils poetry documents four decades
of the history of post-partition Indian Punjab. He began writ-
ing in the rebellious and dreamy 1960s and 1970s, and contin-
ued into the cynical 2000s. The continuity is more than tem-
poral; it is also symbolic and substantial, in that it answers to
deeper correspondences between then and now, which histo-
rians of the present are also beginning to map. After all, the
neo-liberal world order of today was born in the 1970s and
1980s, particularly with the realpolitik of Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan met the economic theories of Friedrich
von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and the Chicago Boys.
Dils poetry cannot, hence, be conned to the world of the
1960s and 1970s. He is equally a poet of our times. In fact, his
poetry is capable of re-disclosing the earlier decades in the
light of our day, revealing thereby the lineages of the present.
He was not a trained historian, nor a geographer, yet he
grasped capitalisms historical geography in this part of the
world in a way that no contemporary Punjabi poet writing in
the neo-liberal 1990s and 2000s has arguably done.
2
As a
result, he remains among the most alert and insightful wit-
nesses to the dim-lit drama of ordinary lives, affected by the
transforming spaces of the Punjab, as seen through the hour
glass of recent history.
Karl Marx and Modern Capitalism
In volume I of Capital, Marx unravels the economic original
sin of the primitive accumulation of capital (1990: 873). In
his broadly linear narrative, the barbarities of the founding
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Economic & Political Weekly EPW february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 65
period of capitalism are gradually replaced by sophisticated,
less obvious methods of capital accumulation. Rosa Luxem-
burg, however, was to note that capital accumulation in the
periods since has actually proceeded simultaneously through
expanded reproduction and primitive accumulation. Accord-
ing to her, force, fraud, oppression, looting, which character-
ised the early phase of capital accumulation, have not been
abandoned, but are frequently resorted to whenever the capi-
talist order brushes against non-capitalist modes of production,
particularly when it is looking to expand into new territories,
domestic, colonial, or neocolonial (2003: 432).
Marxs term (primitive or original accumulation) carries,
in our day, a shade of obsolescence that may hinder a clear
view of the present, which is actually shaped by a dual process
of capital accumulation. For this reason, as David Harvey
suggests, it would be better if we used the term accumulation
by dispossession (2003: 144). As he points out, the process
includes more than plain robbery and possession by force:
A closer look at Marxs description of primitive accumulation reveals a
wide range of processes. These include the commodication and pri-
vatisation of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations;
the conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collec-
tive, state, etc) into exclusive private property rights; the suppression
of rights to the commons; the commodication of labour power and
the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and
consumption; colonial, neo-colonial, and imperial processes of appro-
priation of assets (including natural resources); the monetisation of
exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade and usury,
the national debt, and ultimately the credit system as radical means of
primitive accumulation (ibid: 145).
Harvey goes on to observe, and then substantiate with
instances, that [a]ll the features of primitive accumulation
that Marx mentions have remained powerfully present within
capitalisms historical geography up until now (2003: 145).
The instances Harvey cites have a global provenance, and
some are expectedly from contemporary India.
Marx denes primitive accumulation as the historical
process of divorcing the producer from the means of produc-
tion. The history of this process, he adds, is written in the
annals of mankind in letters of blood and re (1990: 875).
This is so because great masses of men (sic) are suddenly and
forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled onto
the labour-market as free, unprotected and rightless proletari-
ans (ibid: 876). Along with the peasants, agricultural wage
labourers, too, lose access to the common land, which gave
pasture to their cattle, and furnished them with timber, re-
wood, turf, etc (ibid: 877). Marx traces the gruesome history
of this process of expropriation under circumstances of ruth-
less terrorism (ibid: 895) in England back to the 15th century.
Resources such as land, which until then had been the com-
mon property of people, were forcibly and sometimes under
cover of (cunningly fabricated) law snatched from them, be-
coming the private property of the emerging capitalist class
(ibid: 879-83). This did not end here; the wealthy class
practice[s] on a colossal scale the thefts of state lands as
these estates are given away, sold at ridiculous prices, or even
annexed to private estates by direct seizure (ibid: 884).
3
Marx
notes that the law itself now becomes the instrument by
which the peoples land is stolen; he refers to [t]he Parlia-
mentary form of the robbery embodied in Bills for In closure
of Commons (ibid: 885). The very use of a parliamentary
coup dtat, he observes, to transform the commons into pri-
vate property, proves the illegality and illegitimacy of the
process (ibid: 886). The dispossessed are then branded as
voluntary criminals through legislation against vagabondage
(ibid: 896).
