Marginality, regional forms
and state patronage
VEENA NAREGAL
The primary objective of the Akademies is to
promote excellence in the fine arts and litera-
ture, and to help in the process of conserving
and disseminating our cultural heritage… but
between the idea and the reality falls the
shadow.
Haksar Committee Report 19901
We wanted to join the festival called freedom,
offer our ideas, our philosophies, our vision
of India, but we had already been museumized
or criminalized. We went as philosophers and
were dismissed as savages…2
HAVING received little public discus-
sion, the Haksar Committee Report
(1990) on the working of National
Akademies and the National School
of Drama remains a remarkable docu-
ment in several ways. In the critical
view that it took of the working of
these institutions as well the reluc-
tance with which its recommenda-
tions were met, its trajectory was
entirely consistent with those of pre-
ceding reports by the Homi Bhabha
Committee (1964) and the Justice
Khosla Committee (1972). However,
1. Report of the High-Powered Committee
Appointed to Review the Performance of the
National Akademies and the National School
of Drama, Department of Culture, Ministry
of Human Resource Development, July 1990,
p. 28.
2. Cited in Shiv Visvanathan, The Tribal World
and Imagination of the Future, Verrier Elwin
lecture posted on http://www.indiatogether.
what marks it apart was the evident
ways in which it was able to bring a
deep and scholarly understanding of
India’s cultural past to bear upon its
reflections upon contemporary cul-
tural processes and the challenges of
defining the role of the state in devis-
ing cultural policies and structures
that would foster diversity as a means
of sustaining Indian democracy. Sev-
eral of its observations resonate with
a discerning edge beyond the level of
pertinent (but general) observation
characterizing the earlier exercises.
This essay argues that so far cul-
tural historians have not addressed the
full significance of the 1940s and the
1950s as important decades when cru-
cial cultural transitions were being put
in place, particularly, within regional
cultural spheres, in ways that were
soon mobilized to define avenues and
categories for patronage at the na-
tional level. Above all, the Haksar Re-
org/2006/nov/soc-verrier.htm, accessed on
23 July 2008. The comments belong to
Raphael Horo, a member of the team represent-
ing the tribal communities of Chottanagpur
invited to meet with Nehru and other govern-
ment leaders at Teen Murti Bhavan in late
1947. The meeting was arranged as part of 33
the debate initiated in the context of efforts
to frame the Directive Principles of State
Policy.
SEMINAR 589 – September 2008
 port emerges as a critical resource in
thinking through some of these shifts
because of its deft ability to speak
from a historically nuanced view of
the pre-colonial and colonial past out-
side of a nation-statist perspective ad-
vancing a modernizing imperative.
Consider, for instance, its early
observations emphasizing that while
efforts to restore institutional frame-
works of survival to the crafts had regis-
tered an appreciable degree of success,
‘comparable on-going efforts for folk
art and culture are not visible on a na-
tional scale, the activities of a number
of institutes of tribal culture notwith-
standing (p. 20, emphasis added). Or
again, while evaluating the achieve-
ments of the institutional frameworks
devised in the 1950s, despite the for-
midable presence and passionate ef-
forts of a key figure like Kamaladevi
Chattopadhyaya at the helm of insti-
tutional arenas set up to promote the
performing arts and Indian handloom
and handicrafts, respectively, the re-
port notes that the domain of folk art
and culture cannot claim any impres-
sive success, even as the recent emer-
gence of a host of ethnic identities and
tensions highlighted the national ur-
gency in this regard (ibid).
T hrough many such reflective hints,
the report opens up a space to consider
how indeed the above noted discrep-
ancy in the fortunes of the so-called
‘folk’ performing traditions vis-à-vis
the relative successes of the crafts sec-
tor in negotiating the domestic and
foreign market for cultural goods may
be read. If a range of weaves, embroi-
dery crafts, furnishing products and
artefacts have been marketed success-
fully to claim a significant niche in
markets catering to the upwardly mo-
bile middle classes, why is it that the
34 regional performance forms have not
been able to cash in upon the boom for
urban chic in comparable ways? Here
SEMINAR 589 – September 2008
I will address some of the deeper is-
sues about the negotiation of cultural
forms and marginality within devel-
opmental frameworks of Indian de-
mocracy that this question raises.
