Kolhar, and a Childhood Without Land

Govind Pandharinath Pansare was born on 26 November 1933 in Kolhar, a village in Shrirampur taluka of Ahmednagar district in Maharashtra. His family had lost its land to moneylenders and lived in real poverty. His mother, Harnabai, worked as a farm labourer; his father, Pandharinath, took whatever work he could find. The economic arrangements that Pansare would spend fifty years opposing — debt, dispossession, the quiet transfer of land from the poor to the lender — were not theory to him. They were the reason his childhood looked as it did.

He would not have been educated at all without help. He joined the Rashtra Seva Dal, the socialist youth organisation, where a mentor named Govind Patki arranged his admission to high school at Rahuri. There he first encountered communist ideas, and campaigned for a communist candidate in an assembly election while still a schoolboy.

He moved to Kolhapur district for further study, and the city became his home for the rest of his life. At Rajaram College he became a regular at a bookstall run by left-wing activists — the kind of informal institution that produced a generation of Indian political organisers. He completed his BA there and then a law degree at Shahaji Law College. In 1952 he formally joined the Communist Party of India.

From 1964 he practised as a labour lawyer, representing trade unions and slum dwellers. When the Communist Party split that same year he stayed with the parent CPI, and rose within it to become a state secretary and a member of its national executive. He had been briefly detained during the 1962 war with China because of his party affiliation. His legal work was never separable from his politics: he took the cases of people who could not pay, in the courts of a district where he was simultaneously organising them.

Shivaji Kon Hota?

Pansare's most consequential act was to write a short book. Shivaji Kon Hota? — Who Was Shivaji? — published in 1988, argued that the seventeenth-century Maratha ruler was a pragmatic and broadly secular statesman rather than a sectarian champion. Pansare pointed to Shivaji's appointment of Muslim commanders and his recorded conduct towards women, and set that record against the communal reading of Shivaji that had become politically useful in twentieth-century Maharashtra.

The book found an enormous audience. It has sold well over a hundred and forty-five thousand copies across some thirty-eight editions, and has been translated into several languages — remarkable figures for a work of popular history in Marathi. It made Pansare a genuinely public figure and, in the same movement, made him enemies. He wrote around twenty-one books in all, most of them accessible commentaries on social questions rather than academic works.

The Activist

His activism was practical and unglamorous. He ran an organisation promoting inter-caste marriage. He campaigned against the Putrakameshti ritual, performed by those seeking the birth of a son — a target chosen precisely because it sat at the junction of superstition and sex selection. He led a long agitation against toll collection in Kolhapur, which became one of the district's defining civic campaigns. He publicly opposed the glorification of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's assassin.

When the anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar was shot dead in Pune in August 2013, Pansare urged fellow activists not to stand down but to carry the work forward. He identified openly as a rationalist and understood the risk.

He married Uma, and they had three children: a son, Avinash, a lawyer and left activist who died young, and two daughters, Smita and Megha.

16 February 2015

On the morning of 16 February 2015, at about 9:25, Pansare and Uma were walking home from their morning walk in Kolhapur when two young men on a motorcycle fired five shots at them at close range. Pansare was hit in the nape and chest; Uma was struck in the head. Both survived the immediate attack, and Pansare initially seemed to improve. His condition then deteriorated, and he was airlifted to a hospital in Mumbai on 20 February, where he died the same day. He was eighty-one.

The investigation has not produced a conviction. A man was arrested in September 2015 and further suspects were detained, but the case against them did not hold; police established that the principal accused had been elsewhere at the time, and the state government acknowledged in the legislature that evidence was lacking.

The Pattern, and the Legacy

Pansare's killing was the second in a sequence. Dabholkar had been shot in 2013 in strikingly similar circumstances — morning walk, motorcycle, close range. The scholar M. M. Kalburgi was killed later in 2015 and the journalist Gauri Lankesh in 2017. All four were rationalists and critics of the religious right; all four had received threats. Official statements at one point suggested the only common factor was that the victims were morning walkers, an explanation that satisfied nobody.

What survives is the work. Shivaji Kon Hota? is still printed and still argued over. The toll agitation he led changed civic politics in Kolhapur. And the manner of his death made him, against his own preference for the unspectacular, one of modern India's clearest cases of a man killed for what he wrote.