Marxs words resonate, with an unmistakable measure of
irony, in Prime Minister Manmohan Singhs warning, issued
on 27 December 2012, against the menace of footloose mi-
grants who leave their villages and descend on cities in search
of work (Hindustan Times 2012). Singh was alluding to the
rising graph of crime in the countrys capital, brought into
sharp focus after the gang rape of a girl a few days earlier. As
one of those neo-liberal economic policymakers who cannot
wait to study history because they are in a hurry to make it, he
expectedly displayed no inclination to reect historically on
the forces which the policies of successive Indian governments
have unleashed since the early 1990s. The execution of these
policies has removed enormous numbers of the poor from their
land and hearth and ung them into big cities, where they are
compelled to sleep under yovers or in impromptu shelters in
the countrys many teeming slums.
4

Ajj Billa Phir Aaya: The Historical Geography
of Capitalism in Punjab
Dils gures do not inhabit either metropolitan spaces or their
peripheries. At best, they live in small towns (that is, when
they are not moving from one place to another), such as Sam-
rala, Dils home town. This renders their lives more precarious,
as opportunities for work are even fewer there. So they remain
perennially insecure. What is called development ickers
like a tful dream: Billa is an artisan who came to the town in
search of work. He found work for a while, but no longer has
any: the buildings have already been built (2009: 37). In this
place, at least for now, development has exhausted itself.
In Ajj Billa Phir Aaya, his longest and probably his last poem,
Dil addresses global capitalisms historical geography in the
east Punjab from the point of view of a poet-chronicler, in the
role of witness. It is obviously a formidable task,
5
considering
the sweep and complexity of the historical processes confront-
ing him, and it demands that he forge a narrative that can
accommodate fragments as much as coherent wholes at vari-
ous levels. He responds to the demand by devising a poetics
that is at once hallucinatory, anecdotal, oneiric and reportage.
He is obviously guided by the conviction that art, everyday life,
dreaming and politics cannot be separated. And so he cannot
but conjoin them, but without seamlessly melding them: the
seams must show. Dils poetics is, thus, a poetics of disjunction:
he deploys the logic of disjunction to capture a reality that is,
to recall Hamlets anguished cry, out of joint (Shakespeare
1.5.188). It is a disjointed reality that needs nothing short of
a disjunctive aesthetic with its characteristic shock of what,
in the language of cinema, is called the jump cut. It may
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be added that Dils poetics of disjunction operates at the levels
of the narrative, the image and the myth.
To appreciate the signicance of Dils efforts to achieve the
necessary form through the poetics of disjunction, we may
recall Adornos observations on the problematic relationship
between form and reality: The unsolved antagonisms of rea-
lity return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This,
not the insertion of objective elements, denes the relation of
art to society (2004: 7). And yet there is also, in addition to
the antagonisms of reality, the challenge posed by the sheer
abnormity of a developing
6
reality which compels art to self-
reect. Regarding this, Adorno says:
In the face of the abnormity into which reality is developing, arts ines-
capable afrmative essence has become insufferable. Art must turn
against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become un-
certain of itself right into its innermost ber (ibid: 2).
Dil uninchingly faces the specic abnormity of his times,
which consists as much of capitalisms dispossessive brutali-
ties executed on an unimaginable scale as of the seductions of
its spectacle, and he strives to create a poetic form that might
be able to answer adequately the impossible demands of the
times. He does not renounce afrmation, using it instead to
defy the insufferable. Sometimes, of course, the abnormity of
the present lends a peculiar poignancy to the afrmation
which occasionally blooms into celebration of life, however
tenuously lived. Sometimes it prompts from him a whisper of
irony. But sometimes it arouses his wrath, particularly when
he contemplates the brutalities running through history to the
present. Yet he does not allow the abnormity, however
insufferable, to destroy his capacity to embrace life joyously.
Once again, the use of the hallucinatory is part of Dils effort
to devise a form to answer the demands of the contemporary
reality of capitalisms historical geography. I use the term hal-
lucinatory in G N Devys sense. He employs it to explain a key
trait of adivasi art its peculiar manner of constructing space
and imagery:
Whether it is the oral and literary form of representation, or the visual
and pictorial form, adivasi artists seem to interpret verbal and pictori-
al space as demarcated by an extremely exible framing. The bound-
aries, therefore, between art and non-art are highly porous. An adivasi
epic can commence its narration almost out of a trivial everyday event.
Adivasi paintings merge with their own living space as if the two are
no different at all. And within the narrative itself, or within the paint-
ed imagery, there is no deliberate attempt made to follow a sequence.
The episodes retold and the images created take on the apparently
chaotic shapes of dreams... Yet, one would be wrong in assuming that
adivasi arts do not employ any ordering principles (2011: 71).