D rawing upon the Kumarrappa dia-
ries, in his above cited lecture, Shiv
Visvanathan points out how the de-
bates around the Directive Principles
of State Policy (DPSP) between the
Chotanagpur tribals and Nehru’s team
became one of the most vibrant dia-
logues about the future of India. Ac-
cording to him, what struck
Kumarrappa was that, as an interest
group, the tribals did not begin with
their sense of victimhood, of wrongs
to be righted, but with democracy as
a fundamental question. Further, as
Prathama Bannerjee comments,
within the more recent context of the
struggles over diversity, equity and
sustainability, ‘the adivasi has come
through as the ultimate radical critic
in contemporary politics’.3
A core question that any reflec-
tion upon the health of India’s cultural
institutions, and in particular, a review
of the categories posited by the 1956
Drama Seminar would need to ad-
dress is to ask, given the apparent po-
litical visibility of tribals and other
marginal communities within the
structures of democratic governance,
how then could we begin to under-
stand specifically why has the story of
the survival of performing arts, des-
ignated as folk traditions, remained
such a troubled one. Or to put the ques-
tion in another way, in what ways
might the continued political visibil-
ity – and marginality – of such groups
tied to how their cultural identities get
defined and reproduced within the
structures of the modern nation state?
3. Prathama Bannerjee, ‘Culture/Politics: The
Irresoluble Double-bind of the Indian
Adivasi’, Indian Historical Review, 33(1),
Jannuary 2006, pp. 99-126.
The selection of certain per-
formance forms as ‘classical’ and oth-
ers as ‘folk’ through the 1940s
onwards was formalized through the
operations of policy, which in turn
have been subsequently naturalized
within cultural arenas as well as criti-
cal discourse. There is plenty that has
already been said to interrogate the
bases of hierarchization of cultural
products through the binarist catego-
ries of ‘folk’/‘classical’, particularly,
on how these boundaries were rene-
gotiated through colonial discourse
and policies, and the underpinnings of
such initiatives in colonial anthropol-
ogy. I will not enter that debate here.
However, for my purposes, I will sim-
ply recall the important ways in which
the fault-lines of Indian modernity and
nationalism were primarily shaped on
the plane of culture, particularly on the
domain of the vernacular spheres,
while ‘politics’, per se, was subsumed
under the paradigms of education, im-
provement and modernization.
H ow this played out in the 19th cen-
tury is now quite well known. How-
ever, to return to an earlier point: what
is not equally well understood is how,
from the 1940s onwards, the signifi-
cance of the vernacular sphere gets
subsumed within the need to regulate
the centre’s relation with the states/re-
gions as an the imperative of a model
of planned national development. If
the vernacular cultural spheres thus
becomes the axis around which re-
gional identities within the new nation
get fixed, major contradictions
emerged as this became the mobiliz-
ing vision of the cultural institutions
set up in the early/mid 1950s with a
near monopoly over the disbursement
of cultural patronage from the Centre
to the regions from then onwards.
Critically, and quite persistently,
the distinction between ‘classical’ and
‘folk’ performing traditions distinc-
tion also gets mapped on to the Cen-
tre/region axis, such that the ‘classi-
cal’ signifies that which is eligible for
national level patronage, while the
survival of ‘folk’ forms, ostensibly as
a residual category, will be managed
at the regional level under directives
from the central Akademies. The
question of patronage thus becomes a
key critical issue to make links be-
tween how the procedures of the dif-
ferentiation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms
might intrinsically affect chances of
their effective survival.
T aking its cue then from the adoption
of developmentalism as a national
goal, post-1947 policy discourse
across the spheres of education, lan-
guage and most importantly, eco-
nomic planning, rapidly and
successfully cast the emerging rela-
tion between the centre and the re-
gions as an antagonistic face-off.
