On the afternoon of February 7, the open-air courtyard of the Press Club of India in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi was packed with journalists, students and camerapersons. The usually shabby and damp premises wore a festive look. Behind a tiny makeshift stage there hung a bright purple banner that showed the anguished face of a young woman singing, her eyes closed, her lips parted. The poster bore the legend, "Sheetal Sathe and Troupe".
The documentary of 2011 about Dalit politics in Maharashtra, Jai Bhim Comrade, by the film-maker, Anand Patwardhan, had featured Sheetal Sathe. Shot over 14 years, it chronicled the struggle for justice among followers of B.R. Ambedkar. Patwardhan's film told the story of the Dalit movement from the late-1990s through the fortunes of a number of activist-poets, including Sathe and the group she belonged to, the Kabir Kala Manch. During this period, the Hindu Right consolidated its position in both state-level and national politics.
Dalit politicians and parties were wooed, co-opted and sometimes brutally eliminated by the forces of Hindu nationalism. Those in the Dalit leadership who claimed Ambedkar's historic agenda for the "annihilation of caste", or those of a Marxist persuasion who tried to marry class struggle with the struggle against caste, were perceived by the proponents of Hindutva as the most threatening to their political project of making India into a majoritarian Hindu rashtra. Sheetal and the KKM were already at the time of the film's shooting being hounded by the Maharashtra government - then led by the Congress - for their allegedly inflammatory performances. She and her mates had to go underground.
The KKM came together partially as a response to the violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. But because many of its members were Ambedkarites, they took up both communalism and caste, and set out to "educate, agitate and organize", putting into practice Babasaheb's rousing slogan for social justice and political transformation. Their revolutionary songs earned them the enmity of the State, which began to accuse them of associating with Naxalites. In 2013, Sheetal, her husband and fellow-poet, Sachin Mali, and two other KKM members staged a satyagraha by singing songs in the presence of officers of the Mumbai police. They were instantly arrested and jailed by the notorious Anti-Terrorism Squad and charged with being cadre of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). Heavily pregnant, Sheetal was released on bail to deliver her baby; Mali was denied bail, is yet to have a trial and, along with two other KKM associates, continues to be incarcerated in Mumbai's infamous Arthur Road Jail.
As Sheetal travels and sings to educate in early 2016, she brings along her musicians and backup vocalists, her dafli drum that she plays herself, and her two-and-a-half-year-old son, Abhang, whose name means a "stanza" by Tukaram, Marathi language's most famous medieval poet who preached a radical message questioning organized religion and rejecting caste hierarchy in the first half of the 17th century. Abhang is shepherded, regaled and shushed by various members of the troupe, and acts as his mother's strongest evidence of the injustice that the Indian State continues to inflict on her family, and on millions of Dalits.
Patwardhan introduces Sheetal at the Press Club. After he had finished making his film, he formed the Kabir Kala Manch-Defense Committee, which now fights a legal battle for the release of Sachin Mali, Sagar Gorkhe and Ramesh Gaichor of the KKM. Sathe herself is young, unpretentious, short, wry, humorous, matter-of-fact and yet so forceful and direct as to bring tears to all our eyes. She sings of Ambedkar, of the colonial-era social reformer, Jyotiba Phule, and of the pre-modern poets Tukaram and Chokhamela, all protagonists of Maharashtra's long tradition of anti-caste radicalism that clearly continues through her and her partner in poetry and politics, Sachin.
She sings about her mother-in-law, a poor peasant woman; about her son, born amidst a raging storm in his parents' life, separated from his father from birth. Her voice is clear; she hits the right notes. She sings her own poems and those composed by her husband, who appears to keep writing and publishing his poetry even from his jail cell. Her situation is heart-rending but she conveys it with a steady, steely anger rather than plaintively. It's her personal story but speaks to all Dalits.
Sheetal mentions the intellectuals Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M.M. Kalburgi, assassinated for their rationalist and critical views on the Hindu religion and the Indian State. After several songs interspersed with commentary, homilies and jokes in Hindi and Marathi, she begins to sing about the suicide of a Dalit PhD research scholar, Rohith Vemula, at the Hyderabad Central University on January 17. The song's refrain is blunt and poignant: "Rohith is gone/ A Dalit is gone/ It's Democracy that has died!"