The Hallucinatory in Dils Poetry
In Dils case, the hallucinatory is used in response to the
chaos let loose by the neo-liberal economic order. His exi-
ble framing is a rejection of the nostalgia for a seamless
narrative which, in any case, cannot accommodate and
report the fractured and fracturing reality of the present. Be-
sides, poetry and reportage cannot strategically be kept sep-
arate in a world in which the discourses of revolt always risk
being promptly absorbed and co-opted by the market. And
while the hallucinatory functions as an ordering device in the
face of a systemic chaos and makes that chaos somewhat com-
prehensible, reportage can act as a device to tell the bare,
mundane truths of lived everyday reality. There is, as Dils
poetry frequently demonstrates, an order of truths that poetry
can access only through reporting. Discussing the question of
intellectual honesty in the face of truth, George Orwell writes:
What is really at issue is the right to report contemporary events truth-
fully, or as truthfully as is consistent with the ignorance, bias and self-
deception from which every observer necessarily suffers. In saying
this I may seem to be saying that straightforward reportage is the
only branch of literature that matters: but I will try to show later that
at every literary level, and probably in every one of the arts, the same
issue arises in more or less subtilised forms (2008: 24).
Intellectual freedom is the freedom to report what one has
seen, heard, and felt, and not to be obliged to fabricate imagi-
nary facts and feelings (ibid: 25). To report is part of the obli-
gation to bear witness to what is. It thus reinforces the uses of
the hallucinatory which, as we have noted, is not an escape
from a difcult truth, but a commitment to seeing in spite of,
and beyond, frames and fragments.
The anecdotal, embodied in the many anecdotes which the
narrator of Ajj Billa Phir Aaya tells, as well as those which his
characters relate, adds to the work a dimension of oral histo-
ries of the present. The live resonance of anecdotes as personal
testimonies emanates from the authority of their sources,
which, in the poem, are historical as much as ctional.
The oneiric apparently brings the element of dream into the
narrative. However, its real signicance lies in extending the
geographies of reality by making possible an encounter with
the impossible as a constitutive element of contemporary reality.
Using the oneiric, the hallucinatory, the anecdotal, and
repor tage, Dil creates a mobile montage whose organising
force is supplied by movements of wandering and drifting
which recapture at another level the enforced nomadism of
the dispossessed.
The Poem as a Cartographic Project
Dil dedicates Ajj Billa Phir Aaya to the new Marx. To read the
present, one has to renew Marx, renew ones reading of Marx,
renew ones understanding of the contemporary world in the
light of Marxs interpretation of history. One has to acknowl-
edge as Derrida would wish the presence of Marxs spectres
that keep us company. The spectres are no mere ghostly
shades, but presences that lurk at the edge of the visible and
the comprehensible, suggesting, besides crises of articulation
and communication, unnished projects: No, no, I am not a
ghost, the spectre of the poets mother tells him (2006: 21).
The poem opens with the identication of an amorphous
fear and the obligation to confront it by writing it down, and
goes on to acknowledge that this undertaking entails a pas-
sage through fear. By the time the poem ends, the poet has
gured out the monster the beast, as Arundhati Roy
(2008: 128) calls it that is the source of the fear. As a kind of
performative project, the poem thus works itself out as a carto-
graphic project that maps the monstrosity, the abnormity, of
capitalisms historical geography. The old river, aged and
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deserted, recalls the Satluj of the rst poem in the poets rst
book, Satluj di Hawa (Winds from the Satluj) (1971), a poem
in which the theme of the robbery of land makes its maiden
appearance. Confronting the obscure fear is like crossing the
river, he writes. The fear dehumanises people; like dogs, they
wag their tails and lick plates for leftovers of falsehood
(2009: 21). Against this, the poem offers to the reader as to
the poet a baptism of fear, so that the monster is seen, sized
up, and confronted.
Two deeply perturbing images in the poem overshadow all
others. Both are monstrous images. The rst is of women
making rotis: the food smells of esh; on food plates in every
home, esh shines (2009: 24). The second image is of the poet-
narrators mind rising up after he has had some dreams. It
has risen, he says, like the head of a child rises in a thousand
boils: an insurrection of boils exploding through tender skin.
Reality and the Lacanian real dissolve in these images to
report the unsayable, making the images the key sites of the
poems activity.
Ajj Billa Phir Aaya is simultaneously a document inter-
spersed with critique and a sustained reection on the ques-
tion of poetic form. The document, signicantly, accommo-
dates several dreams. It is also a dream that prompts the poet
to write (2009: 21). The unreality of dreams, stitched into
reportage, works to disclose the impossible geographies of
reality. In fact, the failure of the numerous impracticable
schemes which a worried Billa makes for his livelihood
points to his inability to grasp the impossible reality around
him, the reality which affords him no opening (ibid: 36).
Neither does it afford any to Bhatti, a scooter mechanic with a
diploma in technical training. His small workshop received no
work after municipal authorities dug up the road to lay sewerage
pipes. The local development project pushed him to seek an
escape from his worries in drugs in the company of an addict,
a brahmin who sold milk for a living. With reality over-
whelming and eluding them, these young men seek escape in
daydreams and drug-induced fantasy. Sukhus son, who sells
tea and milk from a rehri in the grain market, also reports a
failing business (ibid: 51-52). Maybe he too would nd solace
in some escape.
