JAC : A Journal Of Composition Theory ISSN : 0731-6755 Pen, Pain and Poem: Feminist-Humanist works of Sarup Dhruv Dr.Khevana Desai Assistant professor, Department of Sociology, Mithibai College of Arts, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India Email:
[email protected] Abstract Sarup Dhruv, a voice from Gujarat was born in an independent nation (born a year after India attained freedom) and ultimately became the voice of the ones who never tasted freedom. She is not just the voice of the neglected but a voice most neglected in the mainstream and standardized Gujarati literature. She is the one who experienced marginalization in the literary world and yet never ceased to worry, write or work for every single strata of the marginalized society. Her poems are an emblem of passion with which she has moved in the world of Gujarati literature like wings on fire. Her works are a reflection of her activism filled with social compassion, social work and ideas of empowerment of women, dalit and other marginalised sections that reshaped her vocabulary, insight and perception. For her poetries of protest could not and should not be confined to rigid „forms‟ with stereotyped content. It should be the voice of the voiceless and not a song for applauses and appraisal. Her poems and other writings are denoted as fearless, „free‟ and fiery or rather for the mainstream literary world „a deviance from the established‟. The paper attempts to highlight and analyse the path breaking and unconventional contribution of Sarup Dhruv not just in Gujarati literature in particular but in Indian women‟s writings at large.