Three months after Communist leader and secular activist Govind Pansare was murdered in Kolhapur, the Maharashtra government still has no leads on who might have killed him. Now, his death has been commemorated in new song sung by cultural activist Sheetal Sathe and written by her imprisoned husband Sachin Mali.

Titled Sampvila deh Zari or “You can destroy the body”, the song’s biting words reference the long history of murders in the name of religious fanaticism around the world and speaks of how ideas will continue to thrive despite the repression.



Mali and Sathe are both members of the Kabir Kala Manch, a cultural group accused of having Maoist sympathies. Both surrendered to the police in April 2013 after being underground for two years. While Sathe got bail a few months later in June, Mali and two others are still awaiting trial in prison.

In August 2013, soon after eminent rationalist Narendra Dabholkar was murdered in Pune, Mali had written a poem mourning the killing. The murder of Communist leader and secular activist Govind Pansare in February is being perceived as another attack on the movement for rationality in public discourse. Weeks after Pansare's death, Mali wrote another poem, similar in tone to the first.

Sathe has now set this poem to music. She sang it for the first time earlier this fortnight at a commemorative event in Mumbai for Pansare, where documentary filmmaker Anand Patwardhan filmed her performance.

The song makes note of an irony: while the government, with all its state machinery and secret agencies, has not yet managed to track down the murderers of either Dhabolkar or Pansare, there is no lack of resources when it comes to prosecuting activists carrying on the legacy of these slain rationalists. “To deny them bail, strengthen the case against them, this responsibility it can ensure," Sathe says.

Fewer groups

There are very few recordings of Sathe’s songs online and even fewer videos. One of these comes from Patwardhan’s Jai Bhim Comrade, a three-hour documentary on Dalit protest poetry, music and politics that followed police firings in 1997 at Ramabai Colony in Mumbai left ten Dalits dead. The Kabir Kala Manch features significantly in the second half of the film.

Jai Bhim Comrade was begun at the time of the firing and shot over 14 years, Patwardhan said. It references songs by singers like Vilas Ghogre that were composed even earlier.

“You see a wide variety of both Ambedkarite and Left-inspired culture that was perhaps more vibrant in previous decades because peoples' movements were stronger then,” the filmmaker said. “Today there is despondency in the Left and in the Ambedkarite movement, a sense of betrayal by the established Dalit leadership prevails. But just as the Dalit Panthers were born when the Republican Panther Party began to fail Ambedkarite ideals, today a younger generation of cultural activists is again emerging.”

Still in jail

Two years after they surrendered, three members of the Kabir Kala Manch have not yet been granted bail. The trial against the group has not even begun.

“What is shocking is the denial of bail,” Patwardhan said. “Four members of the Kabir Kala Manch voluntarily gave themselves up to the police over two years ago. They were not caught with arms and ammunition or accused of any violent act. The state wants to crow about having caught dreaded Naxalites, but they have caught musicians instead. The lives of these young artists have been wasted and the country has been deprived of their thought provoking art.”

Mali’s second book of poetry from jail was released in Mumbai on Saturday. Read some of his earlier poems here.