Meanwhile, what is the reality that these persons are unable
to understand and that is driving them to despair? It is, to use
Harveys words, the global neo-liberal project for the restora-
tion of class power by means of a widespread process of dis-
possession through which the means of production, on which
the poor survive, are transferred to the global elite on a mas-
sive scale (Harvey 2005: 7-52). Increasingly, people are being
denied any right to the commons. The commons are being
enclosed and transformed into private property, and some-
times state property before that property, too, is stolen
away and turned surreptitiously into private property. The his-
tory that Marx witnessed is being re-enacted, under his spec-
tres lingering gaze.
Dil dwells extensively and repeatedly on the expropriation
of the commons in the Punjab. He notes that pastures, ponds,
graveyards, and other common lands are being occupied by
the wealthy and powerful, who also control the political
parties. The poet literally reports several illegal occupations,
giving specic details, including those involving lands taken
for social and charitable purposes. The cattle of the poor are
attacked, and sometimes slaughtered or set on re with a tyre
around the neck to eliminate the threat they pose to the expro-
priated commons. The poor, the overwhelming majority of
whom are dalits, are thus violently robbed of the barest means
of survival (2009: 66, 71-72, 76, 83, 86, 91, 102-04, 106-07,
112-13). Unable to nd sustenance in their villages, they rush to
the cities, where they are again disappointed. The cities have
no work for them either (ibid: 67).
In this situation, drugs serve different purposes. They offer
an escape to those who turn to the false solace they provide,
and an excuse to the expropriators, who can correctly blame
their victims from a moral high ground. Dil views the easily
available drugs as weapons of mass destruction in a class war
(in which caste, too, is necessarily implicated). In his view,
iterated more than once in the poem, drugs are instruments of
the genocide of poor dalits, although they kill others too now
and then (2009: 67, 71, 78, 81). Some of the most terrifying
images in the poem are thus of the victims of drugs: they are
seen dying on the roads and in deserted cremation grounds,
sometimes eaten by packs of dogs (ibid: 34). Parveen, one of
them, tells Billa:
Look at our condition,
worse than a dogs.
Even a dog doesnt let worms infest it.
But we are being eaten by worms
7
(ibid: 60).
The poets bitterness is part of a larger structure of response,
which addresses the logic of the postcolonial state. That
larger, inhuman logic has to be talked about, understood and
exposed:
Those tyrants who,
after the British had left,
invented new forms of tyranny
must be talked about.
Their ways must be discussed (2009: 99).
What follows is a rambling report on, among other things,
the disappearance of the historic forests of Machhiwara where
Guru Gobind Singh had once walked: the marauding land-
grabbers have erased all signs of that history, including the
well where the Guru had probably quenched his thirst (2009:
104). This is followed by pointed remarks on what Dil sees as a
calculated extermination of the small peasantry, symbolised
in the way urbanisation is pushing the poor villagers bullock
cart off the road with seeming inevitability a reality that is
simultaneously a grim symbol of capitalisms historical
geography (ibid: 110).
Dils Poetry and the Problem of Form
Something of this doubling as between reality and the
symbol occurs when Dil reects aloud, in the body of the
poem itself, on the problem of form. The reection is under-
taken with extreme self-consciousness clearly not because
the poet is awed by the norms of poetic propriety, but because
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he would not conceal his purpose, which is to capture an
elusive reality:
I want to catch something in poetry,
something that has been lost.
Its like shooting an arrow in the dark.
If the poem fails to catch the thing,
it will have failed
like a vine that bears no fruit (2009: 29).
So, once again, after more than a century, poetry has the
obligation to mirror reality. The difference, though, is that
reality today has melted all existing frames, and not just the
binaries. It has become a monstrosity, an abnormity: it has
become a Narasingha (the Puranic gure of the half human
and half lion) (ibid: 31). Must not, then, poetry too become
monstrous, if only to get hold of reality and bring it to justice?
Such poetry is something that grows in the mind like a
harvest of mushrooms, the poet writes. He wonders how to
label it. Is it a poem, a story, a novel, or an essay? One thing is
certain: a poem takes place only when the poet stands apart
from the world even when the poem happens to be about the
world itself (2009: 46). The poet then has, one might add, a
spectral relation to the world.
At times, of course, poetry seems to be mere words, a des-
perate effort to avoid being drowned (2009: 91-92). But then
there is the promise it holds out, the promise to y free
towards real skies (ibid: 118). When the promise is realised,
the poem takes over from the poet. He no longer holds its reins
(ibid: 127).
