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Rise of Popular Movements
Turning their backs to the sun, they journeyed through centuries.
Now, now we must refuse to be pilgrims of darkness.
That one, our father, carrying, carrying the darkness is now bent;
Now, now we must lift the burden from his back.
Our blood was spilled for this glorious city
And what we got was the right to eat stones
Now, now we must explode the building that kisses the sky!
After a thousand years we were blessed with sunflower giving fakir;
Now, now, we must like sunflowers turn our faces to the sun.
(i) Who wrote this poem originally in Marathi ?
(ii) What do you understand by ‘pilgrims of darkness’ ?
(iii) Who was the ‘Sunflower giving fakir’ that blessed the ‘pilgrims of darkness’ ?
(iv) What is expressed by the poems?
(i) Namdeo Dhasal.
(ii) ‘The pilgrims of darkness’ were the Dalit communities who had experienced brutal caste injustices for a long time in our society.
(iii) The ‘sunflower giving fakir’ was Dr. B. R. Ambedkar who has been referred to as their liberator.
(iv) Such poems were expressions of anguish that the Dalit masses continued to face even after twenty years of independence.
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.....nearly all ‘new social movements have emerged as corrective to new maladies–environmental degradation, violation of the status of women, destruction of tribal cultures and the undermining of human rights-none of which are in and by themselves transformative of the social order. They are in that way quite different from revolutionary ideologies of the past. But their weakness lies in their being so heavily fragmented......................a large part of the space occupied by the new social movements seem to be suffering from ..various characteristics which Have prevented them from being relevant to the truly oppressed and the poor in the form of a solid unified movement of the people. They are too fragmented, reactive, ad hocish, providing no comprehensive framework of basic social change. Their being anti-this or that (anti-West, anti-capitalist, anti-development, etc.) does not make them any more coherent, any more relevant to oppressed and peripheralised communities. —Rajni Kothari
(a) What is the difference between new social movements and revolutionary ideologies ?
(b) What according to the author are the limitations of social movements ?
(c) If social movements address specific issues, would you say that they are ‘fragmented’ or that they are more focused ? Give reasons for your answer by giving examples.
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