MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 3 of 100

The Maharashtra Public Service Commission cancelled this question. It is one of the questions the Commission withdrew from this paper, so it carries no keyed choice and this card nominates none; what follows teaches the subject instead. Tukaram Bhaurao Sathe, universally known as Annabhau Sathe, was born on 1 August 1920 at Wategaon in Sangli district into the Matang community, then counted among the untouchable castes, and died on 18 July 1969. His schooling stopped at the fourth standard and he walked to Bombay as a boy during a drought in 1931, which means that everything he later did as a writer he did with almost no formal education behind him. What he had instead was the entire performing repertoire of the Marathi countryside, and he turned it into political instrument. He was a founding member of the Lal Bawta Kala Pathak, the Red Flag cultural squad that functioned as the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India, working alongside Amar Shaikh and D. N. Gavankar; that troupe has been described as the most exciting theatrical phenomenon of the 1950s in Maharashtra, before Indian communism split. Through it and through print he reached audiences no pamphlet could: he composed ten ballads in the powada form, wrote in lavani, and used the tamasha stage and its component pieces, of which batavani, the spoken comic exchange, is one. His written output ran to thirty-five Marathi novels, fifteen collections of short stories, twelve screenplays, a play and a travelogue of the Soviet Union. Fakira, published in 1959, reached a nineteenth edition and won a state award in 1961. He was one of the voices of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement for a separate Marathi-speaking state with Bombay in it, and in 1958 he presided over the opening of the first Dalit Sahitya Sammelan in Bombay. His later work moved toward Ambedkar, but unlike most Dalit writers of the generation after him his frame stayed Marxist rather than Buddhist, which is exactly the tension this question was reaching for.

The Communist Party in Maharashtra in the 1940s and 1950s faced a practical problem: its audience among mill workers and landless labourers was largely unlettered, and a party newspaper reaches only those who can read. The answer was the kala pathak, the cultural squad — a mobile troupe performing in the forms the audience already knew and loved, with the political content carried inside them. The powada, a heroic ballad form associated with Shivaji and sung by the Gondhali and Shahir traditions, could be rewritten to celebrate a strike; the lavani, a rhythmic song form from the tamasha stage, could carry a message about landlordism; the tamasha itself, with its established components including the gan, the gavlan and the batavani, gave a ready-made evening's entertainment inside which argument could be smuggled. The Lal Bawta Kala Pathak did precisely this, and Annabhau Sathe, Amar Shaikh and D. N. Gavankar became the three names attached to it. The method is not unique to Maharashtra — the Indian People's Theatre Association was doing the same nationally — but the Marathi version is distinctive because the folk forms it drew on were unusually strong and because it fed directly into the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation.

Annabhau Sathe is one of the names MPSC asks about most reliably, and it asks from several angles at once: as a Marathi writer, as a figure of the Communist and trade-union movement, as a voice of the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation, and as an early Dalit literary figure. The commission's fondness for him also reflects official commemoration in Maharashtra, where his birth anniversary is marked and a state development corporation carries his name. A candidate should therefore prepare him on all four fronts rather than filing him under one. The specific thing this question was probing — the forms through which he worked — matters because it is where his literary and his political identities meet. Note also the habit worth taking from a cancelled item: a question that has been withdrawn is still an accurate signpost to what the commission considers examinable, so the sensible response is to revise the topic thoroughly rather than to skip it as a dead question.

• Annabhau Sathe, born Tukaram Bhaurao Sathe on 1 August 1920 at Wategaon in Sangli district and died 18 July 1969, was born into the Matang community and left school after the fourth standard, migrating to Bombay in 1931 during a drought.
• He was a founding member of the Lal Bawta Kala Pathak, the Red Flag cultural squad that was the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India, working with Amar Shaikh and D. N. Gavankar.
• His output includes thirty-five Marathi novels, fifteen short-story collections, twelve screenplays, a play, ten powadas and a travelogue of the Soviet Union; he worked in the powada and lavani folk forms.
• Fakira, published in 1959, is his best-known novel; it reached a nineteenth edition and won a Maharashtra state award in 1961.
• He took part in the Samyukta Maharashtra movement for a separate Marathi-speaking state including Bombay, and presided over the first Dalit Sahitya Sammelan held in Bombay in 1958.

• Filing Annabhau Sathe under a single label; he belongs simultaneously to Marathi literature, the communist and trade-union movement, the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation and early Dalit writing
• Assuming every Marathi Dalit writer of the period worked in an Ambedkarite and Buddhist frame — Sathe's frame remained Marxist, which is the standard discriminator asked about him
• Confusing the Lal Bawta Kala Pathak with the Satyashodhak jalsa tradition of the earlier non-Brahmin movement; both used folk performance, but they belong to different decades and different politics
• Treating a cancelled question as a topic that will not return — the commission's withdrawal concerns this item's construction, not the examinability of Annabhau Sathe

MPSC asks about Annabhau Sathe in the straightforward biographical form — birthplace, community, dates, the title of his best-known novel — and in the harder analytical form that asks what distinguishes him from his contemporaries. The recurring discriminators are that his frame stayed Marxist rather than Buddhist, that he came out of the folk-performance tradition rather than the literary establishment, and that he presided at the opening of the first Dalit Sahitya Sammelan. He also appears inside larger questions on the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, on the cultural wings of political parties, and in matching questions that pair Marathi writers with their works, where Fakira is the pairing to have ready. Expect his name in any year's paper somewhere in the Maharashtra history and culture block.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The cultural squad of the Communist Party of India in Maharashtra, of which Annabhau Sathe was a founding member along with Amar Shaikh and D. N. Gavankar, was known by which name ?

  • (a)Satyashodhak Jalsa Mandal
  • (b)Lal Bawta Kala Pathak
  • (c)Rashtra Seva Dal Kala Pathak
  • (d)Maharashtra Loknatya Mandal

  Answer(b) Lal Bawta Kala Pathak — the Red Flag cultural squad, which functioned as the cultural wing of the Communist Party of India and became the best known Marathi political performance troupe of the 1950s. The Satyashodhak jalsa belongs to the earlier non-Brahmin movement of the 1910s and 1920s, and the other two names do not correspond to the communist troupe.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which novel by Annabhau Sathe, first published in 1959 and later honoured with a Maharashtra state award, is regarded as his best-known work ?

  • (a)Fakira
  • (b)Vaitagwadi
  • (c)Chitra
  • (d)Alagoj

  Answer(a) Fakira — published in 1959, it went through many editions, reached a nineteenth edition and won a state award in 1961, and it is the title examiners attach to Sathe in matching questions on Marathi writers and their works. He wrote thirty-five novels in all, so the discriminator asked for is invariably this one title rather than the size of the output.