Language
The language my father gave me I stored in my mother’s womb
and the language my mother gave me I stored in Earth’s womb.
So the anatomists have declared that
I do not have a language.
Dear Language Board,
introduce me as a man,
introduce me as a man before men.
For example,
Sananta
Post: Tanty
Race: Human
Colour: Black
Birthplace: World.
So that my father and my mother do not realize
I was not just their child.
Because my father does not have a name.
Because my mother does not have a name.
My father’s name is Earth; my mother’s name is Earth;
and my name is Sananta.
A dark son of the tea garden—Sananta.
Dear Language Board,
introduce me as a man.
For example, Sananta Tanty
Residence: Inside courtesy, aesthetics, and independence
Character: Man
Desire: The step forward from capitalism to socialism
Let the wind rise and rise and rise.
Wind inside people, wind in people’s hearts.
The language my father gave me I stored in my mother’s womb
and the language my mother gave me I stored in Earth’s womb.
So, for my language, the linguists
have convened an emergency protest meeting.
So the anatomists have declared that
I do not have a language
Dear Language Board,
introduce me as a man,
introduce me as a man before men.
Savage
Twenty-seven persons were killed.
Among them, twelve were men.
The rest were women and children.
Eyewitnesses said there were babies too
asleep at their mothers’ bosoms.
First, the village was surrounded,
then the doors were broken,
and men were dragged from their beds.
Ignoring the innocent faces of the children,
the murderers fired their bullets indiscriminately.
The bullets filled with gunpowder went
through the innocent eyes and hearts of the children.
Flies hovered all night
above the blood-blackened soil.
The moon left the sky.
The sky cried amid the savagery.
In grief, the clouds turned into rain.
Witnessing the heartbreaking scene,
the eyewitnesses said nothing.
They simply covered their faces with handkerchiefs.
After identification, this was learnt about the dead bodies:
1. All twelve men were landless and without independence.
2. The women were mothers of hungry children.
3. The children were just children and—flowers.
Two Poems
Sananta Tanty
translated from the Assamese by Dibyajoti Sarma
Listen to "Language" read in the original Assamese by the poet:
Being leftist is not new for a poet of post-Independence India. In the case of Sananta Tanty, however, this leftist politics has been radical in outlook and sustained in approach. His humanitarianism is rooted in personal experience: born to family of tea-garden workers, he witnessed poverty and exploitation up close. Through education and work, he managed to escape this life but not the trauma of his people—a community defined by its labor, the plucking of tea leaves (imagine the cotton plantations of America).
This experience of growing up amid the oppressive tea gardens of Assam makes Tanty keenly aware of oppression, as seen in the poem, “Savage.” Since the 1970s, Assam has witnessed a series of people’s movements clash with the forces of the state machinery. “Savage” narrates one such incident in which the armed forces, looking for an alleged terrorist, attack a village and massacre the villagers.
In “Language,” the collective trauma of Tanty’s people is palpable in a different way. Like most tea-garden workers, Tanty’s ancestors came from modern-day Odisha during the colonial period. They spoke a dialect of Odia. The language still survives in a broken form. However, Tanty grew up in a district where Bengali is the dominant language and in a state where Assamese is the official language. In the 1970s, the state witnessed a violent agitation to assert the dominance of Assamese. Against this backdrop, Tanty draws a picture of rootless existence. When language as a marker of identity is lost, instead of wallowing in self-pity, Tanty embraces the trade of his people as a fact of their humanity. For example, Tanty is a common surname among tea-garden workers. Thus, to state that his “post” is Tanty is to announce his place in the history of his community. But even this is not radical enough for Tanty’s vision. He wants a human identity beyond all labels. He wants to be identified as a man. Since his parents did not have names, the poet has only one identity: the son of his parents. In a way, one might read Tanty’s poem as a comment on slavery.
This experience of growing up amid the oppressive tea gardens of Assam makes Tanty keenly aware of oppression, as seen in the poem, “Savage.” Since the 1970s, Assam has witnessed a series of people’s movements clash with the forces of the state machinery. “Savage” narrates one such incident in which the armed forces, looking for an alleged terrorist, attack a village and massacre the villagers.
In “Language,” the collective trauma of Tanty’s people is palpable in a different way. Like most tea-garden workers, Tanty’s ancestors came from modern-day Odisha during the colonial period. They spoke a dialect of Odia. The language still survives in a broken form. However, Tanty grew up in a district where Bengali is the dominant language and in a state where Assamese is the official language. In the 1970s, the state witnessed a violent agitation to assert the dominance of Assamese. Against this backdrop, Tanty draws a picture of rootless existence. When language as a marker of identity is lost, instead of wallowing in self-pity, Tanty embraces the trade of his people as a fact of their humanity. For example, Tanty is a common surname among tea-garden workers. Thus, to state that his “post” is Tanty is to announce his place in the history of his community. But even this is not radical enough for Tanty’s vision. He wants a human identity beyond all labels. He wants to be identified as a man. Since his parents did not have names, the poet has only one identity: the son of his parents. In a way, one might read Tanty’s poem as a comment on slavery.
Sananta Tanty (born 1952) comes from the so-called tea-garden community in Assam, a people originally from modern-day Odisha who were transplanted by the British to Assam as labourers in the tea gardens during the second half of the nineteenth century. He is one of the most important voices in modern Assamese poetry. A chronicler of the times and an advocate for the downtrodden, he has produced thirteen volumes of poetry since the publication of his first book, In Search of a Bright Star, in 1982. For Tanty, who is of Odia heritage and was educated in Bengali, writing poetry in Assamese has become a way to negotiate the landscape. His work is both radical and reflective. He is a poet of change and of unbridled optimism. Tanty was awarded the Mrinalini Devi Goswami Memorial Award in 1992, the Birsa Munda Award in 2002, the Osman Ali Sodagar Samannya Award in 2011, and the Krantikal Samman in 2014.
Dibyajoti Sarma was born in Assam. He is the author of two volumes of poetry and an academic book, in addition to numerous writings in anthologies and journals. A journalist with a trade magazine in New Delhi, he is currently translating the poems of Sananta Tanty for a book-length volume.
