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 party. “We could not hope our rights would automatically flow.”

That realisation has driven Dhawale for much for his adult life. He has worked relentlessly to ensure that India’s most marginalised people receive the basic rights that every human deserves – using culture as a weapon to achieve that goal.

Culture, Dhawale said, is the medium for organising. It gives one class or group the opportunity to bond and empathise with others.

In India, where agriculture is still a major source of livelihood, “life has a different rhythm”, he said. He elaborated: “The khat khat khat pace or frenzy of a highly capitalised world hasn’t quite overwhelmed us as yet. Oral tradition which speaks of one’s suffering to another still prevails. The song becomes the medium for understanding...

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