These were tectonic discursive shifts
being put in place in the early years af-
ter Independence, whose intellectual
and political spin-off, however, are yet
to be fully understood.
While the political conse-
quences of such a view of federalism
may have been commented upon, its
deeper underpinnings within larger
intellectual debates or repercussions
upon the cultural possibilities within
Indian democracy remain only barely
acknowledged both within official
discourse or cultural studies in India.
Surely, this inability to problematize
such an emerging architecture of In-
dian nationhood is intrinsically tied
with the grand hesitation, ushered in
by Independence, to reopen cultural
issues beyond their inscription within
officially sanctioned discourses on
cultural authenticity and the sanctity
of tradition. Additionally, however, a
measure of the extent to which this
cultural closure has proved
hegemonic is the fact that it has, as yet,
largely remained uninterrogated
within contemporary social sciences
agendas pertaining to India.
Q uestions about the cultural hierar-
chies that acquired a fixity in the dec-
ades immediately before and after
1947 must be grounded in an under-
standing of this period as a crucial
phase that saw various literary forms
and cultural media transiting from
their pre-Independence form as the
means of mass entertainment and anti-
colonial political mobilizing, to their
accommodation within the institu-
tional regimes of the Independent na-
tion. Unsurprisingly, these years also
witnessed moves by regional elites to
negotiate and legitimize the claims of
‘their’ regional forms for recognition
towards state patronage, particularly,
at the national level.
In this context, interesting con-
trasts emerge in noting regional vari-
ations between the fortunes of
different forms during these key years,
tied significantly to the nature of in-
terest that respective regional middle
class intelligentsias took in the ad-
vancement of such claims. Pointing
thus to the distinctive trajectories
through which emerging regional
middle classes deployed their poten-
tial to mould official discourse and the
course of state patronage in ways that
bolstered their own cultural ascend-
ance, these regional variations de-
serve careful attention.
Take, for instance, the ‘fate’ of
the lavani in comparison with other
comparably ‘degraded’, erotically
laden performative traditions such as
sadir/dasi attam and kathak in South
and North India respectively. No
doubt, the performative context of
ritual worship, aided the remaking of
dasi attam as bharata natyam. The
Madras Music Academy was the pri-
mary arena through which bharat
natyam and Carnatic music were pu-
rified of their erotic excess and rede-
fined now as worthy of middle class
respectability, and soon, of classical
status. In contrast, however, the inter-
ventions of Marathi intellectuals
within the comparable arena of the an-
nual Marathi Natya Parishad (first
convened in 1905) did not aim to ‘up-
grade’ the performative idioms of
forms such as the lavani or the
tamasha, which had fed into the
sangeet natak, the dominant cultural
form to emerge in the Marathi-speak-
ing region.
I n other words, their efforts sought
primarily to negotiate a position of
normative and critical advantage over
performing arenas and traditional pro-
fessional practitioners, including
shahirs, lavanikaars and tamasgirs,
and not to appropriate the ‘lower’
forms per se as part of the regional
middle-class identity. Interestingly,
like kathak the sensuous music and
dance form of the lavani had enjoyed
court patronage during the Peshwa
period. However, in an interesting
contrast with the lavani, and despite
the lack of an association with ritual
worship, the classicization of kathak
proceeded smoothly as regional elites
in the Hindi belt were able to manoeu-
vre its combination of a courtly past
and sublimation of erotic excess
within Vaishnavite frameworks into
cultural capital that could be encashed
to claim the attention of political elites
in Delhi.
