Abandoned soon after birth, Narayan Gangaram Surve (1926–2010) was \nbrought up by mill workers, but left to fend for himself once again at the age \nof twelve in the chawls of Mumbai. He grew up in the streets of the big city, \ntaught himself to read and write—working as doffer boy in a textile mill, a \nsweeper, a peon—and became a school teacher and a celebrated revolutionary \npoet. An abiding allegiance to the workers’ movement was the thread that ran \nthrough his extraordinary journey. His poetry was thus as much ammunition to \nfight the good fight as it was art. It evolved a new idiom, written in the Marathi \nspoken on the streets, freely borrowing words from Hindi or English, unafraid \nto break literary conventions upheld by the cultured elite. As he puts it, the \npeople were ‘my holy books, my scriptures, my gurus’. \nSurve makes no pretence to objectivity. His verse is unostentatious, unabashedly \nso. He wants to write about, and for, the masses. There’s no attempt to idealize \nthem, however—to gloss over the ugliness of life—for he is one of them. His \nsubjects let their guard down and speak their minds. Activists crack jokes while \nputting up posters, a sex worker hustles her client, and a butcher remembers \nhow he lost his leg in a riot trying to save a woman from his co-religionists. \nThe mill worker and farmer know exactly who oppresses them; there is anger \nin them. For all the misery we come across, though, these are not poems of \ndespair, but, instead, of a dogged optimism. \nJerry Pinto renders a broad selection of Surve’s poetry into colourful yet \neffortless English verse, retaining both its raw energy and immediacy, and the \nessence of its unyielding commitment to a better future.