Background
Baburao Ramaji Bagul was born in Nashik in 1930.
Baburao Ramaji Bagul was born in Nashik in 1930.
After high school education, he did various manual jobs until 1968. While doing so, he published several stories in magazines, which started getting attention from Marathi readers. Eventually in 1963, came his first collection of stories, Jevha Mi Jat Chorali (When I had Concealed My Caste), it created a stir in Marathi literature with its passionate depiction of a crude society and thus brought in new momentum to Modern Marathi literature in Marathi.
Today it is seen by many critics as the epic of the downtrodden, and was later made into a film by actor-director Vinay Apte.
He followed it up with a collection of poems, Akar (Shape) (1967), which gave immediate visibility, but it was his second collection of short stories Maran Swasta Hot Ahe (Death is Getting Cheaper) (1969), which cemented his position as an important enlightened voice of his generation. After 1968, he became a full-time writer of literature which continued to deal with the lives of marginalized downtrodden people in Maharashtra.
His fictional writing gave graphic accounts of the lives of that class of people. The thoughts of Karl Marx, Jyotiba Phule, and B. R. Ambedkar had an influence on Bagul"s mind.
He soon became an important radical thinker of the Dalit movement, and published a major ideologue of the Panther, Manifesto of Panther, in 1972.
In the same year he presided over the "Modern Literary Conference" held at Mahad. Over the years his stories taught future Dalit writers to give creative rendition to their autobiographical narratives. Subsequently, the Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University instituted the Baburao Bagul Gaurav Puraskar Award in recognition of his contributions to Marathi literature, to be given annually to the debut work of a budding short-story writer
