In an India still fractured by caste, religion, and language, where narrow loyalties repeatedly threaten to tear the nation apart, Rammanohar Lohia once observed that the true leader of the bahujans is one under whose banner even non-bahujans feel proud to march. The remark applies far beyond politics. In the literary-cultural and social spheres as well, only a person armed with unflinching historical consciousness and the moral courage to refuse every form of personality worship—including worship of oneself—can hope to touch the weak pulse of the age and speak its bitter truths without fear or favour.
History has repeatedly shown that whenever sectarian narrowness has raised its head in this vast, multilingual, multi-ethnic land, it has proved fatal not only for individuals but for entire communities and, ultimately, for the idea of India itself. That is why the country has always needed, and will always need, men and women who stand like drawn swords against every decadent tendency, who possess the courage to name things exactly as they are.
Among the handful of radical intellectuals of our time who still keep sleepless watch and still call a spade a spade regardless of consequence, one quiet, unassuming name shines with rare clarity: Dr Suryanarayan Manikrao Ransubhe. Now in his eighty-third year, the retired Hindi professor from Dayanand College in the small Maharashtra town of Latur continues to write, translate, and provoke with the same fierce commitment that has marked his entire life.
Born on 7 August 1942 in a labour settlement of Gulbarga district in the erstwhile Hyderabad princely state, young Suryanarayan grew up in two cramped rooms shared by parents and nine siblings. Childhood, as most of us understand the word, simply did not exist. While still a schoolboy he cut paan under a betel-leaf stall, chopped areca nut, whitewashed houses in blistering summers, shelled peanuts for street vendors, and did every odd job that brought a few coins home. He never felt shame in manual labour; on the contrary, he speaks of it with calm pride. When he first arrived in Latur decades later for a job interview, the trousers he wore belonged to one friend, the shirt to another. New cloth was a luxury that came only in college.
Brilliant from the beginning, he passed matriculation with marks high enough to win admission to Dharwad Medical College. A wealthy relative promised to finance the entire course—on condition that the seventeen-year-old get engaged to his daughter and marry her after becoming a doctor. Family pressure was intense. Yet by then the boy had already devoured the writings of Sane Guruji, Premchand, and Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar. He refused the offer, gave up the dream of a medical career, and began hunting for any job that would keep body and soul together.
While waiting for the Post & Telegraph call-letter, he enrolled in B.Sc. and scored excellently in physics, only to face the college principal’s public scolding for “wasting” a medical seat. The incident became campus gossip. Within days the Hindi lecturer Shri Kulkarni, noticing that this same youth had topped the state in Hindi, told him about the Government of India scholarship for non-Hindi speakers wishing to study Hindi. The rest is history.
Suryanarayan shifted to B.A., won the scholarship, and landed in the legendary Hindi Department of Allahabad University, where he sat at the feet of giants—Ashk, Kamleshwar, Krishna Sobti, Rajendra Yadav, Yashpal, Nagendra, Raghuvaṃśa, and many more. Through Raghuvaṃśa he even met and conversed several times with Dr Rammanohar Lohia. Friendship with an Andhra classmate introduced him deeply to Marxism. The three streams—Phule-Ambedkar, Lohiaite socialism, and Marxism—flowed together to shape the thinker he would become.
Appointed lecturer in 1965, he might have remained a gifted teacher had Dr Chandrabhanu Sonwane not pushed him towards serious scholarly writing. Books followed steadily: a pioneering tendency-oriented history of modern Marathi literature, monographs on Kamleshwar and on Dr Ambedkar, studies of Hindi fiction after Partition, co-authored histories of Hindi literature, and, most originally, a path-breaking Sociology of Translation that treats translation not as a mechanical linguistic exercise but as a socio-historical process intimately tied to power, mobility, ideology, and the will to connect with the larger human community.
In caste-ridden, hierarchical societies, he argues, translation almost grinds to a halt; in open, democratic cultures it races ahead. He calls the thirteenth-century saint-poet Jñāneśvar the first rebellious “first translator” of Maharashtra and asks why revolutionary Sanskrit and Pali texts were kept locked away from the masses for centuries. With merciless clarity he declares that India’s educated elite, intoxicated by English and European thought, developed an inferiority complex that made it enthusiastic about translating Tagore or Premchand into French but indifferent to translating Dalit suffering into the languages of power.