Arguably, the pliancy of the
kathak and bharat natyam traditions
in accommodating themselves to
regional upper-caste/middle class
reformist initiatives enabled their
incorporation into the post-Independ-
ence canon of Indian classical dances
that would be recognized as part of the
national heritage, and deemed worthy 35
of national-level patronage. Interest-
ingly, the only state-run dance schools
SEMINAR 589 – September 2008
 set up were the Kathak Kendra in
Delhi, and the Jawaharlal Nehru Aca-
demy of Manipuri Dance in Imphal,
both started in 1964. Similarly, the
incorporation of kuchipudi, with its
upper caste associations, and the tra-
ditional theatre form of kathakali into
the classical canon, as against the des-
ignation of the elaborate dance-drama
form of coastal Karnataka yakshagana
as ‘folk’ seem impelled by historical
and taxonomic imperatives that were
hardly synonymous with pure aes-
thetic considerations.
T hus, on the one hand, some regional
forms could hope to make it to the
classical canon that the new nation
state would claim as its cultural ‘core’.
On the other, combined with the
marginalization of traditional lower-
caste/tribal performing communities
that had proceeded since the late 19th
century, the decline of professional
theatre companies against the advent
of the talkies ensured that, by the late
1940s, amateur theatre addressing ur-
ban middle class audiences in the cit-
ies and big towns across the country
could emerge as the sole claimant to
the category of modernist theatre.
Within this scenario, it would
seem that the ‘folk’ as invoked in post-
Independence cultural policy dis-
course (and by the film industry) had
lost its earlier definitive character of
forms working within an immediate
community performative context us-
ing old narratives and staging/acting
and rhetorical techniques. Rather it
had become a kitschy, catch-all rubric
through which a disparate array mix
of regional forms from across the
country that had had to contend with
elimination both from the classical
grade and from claiming a stake in the
realm of an authentic modernist the-
36 atrical practice would now jostle for
a meager share of the almost non-ex-
istent patronage pie.
SEMINAR 589 – September 2008
Like the jatra, in trying to keep
up with the demands of a commercial
circuit and the changes brought in by
cinema, the tamasha and lavani had
evolved formats that had long shed
their earlier folk character, and were
now best regarded as a form of semi-
rural/mofussil entertainment. In ana-
lyzing how key cultural categories
that determined access to patronage
acquired an institutionalized status,
I have argued that these processes
were fundamentally tied to the man-
agement of regional considerations
in keeping with the dominant para-
digms of policy-making in Nehruvian
India. In this context, it was not just
mere coincidence that between the
early 1940s to mid 1950s, Pune saw a
flurry of initiatives to establish a
canon for the lavani form alongside
other attempts to regulate perform-
ance and perceptions of the low caste
lavani and tamasha, whose robust
popularity has evoked persistent anxi-
eties from upper caste cultural and
political elites.
A gainst this, the concluding section
will offer an account of how the ‘folk’
status of the lavani and tamasha and
their access to patronage were intrin-
sically tied to how these forms have
been treated, in the first instance, by
cultural and political elites in
Maharashtra, ranging from upper
caste nationalist/Dalit/left leader-
ships. This account revolves around
the career paths and posthumous repu-
tations of two of the most popular
practitioners of the lavani and
tamasha forms in the pre-Independ-
ence, shahirs Patthe Bapurao, a
brahmin, and Annabhau Sathe, a
matang. Strikingly, Patthe Bapurao
has enjoyed a pre-eminent iconic sta-
tus, towering over the subaltern legacy
of more radical, lower caste perform-
ers like Annabhau Sathe, who is only
nominally acknowledged even within
the performing tradition. This discrep-
ancy in their reputations can be traced
back to a series of events held in 1942-
43, when leading members of the Pune
literati and an array of political lead-
ers presided over efforts aimed at re-
cuperating the legacy of the Brahmin
lavanikaar, Patthe Bapurao, several
years after his performing career had
ended in 1911, just a few years before
his death in 1945.
