Publish Date
15 Sep, 2025
About This Book
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’. Surve makes no pretence to objectivity. His verse is unostentatious, unabashedly so. He wants to write about, and for, the masses. There’s no attempt to idealize them, however—to gloss over the ugliness of life—for he is one of them. His subjects let their guard down and speak their minds. Activists crack jokes while putting up posters, a sex worker hustles her client, and a butcher remembers how he lost his leg in a riot trying to save a woman from his co-religionists. The mill worker and farmer know exactly who oppresses them; there is anger in them. For all the misery we come across, though, these are not poems of despair, but, instead, of a dogged optimism. Jerry Pinto renders a broad selection of Surve’s poetry into colourful yet effortless English verse, retaining both its raw energy and immediacy, and the essence of its unyielding commitment to a better future.
About The Author
Narayan Surve Narayan Surve (1926-2010) was a celebrated Marathi poet and social activist. Born in Mumbai, his poems vividly depicted the struggles of the urban working class. He is most well known for his collection Majhe Vidyapeeth (‘My University’), which came out in 1966. He was the recipient of the Soviet Land Nehru Award in 1973, and, in 1998, he was conferred the Padma Shri by the Government of India. A passionate advocate for labour rights and social justice, he is a revered figure in Marathi literature. Jerry Pinto Jerry Pinto is the author of Murder in Mahim (2017) and Em and the Big Hoom (2012; winner of the Hindu Prize and the Crossword Book Award), and the non-fiction book Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb (2006; winner of the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema). His other books include Asylum and Other Poems, Surviving Women, A Bear for Felicia, Monster Garden, When Crows Are White and, as editor, A Book of Light: When a Loved One Has a Different Mind, Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa, The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood, Bombay, Meri Jaan: Writings on Mumbai (with Naresh Fernandes) and Confronting Love: Poems (with Arundhathi Subramaniam). He has also translated (from Marathi) Daya Pawar’s classic autobiography Baluta, and the memoirs I Want to Destroy Myself (Mala Udhvasta Vhachay) by Malika Amar Shaikh and I, the Salt Doll (Mee Mithaachi Baahuli) by Vandana Mishra. Jerry Pinto also teaches journalism at the Sophia Institute of Social Communications Media in Mumbai and is on the board of directors of Meljol, which works in the sphere of child rights. In 2016, Jerry Pinto was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award.
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