Scroll.in / by Freny Manecksha

For the Marathi poet-activist, song and verse are tools of social change, like they have been for Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj and the Ambedkarite movement.
When Sudhir Dhawale was growing up in Nagpur’s Dalit-dominated Indora area in the 1970s, a calendar depicting a child with a pistol hung on the wall of his family’s rented home. It bore a slogan declaring that rights are not handed out – one has to fight to seize them.
“It was just a poster but it brought the understanding through cultural means that we needed to agitate,” said the 57-year-old Marathi poet, activist and co-founder of the Republican Panthers Caste Annihilation Movement. “We could not hope our rights would automatically flow.”
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