MUMBAI: The 100-minute documentary ‘Footprints of Annabhau Sathe’s Loknatya’, which was screened last week at a theatre studio in Mumbai, chronicles a cultural movement, and the working-class poet who defined it. Milind Champanerkar’s film starts off as a biography that argues for its subject’s historical necessity, charting a life that moved from rural destitution to global recognition, with his literature studied in universities across sixty-six countries.
Annabhau Sathe was born on August 1, 1920, in Wategaon, Sangli district, Maharashtra, his birth date coinciding with the death of Lokmanya Tilak. When I researched ‘Cotton 56 Polyester 84’ (a play that traces Mumbai’s working-class history from 1956 to 1984), three aspects of Annabhau’s life emerged: Annabhau’s role as a social reformer, folk poet and writer. He deployed his art, poetry and powadas (ballads) to awaken the working class. His earliest cultural troupes, designed to educate workers, were precursors to the Lal Bawta Kala Pathak (Red Flag Cultural Troupe) which he co-founded with fellow balladeers Amar Shaikh and Datta Gavanakar in 1944. And above all, his refusal to meekly bow to the tyranny of power.
Annabhau belonged to the Matang community, a group classified as untouchable and severely oppressed. In the play ‘Cotton 56 Polyester 84’, the main character Bhausaheb is based on Annabhau.
Driven by poverty, Annabhau migrated to Mumbai around 1932 due to a severe drought in his hometown. It is an extraordinary journey. How a lack of formal education defined his early years, and how he attended primary school for a brief period around age 14 before leaving due to discrimination and hardship. How he began his literary life only after teaching himself to read and write while working in Mumbai’s labour environment. This self-taught literacy included odd jobs (boot-polisher, street vendor, and labourer in the historic Kohinoor textile mills). Once, he was observed holding a newspaper upside-down by a prominent Gujarati writer who, realising the “budmaashi”, offered to teach him. Annabhau first mastered the Gujarati before his maternal cousin taught him the Marathi alphabet.
His time in the mills directly propelled him into the communist and labour movements, where he became a key activist. He was influenced by the ideologies of Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, Babasaheb Ambedkar and Marx. Ballads and powadas were the weapons in his armoury through which political demands were shaped.
Annabhau’s political conscience was not confined to local disputes. His intellectual output spanned global issues, he wrote a powada in 1939 on fascism in Spain and its effect on the working class, followed by his legendary ballad on the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. However, his work drew the ire of authorities. In 1946, during an election campaign in Amravati, the Lal Bawta Kala Pathak was charged and arrested as “dacoits” rather than political agitators. Annabhau’s argument was simple: Works of art cannot only save us, but they can also make the working class sensitive to what needs repair.
I recall a conversation with Jnanpith award winner Vinda Karandikar who said, “Annabhau Sathe is today’s Tukaram. He is a Vidrohi Tukaram. I think we have underestimated his cultural clout and literary importance.”
Annabhau’s literary work achieved remarkable global reach, with translations in 27 world languages, including German, Japanese and Russian. This literature exported the history, culture and struggles of India’s untouchable Dalit and labour communities to an international reader. His reputation as an uncompromising realist writer (often dismissed as Vastavwadi who depicted the realities of class struggle) led to his comparison to the Russian author Maxim Gorky. This culminated in an invitation to the Soviet Union in the 1960s, where he travelled for three months and later penned a travelogue, which praised the system’s guaranteed employment and minimised social hierarchies. He also translated and sang powadas about Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj for the Russians.
There is a bit in Milind Champanerkar’s film which highlights the transformation of the traditional Marathi folk theatre, Tamasha, into Loknatya (people’s theater). Annabhau stripped away the original form’s vulgarity, retaining its vibrant musical structure, pivoting the content entirely toward social and political issues. He subverted the art form’s traditional conventions, notably by shifting the opening divine invocation (Gan) from a prayer to Lord Ganesha to one dedicated to the labouring hands of humankind, celebrating those who built world civilisations. This was an important turning point in the history of the performing arts.
Over his lifetime, Annabhau was a prolific writer, completing 35 novels, 14 plays, 19 powadas, and numerous short story collections. His most celebrated novel, ‘Fakira’ (published around 1959), tells the story of a brave young man from a marginalised community fighting British tyranny. It won the state government’s best novel award and was dedicated to Dr BR Ambedkar. This solidarity with Ambedkar’s mission was articulated in his 1946 folk play ‘Deshbhakt Ghotale’, with the anthem that became a philosophical bedrock for the Bahujan Samaj: “Jag badal ghaluni ghav, sangun gele mala bhimrao” (Change the world by striking a heavy blow, so taught me Bhimrao).
Between 1955 and 1960, the three Lokshahirs: Annabhau, Shaikh and Gavanakar mobilised the people for the Samyukta Maharashtra Movement, demanding a unified Marathi-speaking state with Mumbai as its capital. His political play, ‘Mumbai Konachi?’ was banned by the Morarji Desai administration, but the trio defiantly continued performing it at the Kamgar Maidan in Parel with theatrical subterfuge, responding to the massive public demand.
Annabhau Sathe died on July 18, 1969, but his towering philosophical statement from the first Dalit Literary Conference in 1958 remains the ultimate summation of his life’s work: ”The earth does not rest on the head of the mythical Sheshnaga, but it exists because it rests on the palms of the labourers and workers who toil hard every day.” Champanerkar’s documentary ensures that the footprints of this voice are not yet erased from history’s record. And it reminds us of what Annabhau said: “They cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without them and their evil ruses.”
(Ramu Ramanathan is Mumbai-based playwright-poet and journalist.)