A t this time, living in isolation and
poverty in Yerwada, relying on petty
earnings through his services to
troupes visiting the Aryabhushan
theatre, Patthe Bapurao was be-
friended by Jintikar, a postman by pro-
fession, and tamasha enthusiast, rental
dealer in costumes and other proper-
ties and self-confessed participant in
litigation to claim brahmin status for
guravs to boot. Jintikar went on to
transcribe and collect the laavanikar’s
compositions, and had them pub-
lished between the late 1940s and
1950s, to which leading Pune intellec-
tuals and leaders, who had been
present in the earlier events of 1942-
3 to publicly honour Patthe Bapurao,
including Datta Vaman Potdar,
Abasaheb Mazumdar, N.C. Kelkar,
Kakasaheb Gadgil, Balasaheb Gore
and Keshavrao Jedhe, all contributed
prefaces. Patthe Bapurao still died in
poverty but, clearly, was sufficiently
gratified by the turn of events to ac-
knowledge them in his autobiographi-
cal lavani composed towards the end
of his life.
Significantly, these events to
canonize Patthe Bapurao’s work co-
incided with a sequence of efforts in
the late 1940s to regulate and disci-
pline these forms that culminated in
the appointment of the Tamasha
Sudhar Samiti, presided over by Datta
Vaman Potdar to send in recommen-
dations on tackling ‘obscene’ ele-
ments and humour of the form. This
was followed by the setting up at state-
level of the Tamasha Scrutiny Board
in 1955, and the first Tamasha
Parishad being convened at the best-
known tamasha venue in Pune, the
Aryabhushan Theatre on 25-26 June
1956, with the involvement of the
same intellectuals who had been at the
helm of efforts to resurrect Patthe
Bapurao’s reputation. This summary
account of the attempts to discipline
the lavani through the 1940s might
help suggest why Marathi elites had
remained unenthusiastic in seizing
opportunities to raise the lavani’s
claims to inclusion in the national
canon of ‘classical’ performance
forms: it may be a sobering truism to
point out that the lavani’s genuine
popularity outside of cultivated mid-
dle class circles at this point may have
mitigated that possibility!
O f a brahmin poet taking to the
lavani form, Patthe Bapurao (b.
Sridhar Kulkarni 1866-1945) was cer-
tainly not the first instance. That by it-
self could not have sufficed as the
reason why the Pune literati found it
worthwhile to back him in his twilight
years. Rather, it was the astuteness
that the lavaanikaar had shown in de-
ploying his upper caste status to
emerge on the tamasha performing
circuit as a star, embellished, as we
will see, with claims to being a ‘cas-
teless’ progressive artiste. This com-
bination seemed replete with
symbolic possibilities at a time when
the cultural and social status of the
lower caste forms was being regu-
lated.
Coming to Bombay in the 1890s,
expressly to make a career in the
tamasha theatres, Patthe Bapurao
soon met Pavla (1870-1939), a mahar
artiste supposedly of great beauty and
talent, who had apparently come to
Bombay with another troupe. At a
time when it was s apparently still not
common for women to perform on the
more public tamasha stage, Pavla and
Patthe Bapurao began performing to-
gether, and also began to openly live
together in flamboyant style. This cre-
ated quite a stir, something that Patthe
Bapurao didn’t seem to mind, as he in-
stinctively realized that such an act of
transgression would only enhance
their appeal on stage. He was proved
right, as the crowds flocking in to see
them showed no signs of abating,
leading to anxieties about an unruly
public situation and possible trouble.
I nterestingly, in the midst of this, ru-
mours escalated in Bombay that on
account of his association with Pavla,
Patthe Bapurao had effectively ‘con-
verted’ (batla, the Marathi term has
connotations of transgression and
conversion) to being a mahar. The re-
sulting situation seems to have led a
paranoid police force to file charges
against Patthe Bapurao for inciting
public disorder. The facts of this liti-
gation are hard to establish, but the
way the story, which may well be
apocryphal, is recounted as though set
in stone is that the court hearing for
this case apparently created a sensa-
tion: when questioned if indeed he
was now a mahar, revelling in all the
attention in the courtroom, Patthe
Bapurao is said to have invited the
judge to visit the theatre to hear his an-
swer on the question. Finally, address-
ing a full house on the set date, Patthe
Bapurao is said to have declared that
true artistes had no caste, but added
that on account of his love for Pavla
and her art, he had indeed become a
mahar as there was no way she could
become a brahmin!
