Editor's Note
As Siddalingaiah, the pioneer of Kannada Dalita-Bandaya poetry wrote, “Nenne Dina, Nanna Jana Bettadanthe Bandaru” (My people arrived yesterday like a moving mountain). The image of a mountain has been used in literature to connote strength, resilience and presence. Dalit Hindi poet Mohan Mukt also uses the trope of a mountain but in an entirely new way. He subverts the idea of the loftiness of the Himalayan mountain range, considered sacred in Indian lore, and reveals the absurdity of considering any human being as inferior.
— Amulya B
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Himalayas Are Dalit
Among the tallest, they say
I say, conquered
Countless rivers flow through them, they say
Countless rivers live in them, they say
They are frozen, I say
They are stalled, I say
Said to be the newest
I find them old
At least older than civilisation
Said to be expanding
Quite slowly, I feel
Great civilisations flourish on their waters, they say
I add that I concur
Must be saved, they say
Stay away, I state
Said to be an abode of gods, sacred
Dalit, I say
Shuddering with rage, they ask how could that be?
I answer —
If people could be Dalits, why not mountains?
Acknowledgments
Image credits: Rajyashri Goody. Skyscape. and reproduced here with the kind permission of the artist. The installation created for KHOJ ‘Refracting Rooms’.
A sky made of 500+ shoes. Rajyashri’s Skyscape is a disquieting and subversive representation of the Dalit’s condition in India. For more of Rajyashri’s work, check out her Insta: @rajgoody.
Author | MOHAN MUKT
MOHAN MUKT’s first collection, provocatively titled Himalaya Dalit Hai (Samaya Sakshaya Prakasha, Dehradun), came out in 2022 and was widely read and praised on social media, if not by “the establishment”.
Hailing from Uttarakhand, Mukt has constantly critiqued, through his journalistic writings, the rosy picture of Pahadi Sanskriti (Hill Culture) painted by upper-caste litterateurs of the region. Pointing to the profound cultural resistance in Mukt’s poetry, literary critic Kanwal Bharti calls it the first Dalit discourse from Pahad. Activist-critic Chandrakala highlights the duality of local and universal in Mukt’s poetry and reserves special praise for how well he expresses a woman’s heart at the level of compassion and empathy.
In addition to creative writing, Mukt is working on an ambitious project to write a history of the Dalit movement in Uttarakhand.
Translator | BHARATBHOOSHAN TIWARI
BHARATBHOOSHAN TIWARI (b.1978) is an independent writer and translator working in three languages— English, Hindi and Marathi, and actively working on adding a fourth language (Dutch) to the repertoire. He earns his living as an IT professional and lives in Amsterdam. His most recent work is Legal Fiction (HarperCollin India, 2021), an English translation of Chandan Pandey’s Hindi novel Vaidhanik Galp.