धूमिल / Dhoomil
(Picture courtesy Kavitakosh)
Dhoomil was the pen-name of Sudama Pandeya, who was born in Khevali, a village near Banaras, in 1935. He was educated in the village and in Banaras, and taught electrical engineering at an industrial institute (polytechnic) in the city for several years. He died of complications from one or more undiagnosed illnesses, possibly including damage to the brain, in 1975. Kedarnath Singh knew him as a young poet just beginning his career in Banaras in the early 1960s, and Kunwar Narain, then based in Lucknow, was one of the few people able to reach his bedside at the time of his sudden and painful death. Dhoomil published one collection of poems in his lifetime, Sansad se sadak tak (1972), which is among the most original and enduring books of poetry in modern Hindi. His later poems were collected and published posthumously in Kal sunana mujhe (1977), and Vidya Niwas Mishra subsequently edited and introduced a representative selection of his poems for a new generation of readers. Dhoomil appears to have been socially marginalized by many of his urban literary contemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s, probably because of his strong personality, ‘rough’ manners, and rural background, but after his death his poems had an great impact on the political left in India, especially on activists at the grassroots level. Hindi criticism, however, has not been able to do justice so far to his language, technique, thematic invention, psychological depth, and political foresight; as a result, Hindi readers have been unable to appreciate his full significance for world literature in the twentieth century.
naman