Rationalist leader Dr Narendra Dabholkar had an uncanny eye for content that complemented the anti-superstition crusade. He felt fiction served as a tool to counter social ills and a regressive world view. As the editor of Sadhana, a weekly, he had devoted 56 pages of a Diwali issue to writer Bharat Sasne's 1999 novel Don Mitra, which mapped Maharashtra's caste realities. In 2019, 20 years since it was first published and six after Dr Dabholkar's killing, Don Mitra is rendered in English as Two Friends: A Perspective Of The Third (Inking Innovations).

This is good news in literary circles. But one cannot escape the bad too, which author Sasne and the translator Dr Vilas Salunke acknowledge. They collectively feel that specters of communalism-casteism that Dr Dabholkar had identified in the novel have grown in scale and intensity. Sasne's unidentified unnamed mythical village/township, in which two friends of different castes face unbelievable social pressure, comes terrifyingly close to real acrimonious neighbourhoods in Maharashtra where inflammatory speeches spark communal riots in which unemployed youth become agents of hate.