This widely recounted story
about Patthe Bapurao’s self-pro-
claimed ‘inter-caste conversion’
could well be apocryphal; neverthe-
less as it stands, it still remains impor-
tant. It was possibly invented by the
poet himself as part of his self-narra-
tive, a myth which soon informed the
resurrection of his reputation at the
hands of the Pune literati in the early
’40s. In either case the important ques-
tion is, how must we grapple with this
self-proclamation by a brahmin poet
at the height of his popularity, of hav-
ing turned mahar, and thus of seem-
ingly having voluntarily relinquished
his high caste status by virtue of his re-
lationship with a lower caste lavani ar-
tiste, and his great love for the form.
How do we read what is sought
to be presented as a startling, if not
radical forfeiture of privileged upper
caste status, especially in the light of
much other evidence that this seem-
ingly sensationally democratic ges-
ture may not have necessarily been
tied to a democratic mind-set? Read
against the tenor of other autobio-
graphical references within Patthe
Bapurao’s lavanis, where he often
comes across as egocentric and proud
of his own recklessness, with a defi-
nite fondness for hyperbole – all of
which seem to be at work in this self-
aggrandizing proclamation – it is hard
not to conclude that Patthe Bapurao’s
declaration of having turned a mahar
remained largely a basis for the dis-
play of upper caste virtuosity, and
eventually for reinforcing a parochial
cultural/political agenda.
I nterestingly, similar brave declara-
tions about art and artists recognizing
no caste barriers occur in V.
Shantaram’s film (1949) based on the
life of Ram Joshi, an earlier brahmin
laavnikaar of the Peshwa period. In
the same vein, Nene’s film on the life
of Patthe Bapurao (1950) invests the
poet-figure with interesting tinges of
Devdas and Guru Dutt in inscribing
him as a tragic hero, whose life and
work at once exemplify his love for 37
the lower caste woman and the art
form, which in the film’s view, makes
SEMINAR 589 – September 2008
 for a stellar example of how caste
prejudice had been transcended. In in-
vesting in Patthe Bapurao’s iconicity
at critical juncture, it would seem that
the Pune literati was thus seeking to
endorse and capitalize upon the sym-
bolic value of such fertile discursive
and political possibilities extractable
from the popularity of the tamasha
form.
I f ‘liberal’ upper caste Marathi elites
have negotiated the popularity of the
lavani and tamasha through such strat-
egies that betray their uneasy mix of
simultaneous fascination and anxiety,
interestingly, another episode about
an encounter between Patthe Bapurao
and Ambedkar in late 1927 against the
context of the Mahad satyagraha
helps foreground similar questions
about how the vibrancy of these forms
have been regarded within the Dalit
movement and its quest of democratic
frameworks premised on a vision of
lower caste emancipation.
Realizing that the temple entry
campaign would require funds,
Ambedkar had called for donations
and contributions from well-wishers
of the cause, including Dalits and
caste Hindus. Prominent among the
respondents were several sangeet
natak mandalis (which by this time,
were often predominantly, if not
homogenously, upper caste) offering
to donate proceeds of sponsored
shows to the Mahad fund. Hearing of
these donations from well-known pro-
scenium theatre groups, Patthe
Bapurao apparently contacted
Ambedkar saying he too wished to
make a contribution. A meeting took
place on 10 September 1927, where
Patthe Bapurao is said to have arrived,
magnificently attired, escorting two
attractive mahar women, one on either
38 side.4 When offered a donation of the
proceeds from eight of their shows,
Ambedkar angrily refused, and re-
SEMINAR 589 – September 2008
turned the money, much to Patthe
Bapurao’s bewilderment.
The reason Ambedkar appar-
ently gave his associates was that it
was utterly insulting and degrading
for him to accept money made through
a systematic exploitation of mahar
women. Interpreting Ambedkar’s po-
sition here is not easy, and in the in-
terest of economy, I will merely
contextualize it against the direction
followed by subsequent Dalit leaders.
