Maharashtrian academic Amarnath Chandaliya founded the Kabir Kala Manch in the wake of the 2002 pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. The troupe’s avowed mission was to use songs and skits to inoculate the lower classes and castes against the virus of communalism concocted by the votaries of Hindutva, or militant Hindu nationalism. Given the communal-caste linkages, the Kabir Kala Manch subsequently deployed its artistic oeuvre to sensitise its audiences to the oppression and violence built into the Hindu hierarchical social order. The KKM drew young artistes inclined to work for social change. Over time, as members experienced the pressures of earning a livelihood – KKM’s earnings were mostly from audience donations – they would quit the cultural troupe to take up jobs, their places taken by a younger crop of artistes.
The stories of Ramesh Gaichor, Sagar Gorkhe and Jyoti Jagtap, the three among others who performed at the Elgar Parishad, illustrate the caste-class composition of the KKM and its recruitment method. Amarnath Chandaliya chanced upon Gaichor singing at a cultural programme in 2003, at Pune’s Wadia College, where he was doing BCom. Chandaliya signed on Gaichor, nurtured his innate singing and writing talent, and took him around Pune for performances. The master also gave his pupil books authored by Ambedkar. Gaichor became a staunch Ambedkarite and, with time, wrote lyrics weaving together radical anti-caste and anti-capitalist ideas.
Likewise, the voice of Sagar Gorkhe so bewitched the KKM’s senior members, present at a programme hosted by Pune’s Ambedkar College, that they invited him to join them forthwith. In 2005, Jyoti Jagtap, who belongs to Belsar village in Pune district, secured impressive grades at school, prompting her father, a small landholding farmer, to send her to Pune’s SP College. She, too, became a member of the KKM. Jagtap belongs to the Mali caste, categorised as an Other Backward Class.
Gaichor is Maratha by caste. He grew up in a Pune slum, in a one-room tenement with a metal-sheet roof,29 which was later expanded to add another room with a brick-and-mortar roof. Gorkhe is a Dalit, and financed his studies by washing cars and sweeping the compounds of middle-class apartment buildings. The KKM’s socially heterogeneous membership keeps flickering the flame of hope in those who believe ideologies propagating equality can become an impulse for Indians to transcend the caste divide.
The KKM not only entertains but also educates viewers to fight caste. It took a sharp radical turn with the Khairlanji massacre. On 29 September 2006, at Khairlanji village of Bhandara district, Maharashtra, a mob comprising high castes attacked the house of Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange, a Dalit, dragged away his wife, Surekha, their 17-year-old daughter, Priyanka, and visually impaired sons, 21-year-old Sudhir and 19-year-old Roshan. Mother and daughter were stripped and marched to a “crude open-theatre stage.”
It soon became a theatre of horror.
With the audience cheering, Surekha and Priyanka were gang raped and killed, although the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) claimed they were not sexually assaulted, based on the findings of what was alleged to have been a fudged postmortem report. Sudhir and Roshan were murdered. Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange managed to escape the mob. The high-caste residents of the village claimed they had been provoked because Surekha was having an affair with a police Patil, or village cop. The reality, though, was that two out of the five acres that the Bhotmanges owned were taken away, in 1996, for building a road. In 2006, the villagers demanded that the family surrender their remaining land for yet another round of road construction. The family resisted, incurring the wrath of the high castes.
It took a month for Khairlanji’s barbarity to become public, courtesy of journalist Sabrina Buckwalter’s story. Protests rocked Maharashtra through November and December 2006, further fuelled by a string of incidents involving the desecration of Ambedkar statues in Uttar Pradesh. The Khairlanji horror deeply influenced KKM members, who wrote songs voicing the anger and sorrow of the Dalits at their oppression.
