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Trigger Warning: Descriptions of Violence, Rape
Meena Kandasamy
In Hathras, cops barricade a raped woman’s home,
hijack her corpse, set it afire on a murderous night,
deaf to her mother’s howling pain. In a land where
Dalits cannot rule, they cannot rage, or even mourn.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
What does that fire remember? The screams of satis
dragged to their husband’s pyres and brides burnt alive;
the wails of caste-crossed lovers put to death,
the tongue-chopped shrieking of raped women.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
Manu said once, so his regiment repeat today:
all women are harlots, all women are base;
all women seek is sex, all they shall have is rape.
Manu gives men a licence plate, such rape-mandate.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
Sanatana, the only law of the land that’s in force,
Sanatana, where nothing, nothing ever will change.
Always, always a victim-blaming slut-template,
a rapist-shielding police-state, a caste-denying fourth estate.
This has happened before, this will happen again.
(Meena Kandaswamy is a poet and writer. Courtesy: The Wire.)
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For a Young Woman Who Will Not Become Old
Romi Mahajan
Your dreams won’t die
They can’t kill them
They killed you
They brutalized you
They lied
But your dreams won’t die
A people
Who pride themselves
On their spirituality…
What spirits indeed
Invade their
Addled brains?
What opiate
Suggests such acts?
What sickness
Can endure?
Their bodies, their limbs
Are what’s really aflame
Your dreams won’t die
You are with us
Flames — their flames
Burn every pretense
That they present
Your dreams won’t die
(Romi Mahajan is an Author, Marketer, Investor, and Activist)
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Just a Dalit Girl
Sajla Chawla
They said the sky is blue
But I only know the color brown
For I am just a Dalit girl
And I always keep my head down
I sing the songs of lost sisters
When I work in the landlord’s fields
And if the landlord comes by
I cover my face silently
We huddle together always
I never walk alone
My sister did that long ago
And she never came back home
My father buried her in the dark
As her broken body bled
No-one asked us where she was
And no-one really cared
A girl I was for silence born
Did the landlord so decree?
Or did the upper caste God
Write my worthless destiny?
I am born so low, they fear
That if I raise my head high
Their Earth might bleed with heinous sins
And congeal their murky blue sky.
