Vira Sathidar, cultural figure who fought India’s caste system, dies

NEW DELHI >> Vira Sathidar played the role of a protest singer enmeshed in India’s frustrating legal system in “Court,” a 2014 movie that won accolades in India and around the world. Yet Sathidar, a lifelong activist against injustice with little screen experience, remained uncomfortable describing himself as an actor.

Acting, he said, was just another tool in the toolbox of protest — along with organizing, pamphleteering, editing, writing poetry and singing.

“Song and dance was a weapon of our fight,” he once said. “It still is.”

Sathidar died of complications of COVID-19 on April 13 at a hospital in

Nagpur, in the state of Maharashtra, his son, Ravan, said. He was 62.

Sathidar agitated against the deeply rooted caste system in India, under which those at the bottom — his fellow Dalits, or untouchables — are systematically abused. A high school dropout, he wrote books and articles, edited magazines and organized street performances. For a brief time, he ran a bookstall. He was the head of the Maharashtra chapter of the Confederation of Human Rights Organizations.

“He was a living library,” his friend Nihal Singh Rathod said, “on political science, on social science.”

Vira Sathidar was born June 7, 1958, in the village of Parsodi, near Nagpur, to Rauf and Gangubai Sathidar. His father, a farmer, was a staunch supporter of B.R. Ambedkar, one of India’s most influential thinkers and political figures. Ambedkar, himself a Dalit, was part of the Indian independence movement and played a central role in drafting the constitution for the future republic. He was also a tireless opponent of the caste system, and Sathidar often cited his influence in setting him on the road to activism.

Sathidar said his father wanted him to be a scholar. But he was a distracted student, and he left school after 10th grade to work at a cotton thread mill.

Sathidar’s activism began when he was a union organizer at the mill. He found himself working with the radical Maoist movement called the Naxalites in the 1990s.