When the elderly Marathi poet Narayan Surve regained consciousness after his coronary bypass in 2001, even before he could get an update from the doctors, he was asked to recite a poem. The ward boy wheeling Surve to his room recognised him and recalled his 1966 poem Majhi Aai, which he had learned in school. Despite his discomfort, the poet recited the poem as he always did—carrying the burden of each syllable with great care.
Surve was immensely popular among the Maharashtrian working class, both in cities and villages—an uncommon man with a common touch. When over two lakh peasant women gathered in 1986 in Nashik’s Chandwad to voice their struggles, they sang Dongari Sheth (1956), one of the first songs Surve wrote. Fourteen years after Surve’s death on 16 August 2010, when a thief found out he had stolen a TV from his house, he returned it with an apology note.
Today, he is credited with rescuing Marathi poetry from the binary of ‘fashionable frustration and romantic revolution’ that was popular with poets such as BS Mardhekar. Despite having written only about 150-160 poems in his lifetime, a relatively small number, his handling of politics, emotion, and technique made him one of the most widely celebrated Marathi poets.
“The need to be open to new modes of struggle and resistance, the need to look ahead with poetry in one’s soul. This is the legacy of Surve Master, which will always stay with us,” wrote filmmakers Anjali Monteiro and KP Jayasankar in their tribute to Surve after his death.
Surve’s allegiance to ‘humankind’
A poet of the masses, Narayan Gangaram Surve was born on 15 October 1926 in Bombay. Abandoned at birth, he was adopted by Gangaram and Kashibai Surve who were both textile mill workers and members of the Girni Kamgar Union.
“You could see the influence of the union in their everyday speech,” Surve wrote about his parents in the introduction to In That Mill, I Too Was Forged (2023), a collection of his poems translated into English by author Jerry Pinto.
In the poem Karl Marx (1982), Surve writes about how he was exposed to the Marxist ideology during his first workers’ strike. He mentions a certain Janakiakka, who refers to Marx as “Markusbaba”, who was born in Germany but “met his end” in England—“nothing unusual” for a sanyasi (ascetic) like him. “Land, for them, is the same everywhere,” Janakiakka tells Surve.
Surve poeticised the everyday speech of Bombay’s proud, revolutionary workers and they championed him because his poetry spoke their language.
As an orphan, he had no caste or religion, so he owed allegiance to no sect but to “humankind”. The people around him became his books, his university, and the subject of his poetry.
Communism appealed to Surve as a ‘scientific and universal movement’. It helped him make sense of his unjust world.
Surve was impressed by communism’s ability to forge connections between people from different socio-cultural and economic backgrounds. He even celebrated how it revived folk theatre in his introduction to Pinto’s book, titled ‘What I saw, I wrote’.
“It will of course be impossible to deny the role of the Communist movement in the revival of the folk theatre movement,” he wrote in In That Mill, I Too Was Forged.
“The folk theatre movement was so effective that all of Maharashtra was swept up in its fervour. Cultural groups sprang up everywhere in the villages. Artists portrayed many events of political and social significance from the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement to the Goa Liberation Struggle,” he added.
He didn’t shy away from acknowledging communism’s failures either.
Surve admitted that the movement lost steam in Maharashtra because it did not consider “the cultural, social, and educational questions of the working class” as important. According to him, the state’s communist movement ignored its legacy of progressive saint poetry, Jyotirao Phule’s akhandas, and Dalit jalsas.
Surve measured the failings of communism in the poetic legacies it discarded. Little wonder, then, that he sought to remedy this with his own writing. Surve’s poetry was at once raw, revolutionary, tender, and hopeful.
In his 1978 poem Chaar Shabda, he proclaimed himself to be “a worker, a flashing sword”.
“Surve poses a lively and vivid challenge to the Saraswat (read Brahmin) stranglehold over Marathi but hidden in that poem is a vibrant warning too. His sins may be venial, as he puts it, but he can also write: I burn my brand into your door,” Pinto wrote about Chaar Shabda in his book.
Surve was also capable of writing about great romance, will, and hope. His poetic sensibility combined rhythms, styles, and diction from Tukaram-Dnyaneshwar, Kusumagraj, and Marathi modernist poets.
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Poet with ‘common touch’
Narayan Surve knew he was loved by many and that there was great curiosity about his journey. From being a doffer boy in a textile mill to a sweeper, a peon, a school teacher and finally a revolutionary poet, he had, after all, come a long way. Surve always told his story without self-aggrandisation—although he did harbour some “forgivable glee”, according to Pinto, at the accolades he won in the face of numerous difficulties.
“I have written little; it has been talked about a lot. I can’t help it,” he had said in a 2004 interview.
When a group of poets and poetry connoisseurs from Nashik sought to name a library after him, he was greatly touched. At first, he pushed for it to be named after Sahir Ludhianvi, but the workers wanted to dedicate the library to one of their own. As he accepted the honour, he also handed them every literary award he had received, a bookshelf from his own house, and two sacks worth of books to fill it.
“Surve never met a person that was a stranger to him,” Ravikant Shardul, trustee at Nashik’s Kavivarya Narayan Surve Vachnalay, told ThePrint.
When Pinto interviewed Marathi writer Shanta Gokhale for In That Mill, I Too Was Forged, she spoke about Surve’s ‘common touch’. She told Pinto about the time when, after attending an event at Mumbai’s Yashwantrao Chavan Centre, she and Surve were walking down a road at Nariman Point. They came across some working-class men whose faces lit up after seeing Surve. The poet, in his turn, chatted with them warmly and patted one on the back. Gokhale recalled having dubbed him “the people’s poet” in her mind.
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Experiencing tragedy
Narayan Surve never expressed any anger toward his mother for having abandoned him at just five months old. “If a woman is unhappy being pregnant, there is no greater curse than bearing a child,” he wrote in his introduction to Pinto’s book.
He chose to remember his adoptive parents, and how they cared for him and raised him. When he was in the fourth grade, the mills where his parents worked closed down almost simultaneously. They had to depart Bombay and return to their village—leaving Surve behind with just Rs 10 in his hand.
This second abandonment perhaps cut deeper and found voice in Majhi Aai, in which five children are confronted with the death of their mill worker mother.
“That night the five of us huddled together,
Thinking it a mother’s love, we draped a blanket over us
We had nothing before, now we had no mother either
Keeping tears at bay, we stayed awake all night together
We had become truly destitute, destitute without a mother.”
This heart-wrenching poem carries the core of Surve’s philosophy of life—to experience tragedy without giving into despondency; to experience abandonment without harbouring resentment.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)