In a curious inversion lit with irony, Dil dubs reality as
poetic when the real, historical characters of the poem are
unable to understand what is really going on around them,
and so retreat into some ctional world that exists only inside
their heads. This, too, he sardonically remarks, makes his
poem poetic (2009: 60).
The hallucinatory and reportage fuse as the long poem
draws to its end. The poet-narrator asks: How shall we deal
with the monster that has swallowed everything? And every-
thing here is not just another word. It is a whole lived world,
with its donkeys, camels, horses, bullocks, pastures, lands,
ponds, peasants, rehris, peoples ways of life, songs, freedom,
forests, state properties, honest ofcials, etc (2009: 128). This
is the poets apocalyptic vision of the monster of global capita-
lism crunching up everything: a historically situated bizarre
replay of the potent old myth of the dark god Krishnas cosmic
form, his vishvarupa, witnessed by an indecisive, bewildered,
and fear-stricken Arjuna in the Mahabharata.
The poem opened with dreams and apprehensions. In end-
ing the way it does by historicising a myth in a way that also
draws a map of global capitalisms historical geography it
points the way, past a baptism of fear, to the freedom of real
skies. The oneiric, the hallucinatory, the anecdotal, and
reportage converge in the apocalyptic in a tense fusion in
which is realised a specic poetics of disjunction appropriate
to the Punjab, whose landscapes and lifeworlds are today
being feverishly overwritten by global capitalisms cognitively
challenging cartography.
Satluj di Hawa: A Critique of Global Capitalism
Dil came to the writing of this miniature critical epic of global
capitalism after a long journey, which apparently began
with the poems that rst appeared in Satluj di Hawa. The
collection is dedicated to the treasures of the human spirit,
in an absolute afrmation of the kind Pablo Neruda loved
and lived, as Mario Vargas Llosa reminisces, in deance of
any life-destroying oppressions (http://www.theparisreview.
org/interviews/2280/the-art-of-ction-no-120-mario-vargas-
llosa). In this afrmation, there is no room for what Nietzsche
terms ressentiment: the poet refuses to bite the dominant
orders bait to play according to a given script. He would not
play the victim as a rebel dened by the order against which
he is rebelling, but would rather redene, in his own way,
the terms and categories of that order. Neither would he
found a separate, exclusive world in retaliation to his exclusion.
Satluj di Hawa, in this sense, marks an important point of
departure in the politics of literary aesthetics. Unlike Pash
who, in a sense, tries to construct alternative, or counter, liter-
ary aesthetics, Dil reworks the available aesthetics to make
them speak other truths and thus subvert the given order. Dils
undertaking has a signicance which will only deepen as late
capitalism reincarnates itself in newer avatars, absorbing,
co-opting and commodifying the various resistances that arise
to challenge its plastic regime. Like Hamlet, the poet chooses
to delve one yard below their mines/and blow them at the
moon (Shakespeare 3.4.208-09).
Blending sadness, anger and joy, the opening poem, Satluj
di Hawa, addresses the river Satluj as a witness to the subcon-
tinents history of dispossession and dishonour:
You look far,
even to where the Cauvery ows,
and see the land being robbed,
the harvest of wheat dishonoured,
the paddy set on re under laughter.
You look far,
to where their palaces stand,
the palaces that still cherish the hanging noose
used by those white rulers (2007: 36).
8
The postcolonial state, as a continuation in many ways of
the colonial state, is a site of concern that Dil visits again and
again. But it is in Sham da Rang (The Colour of the Evening;
ibid: 39-40), arguably Dils best-known poem, that the rework-
ing of the available aesthetics is rst accomplished. The pro-
tagonists of the poem are itinerant agricultural workers,
other daily wage earners, and the unemployed. Through a
process that may be called alchemical, they enter the poems
images as living raw materials, and abide there as spectral
presences in some bizarre fairyland. The alchemy of suffer-
ing and beauty is set to work in the very rst line of the poem,
which evokes time through a hint of immemorial histories:
The evening, again, has an old colour. People lurk as spec-
tral remainders in the disjunctive images of the footpath
and the lake, even as the two apparently stand for and
reect those very people. The city going towards some
villages weaves a circle of irony, sending off sparks of aliena-
tion and sheer numerical friction. The agricultural workers
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perpetual, forced nomadism stands out sharply against the en-
during reality of anothers land, on which they have worked.
The procession of the perennially dispossessed carries a curi-
ous baggage: the abuses and admonitions hurled at them.
These hunger-stricken Aryans are the disenfranchised of their
country; if they unload anywhere for a short stay, they are
treated as menacing encroachers. Only the trees, under which
they have halted to snatch a rest and in whose shade they have
tied their cattle, want them to stay and not leave. In their own
country, these people have been reduced to the hopeless mem-
ory of a promise, which six decades of independence have done
little to redeem.
