T N Atre's Gaav-Gada has been justly celebrated as a Marathi language classic from the point of view of diction and style. Also, Atre must be considered the first author, after Jotirao Phule, to attempt to make the educated urbanite aware of the problems of the farmer by way of a full-length book. The core theme of Atre's book is the disastrous social and moral consequences of a medieval socio-economic system and mindset lingering on into the early decades of the 20th century. This moral degeneration, according to Atre, is the progeny of the vatan system and his book is an invocation to get rid of the vatan system and the hold of the vatan mentality induced by it and to embrace the modern economic order of the market.
