Can We Bring Comrade Annabhau Sathe Out of the Statue ?

Annabhau Sathe (1920-1969) was a giant of Indian literature. He was the pioneer of Dalit literature in Marathi. He wrote thirty-five novels, scores of short stories, powadas (ballads), and tamashas (folk theatre of Maharashtra). He is rightfully revered as sahityaratna (jewel of literature) and lok-shahir (people’s bard) and hero of Maharashtra’s statehood movement. But these epithets barely do him justice. He was first and foremost a worker and a Comrade. He had set out to destroy capitalism and the caste system. The pen and the drum were his weapons. Revolution was his dream – a world where all would prosper and none would be exploited, considered impure or inferior.

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2. The project to appropriate his legacy, strip it bare of all revolutionary messages is well underway. He is being projected, not as an anti-caste icon, but as a ‘Matang’ icon and ironically – a “rival” to Ambedkar. Even worse- as a deity to be worshipped, not emulated.

He wrote from his lived experiences not just as a member of the industrial working class of colonial Bombay, but also as an ‘untouchable’ and a marginal worker doing every sort of menial job to survive. His protagonists always come from such marginal and oppressed backgrounds as himself. They express the pain of the oppressed but always wage a fight against oppressors. They win some battles and lose others but the point is that they always fight.

In “Smashanatil Sona” (Graveyard Gold) Bhima, unemployed and desperate, fends off hungry jackals to get gold teeth from corpses. In “Barbadya Kanjari” the eponymous hero from the labour camps of Mumbai defies his caste elders. The convict “Sultan” fights his jailors for the human right to a full meal. ‘Fakira’ the hero of his most popular and renowned novel rebels against the British empire.

In his tamashas, like “Akalechi Goshta” (Tale of Wit) the traditional village simpleton becomes a satirical critic of the establishment. Peasants outsmart village elites. Milkmaids are no longer the object of double-meaning humour but the bearers of revolutionary messages.

In one famous song, Daulatichya-Raja, he exhorts peasants to –

“uproot the weeds of capitalism … fire slingshots at imperialism.”

In another, he declares:

“Thus spoke Bhimrao (Dr. Ambedkar)
The zealots have tortured us, the wealthy have squeezed us dry.
Change this world with a hammer blow!”

By extolling the bravery of the defenders of Stalingrad in a powada, he instantly relates them with Shivaji’s peasant guerrillas.

From the depths of his writings, Annabhau exposes the social systems that rob the poor, and emphasizes the essential unity of workers in the struggle against those systems – cutting across caste, religion, gender and nationality.