Read as such, it signifies Ambedkar’s
commitment in his public life to jetti-
soning the cultural resources of lower
caste communities as part of a past that
needed to be erased as irrelevant to the
project of Dalit emancipation. In-
stead, it was primarily to be advanced
through pressing the demands for edu-
cation, political representation and
social dignity.
A nd so, in contrast to the efforts of
formally uneducated, lower caste ac-
tivist-performers like Annabhau (and
notwithstanding the work of jalsa
troupes in propagating Ambedkarite
ideas), Ambedkar himself seems to
have persistently refused the possibil-
ity of investing these vibrant perfor-
mative traditions with any kind of
cultural pride. That they could have
potentially contributed to the emanci-
pation process, particularly to the im-
portant possibility of forging an
alliance among the various backward
castes such as the mahars, mangs,
kolhattis and chambhars, is not a pros-
pect that Ambedkar seems to have
ever entertained, even as he and later
leaders have remained troubled by the
persistent factionalism that marked
the Dalit movement soon after its in-
ception.
4. See C.B. Khairmode, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkaryanche Charitra, Vol. 3, Bombay,
1964, pp.141-2. I am indebted to Ram Bapat
for this reference.
I t is not surprising, then, that the radi-
cal energy of a proud and talented
poet-performer like Tukaram (later
Annabhau) Sathe, hailing from a
matang family with a significant in-
volvement in tamasha troupes, and
who found himself in early 1930s
Bombay, when drought forced the
family to undertake the long journey
from Satara on foot, should have
gravitated towards the strong Com-
munist Party presence in the working
class areas of the city. Earning his way
in Bombay through a wide variety of
jobs on the city’s casual labour mar-
ket, Annabhau was emerging as an
early radical Dalit writer and a lead-
ing figure on the cultural and political
scene in Bombay from the early 1940s
to the mid-1960s. A founding member
of the Lalbawta Kalpathak of the
Communist Party, and later an impor-
tant mobilizer in the Samyukta
Maharashtra campaign, Annabhau
went on to produce some 14 loknatyas
or tamashas, 10 povadas, plays, trav-
elogues, 22 short-story collections
and 30 novels, including the best-sell-
ing Fakira, and 12 screenplays.
Annabhau’s important presence
within 1930s Bombay Left circles
could not have been without its con-
tradictions. Here I will only flag
Annabhau’s work with the lavani and
powada forms and his experiments to
energize the tamasha form with politi-
cal content as part of his involvement
with the Lalbawta Kalpathak, IPTA or
the Samyukta Maharashtra campaign.
This will help raise the question of pa-
tronage from the Left for these subal-
tern performance forms, and
understand how the Communist lead-
ership sought to balance the innova-
tive possibilities, popular appeal and
the democratizing potential of the
lavani and tamasha forms within their
political framework.5
Consider, for instance, the inter-
esting contrast that emerges even
through briefly juxtaposing Dange’s
Introduction to the anthology of
Annabhau Sathe’s work issued in
1952 with an address that Annabhau
made to a Dalit Sahitya Sammelan
held in Mumbai in 1958.6 Both these
texts share an implicit understanding
about the economic basis of domi-
nance, exploitation and marginality. It
is significant, however, that the term
‘Dalit’ figures only once in Dange’s
essay, and that too to reiterate what he
terms the ‘internationalist’ dimension
of contemporary Dalit consciousness,
by which Dange means the ability of
the working class to seek out interna-
tional allies, ostensibly the distinguish-
ing hallmark of the Communist poet.
