Anna Bhau Sathe

Moscow, 1961. A delegation of Indian writers and cultural workers is being shown the Soviet Union — forty days of factories, collective farms, theatres, libraries. One member of the delegation is unlike the others. He owns no degree; depending on which telling you trust, his formal schooling lasted a day and a half or a year and a half, and either way it ended when a village schoolmaster made clear that boys of his caste were not welcome. He taught himself letters off Bombay's shop signs and film posters. And yet, of the whole delegation, he is the one some of his hosts already know: during the war, a ballad he composed in Marathi about the Battle of Stalingrad — sung at mill gates and street corners five thousand kilometres from the Volga — had been translated into Russian.

Getting him here took twenty years. In the 1940s the colonial government refused him a passport without troubling to give a reason; in 1948 he was invited to a World Peace Conference and could not go. When the Indo-Soviet cultural committee's invitation finally came in 1961, he had no money for the journey — the money was raised, quickly, by the kind of people he wrote about, because Bombay's workers considered him theirs. And they sent him off with an assignment. Go and look carefully, the mill hands told him, in effect: find out whether Russia has slums like ours — and come back and tell us the truth.

Hold that instruction a moment, because it contains the whole man. They did not ask him to bring back souvenirs or speeches. They asked for verification — they trusted him to look at the workers' paradise with a worker's eyes, because he had carried loads on his back and slept in their tenements, and because in thirty years of writing he had never once prettified a slum. He went, he looked, and he wrote it up in Majha Russiacha Pravas — "My Journey to Russia" — by common reckoning the first travelogue ever published by a Dalit, a member of the castes India had held "untouchable."

His name was Tukaram Bhaurao Sathe. Maharashtra calls him Anna Bhau Sathe — Anna, elder brother. This chapter is about how a boy barred from a village schoolroom became the founder of a literature, the singing voice of a new state, and a test case — still unresolved — of whether India's two great movements of the oppressed, Ambedkar's and Marx's, can hold one man between them without dropping him.

The Life

A word about sources first. Anna Bhau died in 1969, well within living memory, and the outline of his life is secure — dates, books, movements, the major public facts. But he was a poor man whose contemporaries wrote about him unevenly, and the tellings of his early years have been burnished by admirers into slightly different shapes: his schooling is "a day and a half" in one account and up to four years of interrupted attendance in another; the family's walk to Bombay takes two months in one version and six in another. Where the versions diverge, this chapter says so.

He was born on 1 August 1920 in the Mangwada — the Mang quarter, set outside the village proper — of Wategaon, in Sangli district of what was then the Bombay Presidency. His father was Bhaurao, his mother Valubai. The family belonged to the Matang (Mang) community, held untouchable and pinned, with the Mahars, at the bottom of the rural caste order: rope-makers, broom-makers, drummers and trumpeters at other people's weddings, watchmen, haulers of whatever needed hauling. The colonial state had added its own insult, branding communities like theirs "criminal tribes" under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 — suspects by birth, required in many places to report to the police simply for existing. One asset the Matangs did own was music. They were tamasha people — tamasha being Maharashtra's travelling song-and-dance theatre, bawdy, brilliant and looked down upon — and they were keepers of the powada, the thundering Marathi heroic ballad, and the lavani, its quick, sinuous song form. Anna Bhau's inheritance was not land or letters. It was a beat.

The schooling ended as caste decreed. Admitted late to the village school, the boy met a master who had no intention of teaching a Mang child, and that was that: the man who would write thirty-five novels left formal education somewhere between its first day and its first years, functionally unlettered.

Then came 1931. Drought gripped the Satara-Sangli countryside, and the Depression was strangling what little cash work existed; Bhaurao, who had been labouring in Bombay, decided the family would survive together or not at all. They walked — roughly 255 kilometres from Wategaon to Bombay, the eleven-year-old boy on foot the whole way, the journey lasting, by the varying tellings, between two and six months of trudging, odd jobs and hunger. Keep that walk in view. In 2020, when a locked-down India watched its migrant workers walking those same distances home, Maharashtrians reached for Anna Bhau's name, because he had made that walk and then made literature out of everyone who makes it.

Bombay absorbed the family into its lowest tier, at the Matunga Labour Camp among the city's Dalit workforce. The boy did everything the city let him do: porter at Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus), hotel dishwasher, house servant, dog-walker, bootpolish boy, hawker, stone- and coal-carrier, and eventually mill hand in the cotton mills whose chimneys set the city's clock. He learned to read the way almost nobody does: off hoardings, street placards and film posters, with help from a Mahar neighbour who sounded out letters with him and — one cherished story — a Gujarati gentleman who spotted him studying a newspaper held upside down and took him on as a pupil. The mills gave him more than wages. They gave him the labour movement. Hearing the revolutionary peasant leader Nana Patil speak lit the fuse; the red flag of the unions did the rest, and by his late teens Anna Bhau was a Communist Party activist in a city crackling with strikes.

