Sudama Panday Dhoomil (English: Sudama Panday Dhoomil, born: November 9, 1936 – death: February 10, 1975) was a contemporary Hindi poet. In his poems we find the most powerful expression of the pain and anger of the disillusionment of the dreams of freedom. It seems as if the ultimate goal of Dhumil’s poems is to show a mirror to the system that has deceived the public. He was posthumously awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1979.
Sudama Pandey ‘Dhumil’ was born on 9 November 1936 in village Khewli near Varanasi. His ancestors had settled in Khewli from far away places. Dhumil’s father Shivnayak Pandey was an accountant and his mother Rajwanti Devi used to take care of the household. When Dhumil was eleven years old, his father died. Your childhood was full of struggle. Dhumil was married to Murat Devi at the age of 12. When you passed high school in 1953, you were the first person in the village to pass matriculation. Due to financial pressures he could not continue his studies. His intellectual development continued on the strength of both self-study and library.
The search for employment brought ‘Dhumil’ to Calcutta. If he couldn’t find any metal work, he worked as an iron carrier and got to know the lives of the workers closely. When his classmate friend Taraknath Pandey got information about this work, he informed him about a wood company M/s Talwar Brothers Pvt. Ltd. Got me a job. There he worked as an officer for about one and a half years. Meanwhile, when he became unwell, he returned home to recuperate. During his illness, his master asked him to move from Motihari to Gauhati. ‘Dhumil’ refused citing his ill health. The owner became arrogant, “I am paying for my work, not for your health!”
Then what was the job worth Rs 450, the commission per cubic foot and T.A, D.A… ‘Dhumil’ kicked everyone. Through this incident, we understood the viewpoint and distance between the ‘bleak’ capitalists and the workers. Now his democratic struggle was going to be expressed in the form of anger in his poetry. Dhumil is called the poet of struggle of Hindi poetry. In 1957, ‘Dhumil’ took admission in the Industrial Institute of Kashi University. In 1958, he took ‘Diploma in Electricity’ by securing first position in first class. He was appointed to the post of electrical instructor. Then after getting this job and promotion, he continued working in Ballia, Banaras and Saharanpur. In 1974, when he was working in Sitapur, he fell ill. Due to his frankness and arrogance, he had to incur the wrath of the officers. To maintain their pressure, the higher officials kept harassing them in some way or the other. This pressure became the cause of mental stress of ‘Dhumil’. In October 1974, due to unbearable headache, ‘Dhumil’ was admitted to the Medical College of Kashi University. Doctors diagnosed him with brain tumor. In November 1974, he was admitted to ‘King George Medical College’, Lucknow. Here he underwent brain operation but after that he went into ‘coma’ and in this state of unconsciousness, he became the denominator of time on 10 February 1975.
Mill’s eloquent use of language also gives him a distinct identity and a different identity from all the contemporary poets who love to display erudition and scholarship. His poetry echoes the voice of the people’s struggle in new imagery and new contexts. From this point of view, his poetic language challenges the propriety of the social structure. His poetic images are different from those of his later poets. They are wonderful in their nature and presentation – the sunshine was as warm as a mother’s lap. By saying this the poet wholeheartedly accepts the glory of his mother. From the point of view of prosody, almost all his poems are inclined towards prose rhythm. In order to break the monotony and length of the poem, he makes the lines shorter and longer and establishes harmony and rhythm through rhymes. The contribution of this public poet, who gave a new attitude to Hindi poetry, is and will always be remembered.
Dhumil’s lifestyle was so simple that when he died suddenly on February 10, 1975 due to brain tumor, even his family members came to know how great a poet he was only after hearing the news of his death on the radio. Only Kunwar Narayan and Shrilal Shukla had reached Manikarnika Ghat in Banaras at the time of his funeral. In his autobiographies, his death, which he had described as uncertain but possible hundreds of times a day, came that very day in such a hushed manner. Senior storyteller Kashinath Singh tells that Dhumil, who was deprived of formal higher education, later became so ‘suffered’ by the restlessness of learning and understanding poetry that he remained a student throughout his life. He also learned Anzi with the help of his neighbor Nagananda and several dictionaries, so that he could read and understand its poems. However, he suffered from the lack of systematic study throughout his life in such a way that despite being a leftist, he could neither free himself from masculinist thinking about women nor could he adopt the correct class perspective in choosing partisanship between villages and cities. When Ashok Vajpayee’s collection ‘City is still a possibility’ came out, he criticized it by saying that the city is a front, how can it be a possibility? But it also had one benefit. ‘Informal information’ made it easier for him to escape from the prison of ready-made leftist notions and he could truly emerge as a spokesperson for the sorrows and struggles of peasant life and a warrior poet for democracy fighting feudal values.
In expressing deep disbelief in the ‘revolutionary’ intellectual ruminations of the well-fed and uninjured people, he also faced serious charges like ‘generalisation’ and ‘advocacy of directionless blind anger’, but kept asking how people ‘unacquainted with difficulties and struggles’ could be revolutionaries. can? He believed that the people of ‘greedy for a few small facilities/joint family of criminals’ would one day be destroyed and with the strength of this belief, even after accepting to be ‘anarchist’, he did not equate loyalty with excrement. There is an interesting underlying story as to why Dhumil, who was aggressive in exploring the forbidden areas in his poems and flaunting every tradition, civilisation, elegance, decency and decency nurtured by the Chhaliya system, kept his surname with a shadowy meaning. At his young age, Dhumil had succeeded in turning Hindi criticism’s tradition from stories towards poetry. It is another matter that his first published work was a story, which was published in the most popular magazine of his time, ‘Kalpana’. He was considered a symbol of the self-respect of the litterateurs in Banaras and would turn against whoever he saw being mean. Some people allege that he worked as Namvar Singh’s henchman. At least this much is true in that they did not like to hear anything against Namvar. But what is more true considering his nature is that the moment he felt that Namvar was using him, he would have left him.