D ange draws on his considerable
knowledge of Marathi literary history
to argue that true art and dissent have
always gone hand in hand, and to spe-
cifically commend Annabhau’s
‘Mumbaichi lavani’ as a powerful ex-
ample of how class politics can inform
poetry, and praise Annabhau’s
povada, ‘Maharashtrachi parampara’
for its celebration of the cultural and
political ethos of the Maharashtrian
people. And yet, oddly, each laudatory
remark is immediately checked with
qualifying comments about the need
for further improvement: Annabhau is
even peremptorily taken to task for not
delving beyond conventional inter-
pretations of Marathi history. Dange
concludes with the unabashed hope
that the Introduction will guide
Annabhau and his colleagues in their
future work. Seemingly, as reiterated
by other testimonies, even within the
leftist trade union movement, low
5. Veena Naregal, ‘Lavani, Tamasha, Loknatya
and the Vicissitudes of Patronage’ in M. Naito,
I. Shima, H. Kotani (eds.), Marga: Ways of Lib-
eration, Empowerment and Social Change in
Maharashtra, Manohar, 2008, pp. 329-356.
6. Arjun Dangle (ed.), Lokshahir Annabhau
Sathe Nivdak Sahitya, Maharashtra Sahitya ani
Sanskriti Mandal, Mumbai, 1998.
caste subaltern activists like
Annabhau could not hope to be seen
as providing anything more than mere
cultural labour that would need to fit
pre-given moulds determined by a
theoretical elite. No wonder, then, that
Annabhau should have felt
marginalized within IPTA circles!
A s against this, Annabhau’s force-
ful foregrounding of caste as class in
his opening remarks to the Dalit
Sahitya Sammelan provides an inter-
esting counterpoint. It is true that none
of what he says deviates explicitly
from the underlying assumptions of
the party position, and could even lend
itself as a useful corollary to the offi-
cial line. However, Annabhau’s
speech does point in directions that
Communists were clearly not pre-
pared to go, at least in the 1950s. He
points out that a separate Dalit liter-
ary meeting was necessitated pre-
cisely on account of the widespread
tendency to disavow caste as a cat-
egory of marginality and the implicit
refusal to recognize Dalits as a large
and distinct class whose cumulative
experience and labour in fact consti-
tute the social and cultural founda-
tions of the nation, but even now
remain marginalized and invisible
within mainstream regional litera-
tures.
As a Dalit intellectual, Annabhau
was to later clearly acknowledge his
debt to Ambedkar, even as his work
seems to strikes a perceptibly distinct
note from the emphasis on Dalit
‘victimhood’ that formed part of the
dominant rhetorical strategies of later
Marathi Dalit writers. A brief mention
of Annabhau’s best-known novel
Fakira will show this. First published
in 1960, and currently in its 19th edi-
tion, it is an account of Mang valour
set in the early 20th century, depicting
the principled resistance offered by its
young hero, Fakira, who dies fighting
against unjust colonial laws seeking
to criminalize his community. The
novel valourizing pride in being a
Mang is dedicated to Ambedkar with
the lines: jag badali ghaluni ghav/
sangun gele mala Bhimrao (Rupture
and change the world/Was Bhimrao’s
message to me.) From all this, it seems
that Annabhau found it difficult to ac-
commodate his great need to write
about caste within the possibilities
opened up by his progressive experi-
ments with the tamasha/lavani forms
during his long association with Bom-
bay left circles.
Tragically, however, any ac-
knowledgement that Annabhau’s
work has had from the Dalit leader-
ship has been belated, sparse and al-
most entirely nominal.
T hus while various political parties
across the spectrum, including the
Communists, the Socialist Rashtriya
Seva Dal, the Ambedkarites, and Con-
gress have deployed the popular per-
formative ways for purposes of
effective mobilization, much of that
attention seems to have been either
ephemeral or based on a purely instru-
mental approach towards these forms.
The continued marginalization of
lower caste performers and perform-
ance traditions, even as some ele-
ments from these forms are
appropriated for political, commer-
cial or creative ends is, of course, part
of a larger story of how the ‘backward-
looking’ discourse of caste has been,
at once, variously subordinated within
the ‘higher’ discourses of nationalism,
development, modernization and citi-
zenship, even as it has been exploited
in non-transformative ways by par-
ties/leaders of all hues since at least
the 1940s.
The current paradigms within
cultural studies, or policy discourse, 39
it seems, will not allow these complex
processes of subordination to be ad-
equately interrogated.
SEMINAR 589 – September 2008