He was also, from the start, a performer — he had joined a relative's tamasha troupe and discovered that the forms his caste had kept alive could carry new cargo. In 1939 he composed his first major ballad, on the Spanish Civil War, of all things: a Mang mill worker in Bombay singing Madrid's fall to Marathi workers as their own story. The Stalingrad powada followed in 1943, the year the Red Army broke the German Sixth Army; it travelled, in translation, to Russia itself. In 1944 he founded the Lal Bawta Kala Pathak — the Red Flag Cultural Squad — with his comrades Amar Shaikh and D. N. Gavankar, performing at mill gates, in villages, wherever a crowd could stand. The squad's fame brought the state's attention: in 1946, campaigning in the Amravati region, Anna Bhau was arrested on a concocted dacoity charge — the "criminal tribe" label doing its work — and freed only after the unions raised a storm. From 1945 he wrote for the party weekly Lokyuddha ("People's War"), and he threw his troupe into the freedom struggle's final years, then into the campaign to free Goa from Portuguese rule. He became a pillar of the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), the all-India left cultural front born in 1943 — accounts of the movement record him presiding over it by 1949: a one-time railway porter in the chair of the national theatre organisation.

The private life was harder than the public one, and this book does not sand it smooth. He married twice; neither marriage held. For some two decades home was a hut in Chirag Nagar, a Ghatkopar slum, where he wrote his books on whatever surface was available while the neighbourhood's noise poured in — he liked to say his characters lived all around him. Fame arrived — the state's highest literary award in 1961, film contracts, the Russia journey — but money never stayed; he was endlessly generous, endlessly fleeced, and increasingly, in the last years, drinking. In 1968 the Maharashtra government allotted the state's most celebrated people's writer a small house in Goregaon, as if remembering him at last. He had less than a year to live in it. On 18 July 1969, aged forty-eight, Anna Bhau Sathe died in poverty in the city he had carried on his back and put on the page — a death his admirers have never stopped calling an indictment.

The Great Work

The ballad, reloaded. Begin where he began: with the powada. Maharashtra's heroic ballad was perfected in the seventeenth century to sing Shivaji's exploits (chapter 149), and the shahirs — the balladeer-poets — had always been, disproportionately, men of the despised castes: the Mangs and Mahars who drummed the tradition down the generations. Anna Bhau took this inherited machine and swapped its payload. The hero of the new powada was not a king but a class: Madrid's defenders, Stalingrad's workers, Bengal's famine dead — his piece on the 1943 Bengal famine, Bangalchi Hak ("Bengal's Call"), travelled into Bengali and, remarkably, to a London stage. He did the same to the tamasha itself, scrubbing out the leering and rebuilding it as loknatya, "people's theatre" — and made one substitution that tells you everything: the traditional opening invocation to the god Ganesha became, in his shows, a salute to the labouring hands that hold up the world. When governments harassed and banned tamasha performances, the troupes carried on under the loknatya name. The form survived by becoming his.

The songs that made a state. After 1956, the movement called Samyukta Maharashtra — "united Maharashtra" — demanded what the map now shows: a state for Marathi speakers with Bombay as its capital, against a central government disposed to keep the city separate. The movement had leaders and martyrs — 106 demonstrators killed in police firings are memorialised at Bombay's Hutatma Chowk — and it had a soundtrack, and the soundtrack was substantially Anna Bhau, Amar Shaikh and their kalapathaks, singing the cause through mill district and market town. Anna Bhau's lavani on Bombay — a city where, he sang, the mansions climb the hills while the sweat that built them drains into the gutters below — became the movement's portrait of the prize at stake. And his most beloved song, Majhi Maina Gavavar Rahili ("My maina stayed behind in the village"), in the rousing chhakkad form, worked the way only great popular art does, on two levels at once: literally, a migrant worker's lament for the wife left behind in the village — every mill hand in the audience — and, as everyone soon heard it, a lament for the beloved left out of the union: the Marathi-speaking border country of Belgaum, Karwar and Nipani, which stayed outside when Maharashtra was finally born on 1 May 1960. The state exists; the maina still waits; Maharashtra still sings the song.