Beruzgar (The Unemployed; ibid: 41) reads like an accom-
panying poem. The vulnerability and precariousness of the
unemployed, trying to conceal their humiliating poverty, are
captured in the gestures of the faceless gures. They have re-
ned the art of hiding their frayed cuffs and tattered footwear.
Their eyelids carry shrouds beneath: an image that transcends
the metaphorical to communicate a truth which reality can
carry only on the breath of poetry.
What Gaston Bachelard terms the absolute imagination
(1964: 33) in the creation of images is at work in the short
poem Nach (Dance; 2007: 53).
9
The poem bears witness
to impossible celebration the celebration of (mere) living
crystallised in the scene of an anonymous woman labourer
cooking her heart over the hearth, the moon laughing
through the branches of a tree, her husband keeping their two
children entertained, and the older child breaking into a dance
to the impromptu jugalbandi of a bowl and waist-cord bells.
The image conjured is of an absent house, yet with all its
essential affective furniture. John Berger writes: The boon of
language is not tenderness. All that it holds, it holds with ex-
actitude and without pity (2003: 450). Dils poem handles
tenderness without tenderness and without pity, even as it
draws the absent house with exactitude.
Ik Soch (A Way of Thinking; 2007: 68) achieves its fusion
of thought and image with minimal architecture, in just three
lines. Paradoxically, the dry, rough thoughts receive their
nourishment from the well-nourished, well-oiled hair, whose
illusory gift of liberation is regretted and renounced with the
rst light of a dawning wisdom.
Lal Purab (The Red East; 2007: 92-95) is another poem
in which thought and image are up and fuse remarkably, in
spite of the insistent note of revolutionary propaganda that
somewhat impairs the poems overall artistic merit. The
rising sun is seen against a pageant of struggling and
despairing people. Famished buds go barefoot, carrying
great loads on their young heads; starving women quarrel
loudly to forget their hunger; grieving mens eyes swim with
rain clouds; aged heads and dry white beards tremble with
strokes of the hammer; lives burn out with lamps late into
the nights; and peasants, consumed by worries over their
mortgaged little land, eat the bread of insults while the
rafters in a shaky ceiling threaten to crash over their dis-
tressed heads. It is a whole lifeworld of hopeless anxiety
visualised in colours the grey and brown of dust, the black
of rotting old moss, the red of the sun. The murky gloom is lit
only with hope.
There is, however, no hope in Raat (Night; 2007: 113), an
indebted peasants autobiographical narrative, in which dream
and reportage are interwoven to yield glimpses into a tor-
mented life: he watches empty cooking vessels y away, and
pokes the hearth but nds no re. I was sold/like all who are
sold, he cries: the consciousness of a condition in which he is
not alone lends an ironic measure of dignity to his lament.
Dil was to again create a procession of fraught images in
Kupp (Haystacks; 2007: 123), which appeared in his second
collection of poems, Bahut Sare Suraj (So Many Suns, 1982).
Here you have a farmer, a jatt, barely managing to save his
honour from the hands of his exploiters in the mandi; a father
hounded by men in spotless whites, who loom outside his
door to get his or his daughters thumb impression on a
paper; and ofcers of the government reclining royally on his
cot and leering at his daughter, amusing themselves at the
dance the frenzied panic of father and daughter. Then
you have the image of a young son bolting from school after
smashing a window pane with a hockey stick. This is followed
by another image, in which the haystacks of hope (as they
appear when the poem opens) become sites of violent revolt as
policemen go berserk, scattering the chaff in search of two
men suspected to be hiding there.
Bearing Witness to a Precarious State of Living
The relationship between peasantry and patriotism is prob-
lematised in Khat (Letter; 2007: 108) and Fauji Gaddi vich
Baithe Dost (Friends Sitting in a Military Vehicle; ibid: 109).
In the rst, a soldiers wife writes to him of love, debt and
death. The poem is at once her letter and the poets dream of
her consciousness. The rst image is of bricks in a falling wall,
an image simultaneously menacing and romantic: she sees in
the bricks tentative images of their conjugal love. This is fol-
lowed by the image of moneylenders, whom the soldiers just
deceased father owed money; they come daily with demands
for recovery, knocking on their house which is still in mourn-
ing. The lamp burns all night: is the lamp, lit beside the dead
during the last vigil, spilling its light beyond the dread night?
The nights, in the last extended image, settle down like sleep-
ing vultures, to wail in the womans intermittent sleep.
In the second poem, the narrator unravels the conditions at
home that have probably forced the young men to join military
service. Their fathers are perhaps desperately chasing the
dream of a full stomach; their mothers, timid and fearful like
vulnerable birds, are probably trudging the long road to work.
Perhaps their small patches of land have been sold off; per-
haps the police have scattered the contents of a brothers
chhabri on the road.