Sheetal's own struggle has been protracted, but it is Rohith's death that has caused a sudden spate of invitations to come her way at this time, from universities and activist platforms around the country. The deceased 26-year-old, who was also a leader of the Ambedkar Students Association at the Hyderabad Central University, left behind a stunning suicide note that made it clear that he could no longer bear a life of both overt discrimination and subtle prejudice based on his caste identity.
Rohith's dying declaration - "My birth is my fatal accident" - was the fuse that set alight campuses all over the country. Sheetal expressed her grief at Rohith's death, the tragedy of a brilliant young man so disheartened by prevalent conditions as to give up on life. But, she said, in Maharashtra, we believe in fighting back, not in dying. She explained to her spell-bound listeners that being Dalit is not just about being stuck with an ascribed social description that predicts inevitable victimization; it's not just a legal category that dictates certain entitlements one can claim from the State; it's not just a history of discrimination that one is born into and inescapably saddled with. Being Dalit is rather a political identity that one must actively embrace, to signify one's determination to reject the caste system. She sang: "The Dalit has come/ The student has come/ To keep Democracy alive!"
The next day, February 8, I went to the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus to meet Sheetal. She was to perform there from 9 pm in an open-air amphitheatre, and the organizers, members of the JNU Students' Union, were anxious about the possibility of disruptions by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student front of the Hindu Right that had on earlier occasions at venues in Maharashtra threatened Sheetal and her troupe, and tried to forcefully shut down scheduled performances. Sheetal had asked me to meet her at 7.30 pm, arriving after long consultations with her legal team. She went in for a hurried dinner at Tefla's, the community centre that is as run-down today as I remembered it being in my student days. She ate with her musicians; Abhang was swaddled in blankets and put to bed in the lounge next to the canteen.
Neither Sheetal nor anyone in her group was adequately dressed for the cold Delhi winter. I waited outside, sipping sweet tea from a tiny plastic cup while Sucheta De, a student leader belonging to the All India Students' Association, smoked cigarettes and chatted desultorily with me, sharing her nervousness about Sheetal's programme, given the ABVP's bellicose tactics over recent weeks at HCU, the Indian Institutes of Technology in Chennai and Delhi, the Allahabad University and the Banaras Hindu University. Finally Sheetal indicated she could sit and talk with me. Her simplicity and sincerity were such that all my legalistic questions faded away. I only wanted to tell her that I admired her work and supported her courageous campaign. I remembered the slogan of my late teacher, D.R. Nagaraj, for the Dalit movement in Karnataka, "Let poetry be a sword!" There is something deeply moving about those who set out to change the world with poetry as their weapon.
Sheetal sang for hundreds of JNU students until midnight. They raised slogans, from the Ambedkarite Jai Bhim! to the leftist Lal Salaam! They cheered loudly at her passionate calls for justice, laughed at her sarcastic comments about the government, clapped along with her angry anthem for Rohith. Sheetal tum sangharsh karo, hum tumhaare saath hain - they chanted. Young men and women, of all castes, religions and communities, Indian and foreign, of diverse political persuasions, sat under a polluted wintry sky, wearing caps, mufflers and shawls (even though very few had socks on), singing along enthusiastically with her Marathi verses which most of them did not fully understand, though their import was absolutely clear.
There was no interruption, no violence; no attempt by any group to hamper or to dominate the proceedings. It was Sheetal's bell-like voice that rang out through the air and Sheetal's incandescent spirit that lit up the night. Abhang had woken up from his post-dinner nap and was toddling about on stage. Among students, I felt like one of them, as though the years since I had graduated from JNU had evaporated. Even the aeroplanes passed overhead as they always had, much too close, just about to land at the airport nearby.
None of us knew that a couple of days later, police would swarm this same campus, arrest the JNUSU president, Kanhaiya Kumar, and brand all of JNU as they had branded Sheetal: incendiary, anti-national, seditious. I learnt later that Kanhaiya, Sucheta De, Shehla Rashid and so many other student leaders whose names and faces I now recognize had been there both at the Press Club and at JNU that night, to assert Sheetal's rights, honour Rohith's memory, and uphold our freedoms as citizens. All of India should support these idealistic and courageous young people.