Thirty-five novels from the man the school threw out. Now the part that defies arithmetic. Between mill shifts, party work and performances, Anna Bhau wrote: thirty-five novels, some three hundred short stories gathered in over a dozen collections, fourteen-odd plays and loknatya scripts, screenplays, a travelogue — and his songs, the lavanis and powadas, run past two hundred and fifty by most counts. Marathi cinema came mining: by the commonest count seven of his books became films — among them Vaijayanta (1961), from his novel of a tamasha dancer's life, which took a national award certificate — and counts that include his screenplay work run higher still. The prose came out of the same place as the songs. His people are stevedores, tamasha dancers, slum dwellers, bandits, wrestlers, rag-pickers; his plots move like the ballads he sang — fast, physical, moral without being preachy. His single most famous short story, "Gold from the Grave," follows a drought refugee who feeds his family by exhuming the fresh dead to retrieve the gold burned with them: Dickens would have flinched. Critics sniffed at the melodrama; readers never did; and the Russians, who had made his hero Maxim Gorky out of exactly such material, translated him and called him Maharashtra's Gorky — a compliment he had earned the hard way, having first met Gorky, Tolstoy and Chekhov in Marathi translation as a self-taught mill hand.

Fakira. The masterpiece is Fakira (1959), and it is autobiography at one remove: the story of a Mang rebel of the famine-struck 1870s Deccan, remembered in the lore of Anna Bhau's own community. Fakira is a village watchman's son, proud, generous, impossible to humiliate quietly. When famine comes and the state's grain sits locked while his people starve, he raids the government's stores and treasury and feeds them — at which point the Raj does what it did to "criminal tribes": it takes his whole community hostage, jailing and torturing the innocent until the guilty man appears. Fakira walks in and trades his life for theirs, defiant to the gallows. Three things made the book an earthquake. First, the hero: a Dalit who is never once pitiable — not a victim to be wept over, as even sympathetic upper-caste fiction had drawn Dalits, but the strongest and freest man in the novel. Second, the texture: village Maharashtra seen from the Mangwada outward, a vantage Marathi literature had simply never occupied. Third, the first page: Anna Bhau dedicated the novel to Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar — to his fighting pen — one untouchable-born titan saluting another across the gulf between Marx and the Buddha. The book took the Maharashtra government's top literary prize in 1961, has run through nineteen-odd editions, and has been translated, with his stories, into more than two dozen languages.

One sentence that founded a literature. In 1958, at the first Dalit Sahitya Sammelan — the first conference of Dalit literature, convened in Bombay — Anna Bhau gave the inaugural address and said the thing this chapter has been circling. Hindu cosmology pictured the earth resting on the hood of Shesha, the cosmic serpent. The old belief is wrong, he told the gathering: the earth is not balanced on the snake's hood — it is balanced on the palms of Dalits and workers. Read it twice; it is doing two jobs at once. It is a cosmology swap — the world is held up by labour, so the labourer's story is not a marginal subject but the subject. And it is a commissioning: he charged Dalit writers with writing their own world, for their own people's liberation, in their own voice. The word Dalit — "ground down," the defiant self-chosen name that replaced every euphemism — was just then hardening into a banner; the literature that took the name, the angriest and most consequential new force in post-independence Indian writing, dates its founding charter from that platform. Later Dalit writers, whatever their quarrels with his politics, have called him the founder. For once the word is bookkeeping, not flattery.

The double inheritance. And yet — here is the framing this chapter owes you straight — the founder fits nobody's shelf. Anna Bhau was a Communist who revered Ambedkar (chapter 212), and he refused for most of his life to choose. His class politics came from the mill gate, his caste politics from the Mangwada, and he insisted they were one politics: his famous song runs, in close paraphrase, strike a blow and change the world — so Bhimrao told me, the Marxist imperative issued in Ambedkar's voice, as if Marx and Ambedkar were one commandment. Neither family was comfortable. The Communist Party, for all it gave him — a stage, a cause, comrades — published its own balladeer's work thinly and fitfully, and its leadership, largely upper-caste, was often criticized — by Ambedkarites and later scholars — for treating caste as a distraction from class rather than India's native form of it. The Ambedkarite mainstream, for its part, kept its distance from his red flag, and much of the Dalit literary movement he inaugurated defined itself around Ambedkar and the Buddha, leaving its Communist founder an awkward ancestor — honoured, but not followed. He died in poverty partly in the gap between them. If the measure of a thinker is that he makes both his own camps uncomfortable, Anna Bhau measured out at full length: he saw — sixty years before it became academic fashion — that caste and class in India are not rival explanations but the two hands of the same grip, and he paid the loneliness that insight costs.

Before & After

Backward, the lines run deep. The Mang balladeer inherited Maharashtra's oldest tradition of low-born sacred poets: Chokhāmelā (chapter 113), the Mahar saint kept outside the Pandharpur temple, had sung from the step six centuries earlier, and Tukārām (chapter 145), the shudra grocer-poet, gave Marathi its conscience — the poet Vinda Karandikar would call Anna Bhau a vidrohi Tukaram, a Tukaram in revolt, which is exactly where this book files him. The powada form itself descends from the shahirs of Shivaji's age (chapter 149). His politics had grandparents too: Jyotirāo Phule (chapter 174) and Savitribai Phule (chapter 176) had put the Mali gardener's and the Dalit girl's experience at the centre of Marathi prose and the classroom, and Shahu of Kolhapur (chapter 197) had turned anti-caste conviction into state policy in the very country Anna Bhau was born into. Above them all stood Ambedkar (chapter 212), the dedicatee of Fakira — the man whose movement gave Anna Bhau his deepest audience, and whose "educate, agitate, organise" his songs set to a beat.

