Early feminist, pioneering novelist: Recalling colonial-era Marathi Christian reformer Baba Padmanji
Far from being a European lackey, as he is sometimes characterised, he was a visionary whose contributions undergird the history of modernity in India.
Baba Padmanji.
In 1857, India’s first vernacular-Marathi novel emerged from the presses. At the time, it received only an ambivalent response. But in the years that followed, the book went through three further editions and was included in the curriculum of Bombay University. In 2002, the trenchant critic Bhalchandra Nemade extolled the novel as the first example of “realistic” writing in Marathi fiction that was much ahead of its times.