Poetry, as Manager Pandey once said, is a “tough nut to crack for sociological criticism.” Even great literary sociologists tend to avoid it because the meeting point of sociology and poetry often leaves both a little bruised. Yet, the poetry of Dinesh Kushwaha, a Hindi poet, invites precisely such an encounter. His poems are not abstractions or riddles of language—they breathe the life of ordinary people, their hopes, disappointments, labour, and longing for dignity.
Kushwaha’s world is peopled with men and women who dream, toil, and sometimes despair, but who remain bound by the thread of shared humanity. He writes of people who crave connection in a time when solitude has become a mark of privilege. In one of his most intimate poems, “Moksha in This Very Body,” the poet confesses, “For a long time now, I’ve wanted to meet someone who, upon seeing, feels like the one I was meant to meet for lifetimes past.” The lines carry a yearning for spiritual and emotional communion—a longing not for transcendence but for human nearness that itself becomes liberation.
In the Indian philosophical tradition, “moksha” or liberation is an ultimate ideal, often imagined as release from the cycle of birth and death. For Kushwaha, liberation is not escape from the body but the flowering of compassion within it. His verse transforms the metaphysical idea of moksha into an emotional and social quest: the freedom to love, trust, and share without fear. For him, the act of writing poetry itself is an experience of liberation. In that sense, creation becomes a path to salvation.
This conviction echoes through his work. “Moksha in This Very Body,” “The Breasts of Statues in Khajuraho,” “While Cremating My Father,” and “Kolkata” are not isolated poems; they form a tapestry of human relationships—between father and son, lover and beloved, migrant and homeland, body and soul.
In “While Cremating My Father,” he watches the body burn without ornamentation or ritual flourish. The poem is stripped of sentimentality, yet it glows with tenderness as the poet recalls the values inherited from his father: “Educate the masses not with scriptures but with poetry. Liberate them from begging. True saintliness resides where Raidas stitches shoes, where Kabir weaves cloth.” The father’s advice transforms into a manifesto for socially committed art—poetry as a tool of awakening rather than consolation.
This humanism is what gives Kushwaha’s poetry its sociological core. In “The Breasts of Statues in Khajuraho,” he revisits the ancient sculptures that once scandalized moralists but were defended by Tagore as the nation’s genuine artistic heritage. The poem is not about eroticism for its own sake but about the creative vitality that joins art, body, and beauty in one rhythm. Kushwaha’s descriptions—“the silent flame of desires rising from the freshly bathed body”—echo the sensual yet sacred tone of Vidyapati and the compassion of modern sensibility.
In “Kolkata,” a deeply moving poem inspired by the life of his father, Kushwaha captures the emotional texture of migration. For the father, Kolkata meant “washing dishes with his own hands, lighting the stove, cooking rice.” For the child, it meant “new clothes, candies and sweets.” Gradually, the boy learns that this city of dreams is also a place of exhaustion, where the rickshaw puller ends up “admitted to a horse hospital.” The image of the father appearing “half-horse, half-man, panting” fuses myth with social reality. Migration here is not just economic displacement but a moral wound passed down generations.
Kushwaha belongs to that rare group of contemporary Hindi poets—like Arun Kamal and Ashtbhuja Shukla—who retain the musicality of verse while engaging with political consciousness. In his poem “The Sharing of Happiness,” he writes: “This mind has wandered far and wide, life has swallowed much poison. If only someone would come to share dreams as a partner.” His simplicity is deceptive; beneath it lies the ache of a generation disillusioned by promises of change.
His realism is unflinching. In “That Dream Is Breaking Too,” the poet observes, “Now even a darkness, my friend, is bursting forth from the sun.” It is a stark picture of a world where corruption of ideals has reached the heart of light itself. Yet he refuses despair: “One day, the sufferers will triumph. Happiness will be shared, and no one will wander in despair.” The faith may sound fragile, but it is what keeps the poetic conscience alive.
The strength of Kushwaha’s poetry lies in his awareness of both class and caste. In “Recalling Days Lived in a Sweepers’ Colony in Kanpur,” he writes from lived experience, not from the comfort of observation. He describes those who “digest the earth’s cholera in their stomachs, trapped in a blind well,” and reminds us that “no hell could be as horrific as the one these people endure with their mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives.” The poem becomes a searing indictment of caste oppression and social hypocrisy.
His sensitivity to caste issues is sharpened by history. He invokes Ambedkar’s statement that in India, a person is not a scavenger because of the work they do but because of birth. Against Gandhi’s moral romanticism of scavenging as sacred service, Kushwaha sides with Ambedkar’s call for liberation from indignity. His poetry, however, is not ideological pamphleteering—it is compassion in revolt.