Forward, his chief heir arrives like a detonation: Namdeo Dhasal (chapter 265), whose Golpitha poems and Dalit Panthers took the literature Anna Bhau founded and stripped out the last melodic sweetness — where Anna Bhau's rebel hero dies nobly, Dhasal's Bombay snarls. The broader line — literature as a weapon carried for the dispossessed, researched on foot and written from inside — runs on through Mahasweta Devi (chapter 245) in Bengali. The global rhyme is the proletarian writers of the same half-century — Gorky above all, whose shadow Anna Bhau worked in and eventually escaped: Gorky wrote the lower depths of class; Anna Bhau wrote the lower depths of class and caste, a double basement Europe's literature never had to map.

Why It Still Matters

Start with the argument he embodies, because India is still having it. Is the fundamental Indian injustice class or caste — and can the left and the Ambedkarites make common cause without one swallowing the other? Every generation restages this debate, and Anna Bhau remains its best exhibit: proof that the synthesis can live in one person, and a warning of what it costs him. It is telling that in the twenty-first century both camps have come back for him — Communists pointing to the red flag over his kalapathak, Ambedkarites to the dedication page of Fakira — and that politicians of every party now garland his statues. The man they neglected at forty-eight has become, in death, a constituency.

The literature he founded is now a continent. Dalit writing — in Marathi, then Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, English — is among the most studied bodies of modern Indian literature, and its historians keep arriving back at the 1958 Sammelan and the sentence about the snake's hood. His own books, long out of print and untranslated — the price of writing for readers who could not lobby publishers — are finally travelling: Fakira entered the Penguin Modern Classics list in English in 2021, and in 2026 Maharashtra's government approved the release of sixty-six translations of his works into English, Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil and Russian, with his entire out-of-print corpus reprinted. A postage stamp came in 2002, a statue in Moscow's state library of foreign literature in 2022 — Russian recognition, once again, arriving before much of India's — and a standing demand in Parliament that he be given the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour.

And there is the walk. In 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, millions of migrant workers walked out of India's cities toward distant villages, and newspapers groped for a frame to comprehend it. Maharashtra already had one: the eleven-year-old who walked 255 kilometres the other way in 1931, and who spent his life insisting that the people who carry the city — who literally hold it up on their palms — are its authors, not its extras. Every debate about migrant labour, about who builds and who owns, about whose story gets told and who gets to tell it, is a debate Anna Bhau Sathe equipped. He asked one question in a hundred forms, and India has yet to answer it: if the earth rests on the labourer's palms, what does the earth owe the labourer?

Over to You

Anna Bhau cleaned up the tamasha — cutting its vulgarity to make it a vehicle for politics. Purists call that rescuing a form; others call it another kind of upper hand, deciding for a folk art what it is allowed to be. When does reforming a popular tradition honour it, and when does it bleach it?

He is claimed today by Communists, Ambedkarites, Maharashtra's government and caste organisations — all of whom found him easier to garland than to follow. Is posthumous appropriation a betrayal of such a figure, or exactly the victory he worked for: everyone now needing the stone-carrier's blessing?

Fakira's hero robs the state's grain stores to feed the starving and is hanged for it; the novel calls him a hero and won a state prize for saying so. Where is the line between crime and justice when the law itself administers a famine — and who gets to draw it?

Anna Bhau insisted caste and class are one grip with two hands; six decades on, movements still mostly pick one. Is the synthesis genuinely harder than either politics alone, or just less convenient for the leaders of both?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: Fakira by Anna Bhau Sathe, translated by Baliram Gaikwad (India Penguin Modern Classics, 2021) — the 1959 novel itself, at last in English: fast, violent, warm-blooded storytelling that reads less like a "classic" than like a ballad written in prose, which is what it is.

A modern way in: his most famous short story, "Gold from the Grave," is the Anna Bhau selection in The Greatest Marathi Stories Ever Told, edited by Ashutosh Potdar (Aleph) — one sitting, and you will understand both the melodrama the critics sniffed at and the force they could not deny. The centenary essays in India's English press (The Wire, HuffPost India, 2019–20) map the Marx–Ambedkar tug-of-war over his legacy.

The thread forward: From the balladeer who held up the earth on labouring palms, the book turns to a man who held up something else when it fell: in chapter 236, Satish Dhawan, newly in charge of India's space programme, watches a rocket drop into the Bay of Bengal in 1979 — and walks out to the press to take the blame alone, saving the credit for the day, one launch later, when it would belong to his team.