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Jayant Parmar is an Indian Urdu language poet known for raising Dalit issues in his poetry.
Parmar was born in a poor family. At a young age, he began to paint miniature paintings for a frame maker. Parmer realized that the frame maker had a separate pot for him because he was Dalit. This saddened Parmer and he quit.
Parmar taught himself Urdu from a language learning guide at age 30 after he developed an appreciation for Urdu poetry while living in a Muslim-dominated area in the walled city area of Ahmedabad.[3] He has published three poetry collections: Aur in 1998, Pencil Aur Doosri Nazmein in 2006, and Manind in 2008. Parmer won the 2008 Sahitya Akademi Award in Urdu for Pencil Aur Doosri Nazmein
It looks incredible. A 30- year- old who uses word and brush with equal felicity picks up a language learning guide from the downtown market of Ahmedabad that is famous for” things not with it” as it is the area where one hardly see any shopping mall, food plaza and multiplex. It is the place that makes him realize that the life does exist beyond selling, buying and sensual pleasures. Soon he becomes fully conversant with the nuances and idioms of a language that is apparently incompatible with his cultural ethos, ideological concerns, value system and religious beliefs, surprisingly within no time he rides roughshod over the complicated and formidable prosody of that language. Eventually his ever- increasing proficiency in that particular language coupled with his creative dexterity, has earned him the prestigious Sahitya Academy award in 2009. It is a piece of fiction but is exactly what has been achieved by Jayant Parmar. His transformation from a Gujarati poet and painter into an accomplished Urdu poet leaves many awe-struck as his second collection of poems “Pencil Aur Doosri Nazmein” (Pencil and other poems) got the Award of the National Academy of Letters – Sahitya Academy – for Urdu last year.
Jayant Parmar lived in the Muslim dominated locality of the walled city Ahmedabad, he developed a strong liking for Urdu poetry and it prompted him to start learning Urdu.
“I bought a copy of Urdu Script Teacher from a roadside market and I found Urdu the most effective medium of my creative expression. I also laid my hand at Urdu calligraphy”.
Jayant Parmar first started composing poems in his mother tongue Gujarati, and then found it quite appropriate to express himself in a language that takes pride in taking recourse in a to sentimental exoticism. Urdu poetry, largely infused with highly suggestive imagery, conjures up multiple meanings but Jayant Parmar’s poetry, betrays a definite deviation as he zeroes in on relentless probing of the human predicament through the prism of his intensely personal anguish which he describes as the “smell of hell pit”. He does not wear his sufferings lightly and peels away layers of ignominy of untouchability accumulated over years in an idiom that is direct and completely devoid of rhetorical flourish.
Jayant Parmar’s laconic poems question established truths, as he cannot ingest the fiendish attitude of the society. He has set Dalit poetry in motion in Urdu and his three collections Aur (And, 1999), Penci Aur Doosri Nazmein (Pencil and other poems 2006) and Manind (Similar 2007) unfailingly makes it clear that his poetry is not being written for astral beings. His poems touch the subject of affliction and also turn attention to a savage impulse that exists beneath all human actions, the pervasiveness of exploitation of have-nots. The pitiable and dolorous condition and degeneracy of the outcast makes the narrator to take refuge in ironic posing and his clear-eyed account is generally wrapped in opprobrious terms in a language modulated on speech rhythm:
Jayant avoids obscure vocabulary, Persian idioms, and compound words deliberately and unlike his contemporaries he does not repeat himself conversely as Balraj Komal points out he takes birth in his poems time and again and every time discovers a new dimension of his awe-inspiring creativity. Title of one of his famous poem “sapne dekhne wale hath’ betrays an extreme form of suppression and exploitation as the narrator is impelled to use his hands for having dreams as he can not make use of his imagination .Even for creative urge he has to use hand through which he earns his livelihood. Imtiyaz rightly points out his dreams are ought to be of making knives and draggers and putting heads on the draggers. It is violent protest unheard in Urdu poetry.
Delineating the contours of the poetic creation of Jayant Parmar, eminent Urdu critic Gopichand Narang aptly observes:
“Urdu is the cultural language of minority, but Jayant Parmar’s predicament represents a minority within minority. In other words this marginalized voice is subaltern within subaltern. Subdued in the haze of pain, this is sigh of leaves falling in the autumn sun; In the backdrop of sad colours; poems with the themes of ‘mother’ shock the reader. If one could be lost into the text, one can discover it in words of rags of historical pains and discrimination that has been taken for granted and has been going on for ages”.5
Jayant too writes romantic poem but they too are meshed with his commitment to the causes he lives for. His desire for securing an honourable place in the society and anguish at poverty runs through all his poems.
Explaining the symbolic meaning of the title of his second collection ‘Aur’ (And), Jayant points out:
“There is an invisible mountain behind the elevated peaks. Apparent is not always the truth and I intended to go beyond it. The word ‘Aur’ (And) joins words and sentences and I try to bind hearts together through my poems. In my creative world, lion, bear, leopard, flavor, darkness, sunshine, seasons, paper, pen, pencil, brush, canvass, easel and man, all have their distinct identities. My symbols and metaphors are drawn from routine type. My poems do reveal a deep sense of agony and pain. One might hear in them a tone of assertion rather than a note of an apology”.
Source : Wikipedia
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