This compassion extends to his critique of religious dogma. In “Behind God,” he writes: “God’s invisibility has many benefits. The greatest profit is reaped by those who proclaim that God is everywhere. Behind God, a long gang of liars thrives. God’s business is an eternal trade.” The lines recall the radical voices of the Bhakti tradition—Raidas, Kabir, and Tukaram—who saw the divine not in ritual but in human equality. Dedicating this poem to Stephen Hawking, Kushwaha connects the rational and the spiritual, science and ethics, in one defiant breath.
His historical consciousness culminates in the poem “The Unfortunate in History.” It opens with an image both simple and devastating: “The unfortunate are nowhere in history, whose sweat cemented every brick of grand ramparts.” The poet reclaims those erased from chronicles—the labourers, the exploited women, the anonymous builders of civilization. In doing so, he turns history itself into a moral question: Who writes it, and for whom?
Kushwaha’s history is not a museum of dates; it is a living wound. He writes of “unfortunate girls raised in the nurseries of kings and nobles, whose wombs were turned into garbage bins.” The poem’s blunt realism exposes the violence buried beneath the grandeur of palaces and monuments. Here, his tone resembles Sukanta Bhattacharya’s famous line, “In the kingdom of hunger, the earth is prosaic; the full moon is like a scorched roti.”
The poet’s rebellion is not merely against social systems but against the corruption of imagination itself. In “They Made Hunters Heroes,” he speaks to a “primal poet,” lamenting that “not a single hunter has ever been disgraced till date.” It is a biting comment on how the violence of domination has been aestheticized through myth and art. Similarly, in “Immense Love Seeing a Harijan” and “On a Woman Sarpanch Paraded Naked,” he confronts the brutal intersection of caste and gender, where “the only weapon to silence a vocal woman is shamelessness.”
Yet, amid this fire, there is tenderness. In “Flute in the Soul,” he writes, “It’s been days since I cried openly, since I laughed freely.” The lines recall the quiet melancholy of Mangalesh Dabral—the ache of losing spontaneity in a world choked by noise.
Kushwaha’s affectionate humour appears in “I Haven’t Seen Ramanand,” written for his mentor Kashinath Singh. Recalling the guru-disciple bond of Ramanand and Kabir, the poet says, “Instead of a rosary, he gave a string of love. For moksha, he gave love’s handcuffs.” It is a delightful play on the paradox of freedom and attachment. The poem ends with warmth: “Eyes met, the guru enlightened, the disciple shy, the guru pampered—then the guru became a friend.”
In another luminous tribute, “For Pash,” Kushwaha remembers the slain Punjabi poet Avtar Singh ‘Pash,’ calling him “Our Benjamin.” The poem’s imagery is tactile: “Like a tongue keeps touching a scraped gum, my mind wants to touch you again and again. Your martyrdom has soaked my innermost being, yet my heart keeps cracking.” It is at once a personal elegy and a political statement.
Women occupy a vital place in Kushwaha’s imagination. Poems like “Girl and Gold,” “Girl and Flower,” “Girl and Dreams,” and the haunting “Elegy for Woman at the Century’s Dawn” explore how patriarchy and consumerism distort love and identity. “My heart keeps yearning to see a woman while countless women reside within me,” he writes. The closing lines—“She had boredom, habits, wonder, allure, domesticity, poverty, fierce struggles, songs, a desire to sing—but tears were everywhere”—compress the history of womanhood into a single stanza.
In his later collection The Unfortunate in History, Kushwaha brings together his abiding themes—labour, faith, love, and the defiance of silence. The sociological eye in his poetry is never detached; it is part of his empathy. Like Marx’s reminder that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Kushwaha’s verse knows that liberation begins with naming injustice. But unlike rigid ideology, his awareness is humane. He knows that caste lives inside class, and class divides even the oppressed.
Through all his work runs an unbroken faith in the creative act as resistance. Poetry, for him, is not ornament but witness. It is a mirror that refuses to flatter. In the end, Kushwaha stands in the long line of poets—from Kabir to Nirala, Nagarjun to Kedarnath Singh—who see poetry as a moral practice.
A university professor by profession, he belongs to that rare breed for whom poetry is not an accessory to intellect but its very soul. His writing honours tradition without bowing to it. “When tradition loses vitality and becomes rigid,” he reminds us, “a discerning poet must reject it and recreate the reality of his time.”
In the turbulent landscape of contemporary India—where religion, class, and marketism intersect to shape human destiny—Dinesh Kushwaha’s voice insists on tenderness. His poems remind us that liberation is not an otherworldly dream; it is the everyday courage to be human.
(Based on Dinesh Kushwah’s poetry collections ‘Isī kāyā meṃ mokṣa’ and ‘Itihāsa meṃ abhāge’ [Moksha in This Very Body and The Unfortunate in History] published by Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi.)
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*Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad
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