I am the people,the mob

1. WELCOME

3. The Warlis or Varlis are an indigenous tribe or Adivasis,
living in mountainous as well as coastal areas
of Maharashtra-Gujarat border and surrounding areas.
They have their own animistic beliefs, life, customs and
traditions, as a result of acculturation they have adopted
many Hindu beliefs. The Warlis speak an unwritten Varli
language which belong to the southern zone of the Indo-
Aryan languages.[1] and the union territories of Dadra and
Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.[2]

4. The most important aspect of the painting is that it
does not depicts mythological characters or images
of deities, but depict social life. Pictures of human
beings and animals, along with scenes from daily
life are created in a loose rhythmic pattern. Warli
paintings are painted white on mud walls. The
paintings are beautifully executed and resembles
pre-historic cave paintings in execution and usually
depict scenes of human figures engaged in activities
like hunting, dancing, sowing and harvesting.

5. The tribals are forest-dwellers but have made a
gradual transition towards being a pastoral
community. They reside in the West coast of
Northern Maharastra. A large concentration is
found in the Thane district, off Mumbai. A little
backward economically, they still maintain their
indigenous customs and traditions. The growing
popularity and commercialisation of the Warli
painting has seen the uplift of many tribals and
they are increasingly becoming integrated with the
mainstream. Their marriage traditions are unique
to their culture.

6. Their extremely rudimentary wall paintings use a
very basic graphic vocabulary: a circle, a triangle
and a square.Their paintings were monosyllbic.
The circle and triangle come from their
observation of nature, the circle representing the
sun and the moon, the triangle derived from
mountains and pointed trees. Only the square
seems to obey a different logic and seems to be a
human invention, indicating a sacred enclosure or
a piece of land.

7. About the poet: Carl August Sandburg was an American
poet, writer, and editor. He won three Pulitzer Prizes, two
for his poetry and one for his biography of Abraham
Lincoln. The most famous among all the volumes of his
collected verse are Chicago Poems (published in the year
1916), Cornhuskers (published in the year 1918), and Smoke
and Steel (published in the year 1920).
Sandburg was born in a three-room cottage on 6th January
1878 in Galesburg, Illinois. His parents were Clara Mathilda
(whose maiden name was Anderson) and August
Sandberg, both of Swedish ancestry. He adopted the
nickname “Charles” or “Charlie” in elementary school. It
was also around the same time that he and his two oldest
siblings changed the spelling of their last name to
“Sandburg”.

8. About the poem:
“I am the People, the Mob” by Carl Sandburg was
published in the year 1916 as part of his collection
of poetry entitled Chicago Poems. This poem
provides almost certain foreknowledge of the
poet’s later support for the Civil Rights Movement,
as it speaks of his belief in the power of the
common masses.

9. The poem consists of 15 long lines
in total. These lines are not
divided into stanzas. However,
they are divided into meaningful
segments here in order to make
the poem easier to follow and
understand.

10. Lines 1 – 3:
In this stanza, the poet declares that he is speaking
on behalf of the common people as their
representative. Then he asks his readers whether
they know that it is because of common people that
all the work in this world is done, because it is
common people who are responsible for inventing
new things and engaging in hard labour to produce
man’s clothes as well as his food.

11. Lines 4 – 5:
In this stanza, the poet says that he, as the
common people, has watched every single
event in the past unfolding before his eyes. It
is from among the common people that great
heroes like Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham
Lincoln have arisen, and that other
extraordinary men like them will arise again.

12. Lines 6 – 10:
In this stanza, the poet, in the voice of the masses,
says that he is like a large open field that can easily
bear the burden of being ploughed by heavy
implements, of having destructive storms blow by
it, and of having its very vitality sucked out of it.
Every hardship short of death is faced y the
common people, and they lose everything they
have achieved. Despite all this, they do not hold on
to the past and are willing to move beyond it to a
new day. The masses do cry out in protest at times,
and sometimes they fight and shed their blood, but
in the end, every defeat is forgotten.

13. Lines 11 – 15:
In this stanza, the poet qualifies what he had
said about forgetting in the previous stanza. He
says that the masses forget everything except
the lessons they have learned from the mistakes
of the past. They make it a point to isolate the
powerful men who have robbed them and
tricked them, and to make sure that these men
can never take advantage of them again. As a
result, no one can mock the masses or look
down upon them. The masses will take power
into their own hands.

14. Conclusion:
After reading “I am the People,
the Mob”, there can be no doubt
as to Carl Sandburg’s loyalty. He
is all liberty, equality, fraternity.
This poem is his way of instilling
these same ideals into the
minds of his readers.