B.P. Sathe- Makers of Indian Literature (An Old and Rare Book)

B.P. SATHE (1910-73), Dogri short story writer, essayist and translator was a pioneer. He drew his plots and characters from legend, folklore and village life of his times, but invested them with freshness, beauty and universality. Sathe was the first to write personal essay in Dogri, wistful and nostalgic. Before Sathe, Dogri was not considered fit enough for literature. It required courage and vision to start writing in Dogri which Sathe did.

SHIVANATH (b. 1925) is an eminent critic and author of History of Dogri Literature. In this monograph, he evaluates the contribution of Sathe to the Dogri literature, mainly for the benefit of non-Dogri readers.

Bhagwat Prasad Sathe was a pioneer among Dogri writers, specially in the field of Dogri short-story writing. He was a multi-faceted personality with a wide range of interests. Be sides, he was the product of his times and a son of his native soil, the smell of which perfumes all his work. One approach to the subject could be to deal with his works and, from them, proceed to the man and his life and from there to the milieu which shaped and stimulated his creative genius. I, however, propose to deal with these aspects in the reverse, i.e. the milieu, the man and his work.

I seem to have been tricked into writing this monograph. It was at a meeting of the Advisory Board of the Sahitya Akademi for Dogri that one of the members proposed the name of B.P. Sathe for a monograph in the series 'Makers of Indian Literature' and another member suggested that I should write it and I could not say no. I feel that persons like Ramnath Shastri or Deenu Bhai Pant or D.C. Prashant, M.P., would have done greater justice to the subject as they were the founders of the Dogri Sanstha and the Dogri renaissance movement and knew him from close quarters. Perhaps Jagdish Chandra Sathe who was a relation of his, was better equipped for the assignment.

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