Milind Champanerkar

Milind Champanerkar is a Pune-based writer, researcher, editor, playwright, theatre director, translator and filmmaker. He completed a Master’s degree in Marathi literature from Mumbai University, and Film Appreciation Course from the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune. As a writer and editor, Milind has a number of books and anthologies to his credit, which has won him many awards. He has translated a number of books including Saeed Mirza’s novel Ammi from English to Marathi, which won him the Sahitya Akademi award for Translation in 2017. He has written and directed numerous plays and made many short films. Milind also worked as a journalist with various leading news dailies like Indian Express, Maharashtra Times and Loksatta. He has extensively written on conflict zones such as Kashmir, Chhattisgarh and the North East.

This grant will enable Milind to critically examine the transmuted Loknatya form developed by Lok-Shaheer Anna Bhau Sathe from 1940s to 1960s. Anna Bhau Sathe alias Tukaram Bhaurao Sathe (1920-1969) was a renowned Lok-Shaheer and literary figure in Maharashtra. He hailed from a socially backward caste from a remote village in southern parts of Maharashtra and had no formal education. In a career spanning two-and-a-half decades, Anna Bhau wrote over thirty novels, short stories, a travelogue and many folk plays. Several Marathi films are based on his novels. But what made him popular among common people was his Loknatya – a transmuted version of Tamasha. His plays focused on the lives of socially marginalised communities with piercing criticism of class and caste hierarchies. Through his writings, he insisted on an equitable society. He used folk theatre as a tool for sociopolitical change, which helped various local movements of the time. Milind will enquire into the reasons that made Anna Bhau Sathe’s work popular among people who were fighting various social and political battles. 

Milind will probe into the reasons that attracted people to the Loknatya during and after Anna Bhau Sathe’s lifetime. He will explore ways in which Anna Bhau Sathe developed the form creatively for a mass appeal. Besides this, Milind will also inquire into the aesthetics of the form and the factors that made it into an effective tool for politico-cultural activism. He will study the pedagogy developed by Anna Bhau Sathe stressing the need for powerful content and minimum use of indigenous music, lights and other extensive essential paraphernalia used in theatre. 

Although after Anna Bhau Sathe’s untimely death in 1969, the popularity of Loknatya ebbed and got pushed to the margins, it left a strong impression on the later theatre movements and groups such as the Street Theater Movement in the 1970s-80s, experiments done by groups like Jan Natya Manch in Delhi, Sambhaji Bhagat and Waman Kardak in Mumbai, and Jan Natya Mandali in Telangana. Milind argues that there was a noticeable influence of Loknatya on students’ movements during the protest at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and Hyderabad Central University, after Rohit Vemula’s suicide. According to him new-gen hip-hop performances and films like Gully Boy also carry a certain influence of Loknatya, however indirect they may be. Milind will examine the reasons behind the marginalisation of Loknatya and the impact it continues to have on various current politico-cultural movements in India. 

Through extensive fieldwork in Nagpur, Pune, Mumbai and Delhi, Milind will study the relationship between the subaltern discourses and Loknatya, its form, content, popularity and marginalisation. He will conduct in-depth interviews with experts in the field and visit archives to access secondary material on Anna Bhau Sathe and other cultural movements. He will visit Anna Bhau Sathe Study Centre at the Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University to access the available literature and conduct interviews with scholars working there. He will also visit Jan Natya Manch in Delhi to have conversations with artists about Anna Bhau Sathe and the ways in which they relate to his vision and practice today. 

The outcome of this project will be a script for a documentary film in Marathi. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be audiovisual documentation of interviews with artists and experts from the field and the final script for the documentary film.

This grant is made possible with support from Titan Company Limited.