Anna Bhau Sathe a De Caste Writer: With Special Reference to the Novel Makdicha Maal

Abstract

Anna Bhau Sathe (1920–1969), celebrated Marathi Dalit author, social reformer, and participant in the United Maharashtra Movement, occupies an inextinguishable locus within contemporary Indian letters. Though he emerged from the Mang/Matang caste and devoutly pursued no formal education, his oeuvre—seventeen full-length novels, eleven anthologies of short fiction, a handful of folk-play scripts, various dramas, ballads, and lyric poetry—irreducibly shaped Marathi Dalit literature. Because his vision exceeds the limit of birthmark, critical parlance labels him “Dalit,” but he inscribed a durable proto-term within the corpus of “de-caste,” resisting scholar-categorisation. Sathe's texts approach the lived experience of his own caste in order, not to reproduce an autonomous archive, but to aggregate and project the protracted voices of social groups persistently subsumed under caste, labour, and electoral devaluation. Thematic energy therefore converges upon surging autonomy, quotidian dignity, and aggregate rather than individual exception. His protagonists, incessantly incarnating marginalized subjectivities, behave not as passive oblations but as ingenious resistants, systematically dismantling orthodoxy and composedly renegotiating the social. Sathe’s prose, a diaphanous transcription of dialectal shrill, is reproached—misreading delectable—by critics as “obscene.” Nonetheless, the unsanitized vocabulary boasts a forensic vibrancy, marinated in the life-world, hence exercise of declarative authenticity. Dialectal fixities coexist with enormous social portability, an occasion to confront the formidable edifice of social script upon which the Republic is written. This paper therefore attends to the logic of Sathe’s fiction within established Marathi canon, advancing his theorization through a calibrated homage of the novel Makdicha Maal (The Hillock of Monkeys), supplied with unobtrusive English translation in twin column format for pedagogic availability.

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