Ardhe Akash Maathyavar: Anthology of Marathi poetry turns an empathetic gaze on life on the fringes

“It’s our right to be gay Aamhala manya tu, tujhya laingiktechya Hazaar aasanansaha Pan Bhukecha kaay?” (Translation: It’s our right to be gay. We recognise you and a thousand forms of your sexuality. But, what about hunger?) Lines such as these pierce the heart in Ardhe Akash Maathyavar, an anthology of Marathi poems by Dr Shridhar Pawar, who in his long career, happened to spend six years treating patients at an STD clinic in Kamathipura, the infamous red light neighbourhood in southern Mumbai. His experiences in those by-lanes peopled by various marginalised communities – sex workers and their children, impoverished families, queer groups, migrant populations and so on – inform his worldview as well as the poetry in the book, an often harshly emotional take on life on the fringes. Kamathipura has long attracted the gaze of the Indian and foreign media, with capitalist lenses often exoticising the area’s poverty and backwardness. It is in this context that Dr Pawar’s book works best, as it shuns the over-abused spectacle and romance in favour of an empathetic storyteller’s gaze, one who doesn’t shy away from expressing his personal emotions in the language, tone and style of each poem, based on its own individual story and context. [caption id="" align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Cover for Ardhe Akash Maathyavar. Photograph taken by Sudharak Olwe.[/caption] The title of the book means ‘half the sky on our heads’, symbolising one half of the population – women – who form the backbone of the communities in Kamathipura. The lines at the beginning of this piece are from a poem that talks about the spectrum of marginalisation even within a single community. Thus, a gay person belonging to a higher economic stratum might not be fully able to understand the struggles of impoverished gay people, who face the kind of oppression and discrimination the former can scarcely imagine. The World of the Verses A long, arduous history lies at the back of Dr Pawar’s experiences in Kamathipura. The clinic itself was established over a century ago, in 1916. Ravaged by the carnal needs of Britain’s colonial armed forces, followed by those of the industrial population that was largely responsible for turning Mumbai into a global financial hub in the 20th century, the sex workers of Kamathipura became hosts for the onset of venereal diseases (now known as sexually transmitted diseases) such as syphilis and gonorrhoea. The tyranny of feudalism and colonialism combined to turn a vibrant, active neighbourhood of another kind of commerce, into a hotbed of disease as well as stigma. The permeation and enlargement of the margins of society is a given feature in an increasingly material world, thus giving the stories of Kamathipura a universal relevance. [caption id=“attachment_7978481” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] A scene from Kamathipura. Photograph taken by Sudharak Olwe.[/caption] Invisible people, invisible stories and the power of poetry In one of his poems, titled Feminist, in the Hindi translation of the book, a certain rage emanates from his words, like a gentle soul finally getting angry. He talks of the toxicity of manhood reaching such extreme levels that perhaps only a complete rejection of the symbols of masculinity and patriarchy would do. He almost exhorts a castration of the phallus, because world that claims to aspire for social justice has no place for the infamous male ego. The poetry, is thus reactive, each referring to another story, another personal experience finding expression through these short bursts of emotional and rational perspective. Sometimes, the poetry has an almost performable quality to it. Like in the poem Ek Sadat Janarya Kalavishayi (loosely translated to ‘about this rotting world’), he talks about the identity of transgender people. The nature of verse is prickly and exclamatory, like the script of a street play. It is through such varied empathetic gazes that the collection of poems finds its own identity, though the language is often abstract and metaphorical requiring a higher level of sensitivity and cognisance of the brutal reality of our terms to fully grasp all of it. This is a book that would have immensely benefited from a contextual prose as an addendum to each of the 43 poems contained within, to completely inform the reader of the full force and gaze of each; yet the work as a whole is a timely reminder of how far we’ve all come, and how much farther we, as sentient custodians of the future, have to go.