In that mill, I too was forged

Abandoned soon after birth, Narayan Gangaram Surve (1926-2010) was brought up by mill workers, but left to fend for himself once again at the age of twelve in the chawls of Mumbai. He grew up in the streets of the big city, taught himself to read and write—working as doffer boy in a textile mill, a sweeper, a peon—and became a school teacher and a celebrated revolutionary poet. An abiding allegiance to the workers’ movement was the thread that ran through his extraordinary journey. His poetry was thus as much ammunition to fight the good fight as it was art. It evolved a new idiom, written in the Marathi spoken on the streets, freely borrowing words from Hindi or English, unafraid to break literary conventions upheld by the cultured elite. As he puts it, the people were ‘my holy books, my scriptures, my gurus’.