10

In Nahma (2007: 119-20), one can discern the seed of Ajj
Billa Phir Aaya. This short poem foreshadows the precariats
state of living, which received elaborate treatment at the hands
of the poet years later. It quickly runs the whole gamut from
the poet-narrators innocent boyhood pranks, to the unspeak-
able grief of a father who helplessly watches his young son lose
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february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 70
his sanity, to the shock of nding himself useless because he
can nd no work. The poem is narrated like an anecdote,
capturing a historical condition incomprehensible to the young
man. His insanity comes alive in the strange dialogue with
which the poem ends: Nahma and the son sit facing each other
beside a re pit, over which sugar cane juice boils in a caul-
dron. The son speaks of the fateful cycle of birth and death in
which sons and fathers might even exchange places. Then, he
abruptly threatens to jump into the cauldron. The people
standing nearby take him away. The father utters no word
throughout the dialogue, yet his silent presence oozes from
the image and articulates his unspeakable grief. The poem
derives its peculiar force not only from its anecdotal spont-
aneity, initial humour and understatement, but also from the
dual structure of witness-bearing: the narrator bears witness
to a fathers sorrow; the father, in turn, helplessly watches his
sons insanity.
Bholiyan (Innocent Girls; 2007: 115-16) appears to make an
overstatement towards the end, yet the poem absorbs it natu-
rally after the denitive touches with which the destitute
young girls going to earn their daily wages are sketched. The
abnormity of their dehumanising condition compels a response
of mythical proportions:
Should this be made known
to the inhabitants of another planet,
they would be stunned, would become stones,
would never arise and move again.
Should the beasts realise this,
they would ee mankind
and, terried, rush screaming
back to forests (ibid: 116).
The talent that allows Dil to give oddness a home, the basis
of his poetics of disjunction, appears with characteristic faci-
lity in Babal Tere Khetan Vich (In Your Fields, Father; 2007:
122). The daughter of a dispossessed tiller acknowledges that
her family has lost their claim to land in the court of law, yet
refuses to renounce dreaming. She visualises the tractors
dancing in her fathers elds one day. She can be dispos-
sessed of land, but not of the freedom to dream. The girls
nave refusal transports the oneiric and the hallucinatory
into the geography of the reported.
Ajooba (Wonder; 2007: 139) demonstrates the capacity of
myth to accommodate the disjunctive. Elsewhere, Dil invokes
or recreates myth; here, he creates myth, something that may
not be possible unless a poet comes to embody a people and
their culture, and becomes, in his blazing singularity, the voice
of a collective consciousness. The poem advances like a vine
with its many surprising turns; the moods shift. The stark
opening statement that woman is a wonder of the earth
quickly gives way to the declaration of an article of faith: that
woman holds and bears the earth on her palm. The sensory
testimony elevates the declaration to the realm of the sublime:
the earth has the fragrance of a womans body, the crops
sway like her owing garment, the owers receive their inno-
cence from her lips. Unexpectedly, the poem then turns to
fathom the anguish of being earth and being a woman: hunger
is the lot of both; the seas are salty because womens eyes
have tears. The poem turns again: she loves honour and nobi-
lity, so the stars abide in her vicinity. By the time the poem
reaches this point, she has become ambivalent she is both
earth and woman.
It can be argued that for Dil, poetry itself has the immense
capaciousness of myth, for only then can it accommodate the
vast and disparate reality. His poem Kavita (Poetry; 2007:
105-06) is a manifesto of what may constitute the poetic. The
crops dying for want of fertilisers are poetry; the mills are
poems; the forest in ames is a poem; the laughter of the poets
father is poetry; there is poetry in stones and steel; the donkey
herds and snake charmers are poems.
This power to un-see the borders enables Dil, a rmly rooted
poet of his people and region, to grasp the human condition
without inhibition or bias. In Punjab (2007: 103), he sees Pun-
jab everywhere. All workers with unshaved faces and cracked
bare feet, be they in Bengal or Kerala, are Punjabis to him. The
whole world is Machhiwara, he says: at once exile and home.
In fact, the passion for universal self-identication introduces
itself in Dils rst book, in Desh (Country; 2007: 47) and Belachak
(Inexible; ibid: 60-61). It is a humane, generous rebuke, so
typical of Dil, to the ethnocentric proclivities often placed on
mindless display in Punjab and elsewhere. Caste, too, re-
ceives its share of the poets bitter attention: more often it
informs his observation, although it is treated with uncon-
cealed and raw irony in the short poem Jaat (Caste; ibid:
64), which appeared in his rst book. The poet tells the girl
who loves him, and who comes from another caste, that their
families have separate places to even cremate their dead.
Beyond this the poem says nothing, allowing silence to take
over. How can the living unite in love when even the dead are
not permitted to mix?
Sathhar, Dils third collection of poems, published in 1997,
is, as the title indicates, largely a work of mourning. But it is
mourning with a sting of satire, verging at times on ridicule.
