Jyotirao Phule

Works

• 1873Slavery (Gulamgiri)

  Dialogue in Marathi, dedicated to the people of the United States for their struggle against slavery: Phule retells Brahmanical myths as a history of conquest and describes caste as slavery, upheld by priests and by denying education to Shudras and Ati-Shudras.

Position

Phule is on the map as the founder of the anti-caste movement in western India and as a thinker of education as emancipation. In “Gulamgiri” (Slavery, 1873), a dialogue dedicated to the people of the United States for their struggle against slavery, he retold the Brahmanical myths of the avatars as a history of conquest: Aryan Brahmins had subjugated the original inhabitants, among them the just king Bali, and secured their rule through scriptures that kept Shudras and Ati-Shudras in ignorance. Caste was therefore not a divine order but a historical system of slavery, upheld above all by the monopoly of learning; education, for women and the lowest castes in particular, was the way out. The account takes up the nineteenth-century theory of an Aryan conquest of India and turns it against Brahmin authority. The Satyashodhak Samaj performed ceremonies without Brahmin priests and taught a faith in one creator and the equality of all people, which Phule set out in his posthumous “Book of the True Religion for All” (1891). In “The Cultivator’s Whipcord” (1883) he described how priests, moneylenders and colonial officials exploited the peasants. He defended the writers Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai against attacks. Historians such as Rosalind O’Hanlon and Gail Omvedt treat him as the founder of the non-Brahmin movement. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated “Who Were the Shudras?” (1946) to him and named him, with the Buddha and Kabir, as one of his three teachers.

Life & context

Jotirao (Jyotirao) Govindrao Phule was born in Pune in 1827 – 11 April is the usual date – into a family of the Mali (gardener) caste who traded in flowers. After the Marathi school he attended the Scottish Mission’s high school in Pune (1841–47), where he read, among others, Thomas Paine. Humiliated at the wedding of a Brahmin friend, he turned to social reform: in 1848, with his wife Savitribai Phule, he opened a school for girls in Pune, followed by schools for children of the untouchable castes and, in 1863, a home where widows could give birth safely, against infanticide. In 1873 he published “Gulamgiri” and founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of Truth-Seekers). He was a member of the Pune municipality from 1876 to 1882, and in 1882 he gave evidence to the Indian Education Commission (Hunter Commission), calling for compulsory primary education. In 1888 he was honoured with the title “Mahatma” at a meeting in Bombay. He died in Pune on 28 November 1890 after a stroke.

Further main works

• Tritiya Ratna (The Third Eye, play, 1855)
• Gulamgiri (Slavery, 1873)
• Shetkaryacha Asud (The Cultivator’s Whipcord, 1883)
• Sarvajanik Satya Dharma Pustak (Book of the True Religion for All, 1891)