Sudharak Olwe

I would like to say that it was Namdeo Dhasal's Golpitha that led me to Kamathipura. But that would not be entirely true. It was Namdeo himself. In 1995, I had taken pictures of a morcha by sex workers that he had organised. He was giant of a man fighting for the rights of the despised people. Kamathipura was the world that Namdeo grew up in. He called it do number ki duniya... the bottom of the world.
It included pimps, sex workers, hijras, petty criminals, homeless urchins, beggars and thieves. Namdeo said, "They are my people - these lumpen; I am one of them. My poetry is about life here."

I read his poetry. It was an assault. Every word was a slap in the face, a punch in the gut. Here are some lines from his poem entitled -

Mandakini Patil: A Young Prostitute: My Intended Collage

On a barren blue canvas her clothes ripped off, her thighs blasted open, a sixteen-year-old girl surrendering herself to pain. And a pig; its snout full of blood... Never before had I seen a face so devoid of light as was yours; and of a thousand other females like you. Flashing out from so many countries, and so many cages; And bearing so many different names.... You make anguish scream inside me; and stream inside me; and appropriate me. Is that the scream of an ending; or is the end itself a scream beginning?

Many years were to pass, many lessons had to be learnt before I entered Namdeo's world. What I saw wasn't Kamathipura of the early 1970s when Namdeo had written the Golpitha poems. Since then, many things had changed: the cages were gone; work on social empowerment was underway; HIV had entered; globalization was taking its toll; the people had been uprooted; even the physical landscape had undergone change.