Pushpa Bhave, a social activist and academic who was fondly referred to by many as ‘Tai’, passed away on the intervening night between Friday and Saturday. She leaves behind an inspiring legacy and a diverse body of work.
Pushpa Bhave was born in 1939 into a family of progressive intellectuals who encouraged her to commit to education with a vigour that was uncommon for women in those days. She studied at Elphinstone College Mumbai and then Deccan College in Pune. Bhave went on to become a linguistic scholar in not one, but two languages; Marathi and Sanskrit. She taught Marathi at Ramnarain Ruia College, from where she retired in 1999 as Head of the Department.
In 1956, Bhave joined the Samyukta Maharashtra movement and worked to have the voices of peasants and workers heard amidst a wider struggle for respect in society. She was also a vociferous participant in the Goa liberation movement that aimed to help Goa gain independence from the Portuguese.
It was in the 1960s that Bhave began her work in the field of Dalit rights; her focus never wavered from the plight of Dalit women who suffered more layers of discrimination on account of gender, caste, lack of education and economic independence. Bhave started 15-day camps where she would educate rural girls. She would not only read books to them, but also educated them about their rights. Her commitment to empowering Dalit women was also evident in her efforts to get them fair wages for their labour; she organised beedi workers in Nippani to stand up to exploitative contractors. She was a staunch opponent of the devdasi system where women were sexually exploited in the name of culture and tradition. Bhave was also jailed briefly when she supported a movement to rename Marathwada University as Ambedkar University.
Her social work ventured into political activism during the emergency when she offered shelter to known dissenters and activists like Mrinal Gore and Pannala Sura. In 1990, she took on the powerful Shiv Sena regime when she stood by the widow of Ramesh Kini. She ensured that the findings of the first post mortem that ruled out murder were summarily disproved when she got a second post mortem performed on Kini’s body. She once again stood up to right-wing forces during the Bombay riots of 1992-93, despite facing multiple death threats.
When Bhave’s health started deteriorating, she and her husband moved to a nursing home in Matunga. She was last seen in public in January 2019.
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