The castrated bull, whose horns have now lost their itch and
who has learnt to quietly submit, becomes almost a symbol of
the renegade revolutionary Saahn (Bull; 1997: 149). Ulat
Inqalab de Pair (Revolution Reversed; ibid: 150), Gair Vidrohi
Nazm di Talaash (Search for a Non-Rebellious Poem; ibid:
152), Sawariyan (Passengers; ibid: 183), Comradan da Geet
(Song of the Comrades; ibid: 188), Hiloona (Jolt; ibid: 190)
and Akkhan Wala (The One Who Could See; ibid: 199), all are
a revolutionarys angry outpourings. The reader feels that the
once-glowing embers of the poets imagination are now barely
breathing under the ashes. But the re would return with Ajj
Billa Phir Aaya, and become a conagration.
Conclusion
Although a good deal of Dils work is yet to be published (as the
note appended to Naag Lok indicates), it can nevertheless be
argued that his protean talent had the potential to be a real
match for the protean cunning of capital, which Harvey and
Jameson, among others, have so meticulously mapped in our
day. Dil had the sense and the pride to suspect the appro-
priative attempts at representation that the subaltern studies
SPECIAL ARTICLE
Economic & Political Weekly EPW february 8, 2014 vol xlix no 6 71
group was to question in its own way: You just tell us
who you are to do something/for our sake (Sheeshe di Qaid
[Imprisonment in Glass]; 1997: 67). The poem Sanskriti
(Culture; ibid: 48), brush[ing] history against the grain, to
use Walter Benjamins words, recalls the reader to Benjamins
seventh thesis on the philosophy of history (2007: 256-57).
Vishav Sundari (Miss World; Dil 2007: 77) critiques the
global capitalist spectacle and simulacrum which are fabri-
cated out of, and conceal, the unacknowledged labour of
anonymous people. And in one of the ghazals, Dil speaks of
the commodication of courage and intellect through co-option
by the market (ibid: 80).
In a sense, then, Dils oeuvre is radically unnished. But that
also means it bristles with potentialities for us, his readers,
who shall be measured beside them and judged by our ability
to fathom and develop them. By challenging us from his grave
that was never to be,
11
Dil continues to haunt us like the
undead Marx.
Notes
1 According to Guy Standing, the precariat is A
Class-in-the-Making, a historically specic for-
mation of the period of neo-liberal globalisation,
characterised by precariousness of resi dency,
of labour and work, and of social protection
(2011: vii, 4). Judith Butler notes: Precarious life
characterises such lives who do not qualify as
recognisable, readable, or grievable (2013: xiii).
2 My understanding of capitalisms historical
geography is based on David Harvey (2003,
2005) and Fredric Jamesons (1991) work.

3

History repeats itself. Among innumerable
instances of this kind in the recent history of
India was a case in Patiala, registered by inves-
tigating agencies in 2012, in which a former
collector/deputy commissioner was named as
one of the accused.

4 The yover is indeed the metaphor of our
growth trajectory, enabling the successful
Indian to sweep over the heads of the huddled
masses, writes Mani Shankar Aiyar, a former
bureaucrat and minister in the Indian govern-
ment, in his preface to Badri Rainas book, The
Underside of Things (2012: xx).

5 Fredric Jameson, addressing the challenge of
late (global/multinational) capitalisms formi-
dable complexity, proposes cognitive mapping
as an initial step towards resistance. Dils poe-
tics of disjunction can be seen as a specic
attempt at cognitive mapping. At the same
time, it must be underlined that it does more
than cognitive mapping (Jameson 1991).

6 A pun is intended here to span the distance
between Adornos Developing Reality and
the reality of development in our times. The
reality of development under the neo-liberal
regime, which gives primacy to the freedom of
the market over the individuals freedom to
lead a dignied life, should refer as much to the
gathering human and ecological crisis as to the
accelerated development that impels the crisis
(and which Developmentalism, as the ideo-
logical faade of neo-liberalism, conceals).

7 This, and subsequent translations of Dils poetry
are by the author of this article.

8

Naag Lok (2007) carries in one volume Dils
three books of poetry: Satluj di Hawa (1971),
Bahut Sare Suraj (1982) and Sathhar (1997).
Hence this and subsequent references are to
the page numbers of Naag Lok.

9

Dils images are quintessential poetic images
in Bachelards sense. For Bachelard, the poetic
image begins to nd its form at the limits of
visualisation, conceived as imaging or reec-
tion. It is a work of imagination at the limits, a
limit experience, from which the lineaments
of another world can be dimly sighted.
10 A hawkers basket.
11

His wish that his dead body should be buried
could somehow not be fullled. The body was
cremated.
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Accidents and Road Safety:
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