The KKM’s challenge to the State took yet another turn in 2008, with land being acquired for the Lavasa project that was springing up “amidst seven hills with 60 km of lakefront.” A brainchild of industrialist Ajit Gulabchand, the project was cleared by the Congress government of Maharashtra under its 2001 policy of privately building a hill station for the first time after the departure of the British. The Lavasa project was envisaged as spreading over 7,722 hectares across eighteen villages in the Western Ghats, sixty-five kilometres from Pune. The villagers, mainly tribals, began protesting over land records being surreptitiously changed, and cheques paid as compensation for the land being appropriated bouncing. The KKM sang against the colonial-like project, and articulated the woes of villagers.
The State’s retribution against the KKM was fierce. The first to be arrested was Siddharth Bhosale, on 28 April 2011. Then, on 13 May, the Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Pune police picked up Deepak Dhengle, aka Dhawala Dengle, and transferred him to its counterpart in Mumbai – the Anti-Terrorism Squad police station at Kalachowki. It became evident to Manch members that a plan was afoot to accuse them of being members of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), jail and try them under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. They went incognito. Gaichor, Gorkhe and Jagtap were among them. The method of harnessing the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) to silence dissidents was a Congress invention, which the BJP has finessed and ruthlessly employed in recent years.
The credit for rescuing Manch members from the police hunt goes to documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan, whose acquaintance with the singers has a backstory relevant to the Elgar Parishad. On 11 July 1997, Dalit residents of Ramabai Colony in Mumbai woke up to find a garland of shoes around the statue of Ambedkar. Enraged, they blocked the Eastern Express Highway and smashed cars parked there. A platoon of the Special Reserve Police arrived and opened fire, directing it at both protesters and the colony. In the shower of bullets, ten residents and protesters died. The BJP-Shiv Sena coalition was governing Maharashtra then.
The sight and plight of wailing relatives of Ramabai Colony and the sheer barbarity of the police were unbearably shocking for poet-singer Vilas Ghogre. Four days after the firing, he hanged himself. Ah, that familiar trope of political suicide! Patwardhan knew Ghogre, having recorded his songs for his documentary Bombay Our City. What struck the filmmaker was that Ghogre, an Ambedkarite-turned-Marxist, asserted his Dalit identity before dying by suicide. He had wrapped a blue scarf around his forehead and scribbled, on a blackboard covering a wall of his tiny room, “Long Live Ambedkarite Unity.” Patwardhan’s inquiry into the suicide of Ghogre, through the camera lens, resulted in an award-winning documentary Jai Bhim Comrade fourteen years later, in 2011.
During the long-drawn process of filming, Patwardhan made a trip to Ramabai Colony on 11 July 2007, the tenth anniversary of the massacre. Among the cultural troupes present there for the commemoration ceremony was the KKM. Patwardhan was so captivated by the KKM that he began to follow its members wherever they performed and attended their jamming sessions in a decrepit office lent to them by a socialist sympathiser. A bond was forged between him and Manch members. They discussed, among other things, the social philosophy of Phule, Gandhi and Ambedkar.
Suddenly, Manch members stopped taking Patwardhan’s calls. With his film completed, which has extensive footage on the KKM, he visited Pune to investigate the silence of its members. The mother of Shital Sathe, a Manch singer, told Patwardhan about the arrest of Deepak Dhengle, and how the charge that he was a Maoist had driven his mates underground to evade the police. Sathe and her partner, Sachin Mali, another Manch member, were among them.
Their life as fugitives shocked Patwardhan and others into floating the Kabir Kala Manch Defence Committee, with the corpus of its fund coming from the prize money bestowed on him by the Maharashtra government for bagging a National Award for Jai Bhim Comrade. The irony was unmissable – the Maharashtra government was hunting KKM members for being Maoist, the very singers who had been filmed for Jai Bhim Comrade, which had won a National Award. The ostensibly proud state government awarded the film’s director prize money that helped fund the endeavour to protect singers on the run from the prize-giver. This may be looked upon, superficially, as an example of the bumbling ways in which India functions. But it was more certainly yet another instance of the political elite’s carefully cultivated style of operating in politics – they extol the aspirations of the Dalits to bag their votes and yet brutally suppress them when they fight for their rights and dignity.
Excerpted with permission from Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste, Ajaz Ashraf, Paranjoy.
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