G.N SAIBABA
Biography
G.N. Saibaba was an Indian revolutionary, writer and scholar from Amalapuram, Andhra Pradesh.
In India, resistance and struggle is a living tradition, which continues strong to this day.
Hundreds of millions mobilize annually in the fight for a better life and a better world. And to crush this resistance,
the Indian state and ruling classes have the second largest army in the world, and also a paramilitary force which is even
larger than the Indian military. Hundreds of thousands of troops are deployed in the jungles of India to crush the Naxalite movement
and the broader Adivasi resistance to displacement.
Saibaba was a professor, a husband, a father, and he was a symbol of the long-tradition of popular resistance in India dating back to the British Raj and long before.
Rather than detached academic study, Saibaba took part in the peoples' struggle for a better world, in their struggles for an India free from the chains
of feudalism, capitalism, and imperialism. He was arrested in 2014 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017. The draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act had been invoked in his case.
He wrote about the conditions he had faced in an Anda cell, an egg shaped prison cell exposed to nature and its elements.
His partner, Vasantha Kumari, passed on his poems he had written in confinement and they are written in a collection of poems
called, "Why Do You Fear My Way So Much? Poems and Letters From Prison". The poem I chose, "I Think of Your Evergreen Smile"" is
a part of this collection.
G.N. Saibaba unfortunately passed away on October 12th 2024 at 54 years old, only a few months after being released from prison.
He spent the majority of the past decade in an Anda cell in Nagpur, where he was systematically denied medical care and faced conditions that amounted to torture.
I chose to do my project on GN Saibaba because his poetry is powerful, it shows a man who was unwavering in his allegiance to the peoples' fight.
Click the link to read a beautiful tribute for G.N. Saibaba by Maoist Communist Union (MCU).
The Murder of G.N. Saibaba: What They Could Never Kill Went on to Organize
I Think of Your Evergreen Smile
By G.N. Saibaba
I think of your evergreen smile,
sitting in my solitary prison cell,
far away from your shining eyes of hope,
while my heart whines and body throbs.
My life is like that of a tree chopped of its branches, with its roots chopped off.
My heart throbs with heavy thuds,
a thousand Himalayas dropping into the Pacific Ocean from the high skies.
It's the pain of the farmers, uprooted from their ripe golden fields of crops,
to make way for a high speed train to roll on them.
It's the pain of the Adivasis, whose villages are burnt and loved ones shot dead,
to clear the forests to mine the minerals, for the nation to gallop
at a double-digit growth rate.
In the Maximum Security Prison of the nation,
on this cloudy monsoon morning,
I think of the pain of the people and their everyday struggles
for life and death,
while the pain shoots through my left hand,
and there are twirling aches in my shrunken legs
and agony in my grisly gut.
I think of the burning empty stomachs of the millions,
as their pain comes to dwell in my each limb.
My heart moans, my body trembles,
as there is no treatment for my creaky heart.
The pain kills me, but I still refuse to die.
I wonder what you must be doing, lonely,
at this hour, in our garden of love.
Even as my pain speaks eloquently
in the solid silence of my barred cell,
My life is strewn across prisons, police, courts, false-media propaganda
and stinking corridors of hospitals.
Integrity comes with a thousand days and nights
of howls of suffering,
stung by the termites of penitentiary power.
My face shines under the flames of my burning pain,
in the dark entrails of the prison house
of tyranny.
They have imprisoned us, me inside the high walls, you outside,
in the wider prison.
But who has been spared that dreams of freedom, of a hopeful future?
They are scared of our dreams,
frightened of our love for the people of empty hands and bare feet, who love their lands of hope.
I see the moving August clouds in my mind's eye,
from the closed gates of my cage.
This morning rain is pregnant with
your message of love.
The fertile clouds pour onto sprouting seeds of love.
The powers that be
may fell all trees of life,
but can never hold back our growing forests of love.
My fingers' grip on the iron bars tightens
as my mind writhes, recalling our days in the fields of freshly soaked grass of rice with honeyed drops of morning rain.