দুটি কবিতা

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.