Namdeo Dhasal
Namdeo Dhasal (1949-2014), the maverick Marathi poet with hardly any formal education, was born in 1949 in a former ‘untouchable’ community in Pur-Kanersar village near Pune in Maharashtra. In 1972, he founded Dalit Panther, the militant organisation modelled on Black Panther. The same year he published Golpitha that belongs to the tradition in modern urban poetry beginning with Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Since then, he has published eight collections of poems from which a representative selection was published in English as A Current of Blood.