Organic Dalit leader by chandramohan s

Ayyankali,one of Kerala's first dalit leaders was instrumental in the social revolution of the later half of the nineteenth century along with Sreenarayana Guru and Sahodaran Ayyapan.He stands apart from other social reformers of his era since he did not have any forms of social or cultural capital like education or financial muscle.History has been unkind to him in the fact that his role as the first peasant organizer of Kerala is skillfully buried by the left grand narratives and his  glory is being slowly unveiled only from the global demise of Marxism and communist regimes the world over.His brave attempts to get access to education for the people of his race,facing odds of all kinds and his dream of producing educated graduates from the lower social rungs of the society were commendable even for a modern society like us.Even today a thorough  biography of Ayyankali does not exists in Malayalam or English.Probably this poem could be the very first one in English. Ayyankali(1863–1941) -Organic Dalit leader In the times when a handful of rice can engulf a village When famines were more consistent than the monsoons Unlettered in the hymns of revolution decades before the crimson feathered crane from St.Petersburg announced its renaming as Leningrad and flapped wings to unsettle the straight line of peasants chained to the fields.                          He lead his race of peasants off the fields To grow weeds in landlord’s granaries .   Let our children into schools It wasn’t the pounding of the gavel From “Brown Versus Board of education” That  roused him to clutch Panchami’s hand Into a school The first ever from his race! A crane That flew from Leningrad catching the strong wind currents of Glasnost and Perestroika to announce its rechristening back to St.Petersburg perched on his statue. The victor over fate!