After retirement Ransubhe turned increasingly to translation and Dalit studies. “I have done manual labour all my life,” he says in an interview. “Everyone around me—every caste, every religion—was crushed and neglected. I was one of them. My commitment is theirs.” Translation, for him, is not a secondary activity; when creator and translator share the same commitment, translation becomes re-creation. In the last two decades he has gifted Hindi readers priceless Dalit autobiographies—E. Sonkambale’s Birds of Memory written in the Mahari dialect of Marathwada, Sharan Kumar Limbale’s blazing Akkarmashi (re-translated afresh into Hindi in 2023), Halalkhor by Uthaigir, and many more. Each translation is accompanied by long, learned introductions that place the text in its searing social context.
His critical oeuvre is no less formidable. In Regional Language and Literary History he rewrites the story of modern Marathi literature with special attention to writers pushed to the margins. He analyses Keshavsut’s secular love poetry and social despair, celebrates the science fiction of Jayant Narlikar, and rescues forgotten voices outside the prestigious Ravikiraṇ Maṇḍal.
A long chapter on Dakhni Hindi-Urdu traces its thousand-year journey from Bahmani courts to the streets of Hyderabad and Aurangabad, insisting that it is an independent language that needs no suffix of “Hindi” or “Urdu.” His biography of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar remains one of the finest in Hindi: a book that is simultaneously a history of the Indian caste system, a psychological study of the “collective unconscious” that makes Indians consider some human beings superior and others inferior by birth, and a passionate argument that Ambedkar’s vision was never only for Dalits but for the creation of an exploitation-free, casteless nation enriched with purely human values.
Even at eighty-three Ransubhe has lost none of his fire. In 2023 he brought out a powerful new Hindi translation of Akkarmashi. In 2024 he published a long essay on Savitribai Phule that reads her life as practical Ambedkarism avant la lettre and places her alongside Jotiba as the real founder of modern India’s feminist-anti-caste tradition. Through essays in journals, video lectures, and messages to literary conferences he continues to intervene in contemporary debates—whether on the feudal-Muslim alliance under the Nizam that crushed Dalit peasantry or on the need to widen Marathi literary horizons through Dalit and feminist lenses.
One incident he recounts still chills the blood. Travelling alone in a sleeper coach, an upper-caste family from North India asked his “birādrī.” When he answered “Dalit,” the temperature in the compartment fell several degrees. With exquisite politeness they requested him to “please stand near the door for a while—we have to eat lunch.” He stood, quietly, feeling the poison hidden in that politeness. “If I had said Brahmin or Thakur,” he later wrote, “they would have invited me to share the meal. Say Dalit and you are asked to move away so that your shadow does not pollute their food.” He adds another journey where introducing himself as Muslim instantly filled the air with suspicion. Only those who have lived such moments know the depth of that wound.
Yet the same man who can narrate such incidents without self-pity continues to translate the pain of the crushed into a language that heals as it wounds. His pen remains a sword in the service of Lohia’s dream: a leadership under which even non-bahujans feel proud to march, a literature in which even the privileged reader is forced to look into the mirror and recognise their own complicity in centuries of injustice.
In a country that still flinches from speaking plainly about caste, where intellectuals often hide behind ambiguity and opportunism, Dr Suryanarayan Ransubhe stands almost alone in his generation—unbending, uncompromising, and yet profoundly humane. His life and his vast body of work—monographs, biographies, literary histories, translations, essays—are a standing rebuke to hypocrisy and a quiet invitation to the only revolution that finally matters: the revolution of the heart that alone can annihilate caste. So long as India has thinkers like him—humble, fearless, and tirelessly committed to the dream of a casteless, exploitation-free society—the hope famously articulated by Babasaheb Ambedkar remains alive. And that, in the end, is the truest measure of a life well lived.
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*Professor & Former Head, Department of Hindi ,University of Hyderabad
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