Jyotiba Phule was born on April 11, 1827, in the Mali caste, a community traditionally occupied with gardening and floristry. In 1848, Phule was invited to attend a wedding of one of his Brahmin friends. The relatives of the groom insulted and abused him while referring to his ‘lower’ caste. Phule left the procession, having made up his mind to defy the prevailing social system and its incumbent caste oppression. He visited a girls’ school in Ahmednagar run by missionary Cynthia Farrar, and also came into contact with Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, which had criticised Christian orthodoxy much in the same way as Phule would come to contend with its Hindu counterpart.
The very same year, Phule and his wife Savitribai cofounded the first school for girls in India. Phule was only 21 years old at the time; the couple opened 18 more schools in the next three years. By 1855, Phule had also opened night schools in Pune, intended as a centre of learning for workers, farmers, and working women who were busy during the day. Phule’s rapid success in this emancipatory revolution was opposed by the orthodoxy.
In his later years, Phule had vociferously opposed first Vishnu Shashtri Chiplunkar, and then his protege Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Phule preferred to work with the British government to improve the lot of the untouchables and the depressed castes and the emancipation of women, while Tilak and other orthodox nationalists saw the British government as an occupying force intent on changing what they felt was the fundamental character of the Hindu religion. Nonetheless, Phule had the discernment to aid the deliverance of an opponent when he bailed out an imprisoned Tilak and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar from Mumbai’s Dongri Jail.
Phule also founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of Truth-Seekers) in September 1873. The body was intended as an alternative to the largely upper-caste dominated reform movements that had been surging in India. These included the Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj, as well as the Arya Samaj movements.
Breaking the chain
Revolution is a vehicle for change — social, economic, and political. The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce had in 1857 called the sepoy revolt ‘a deadly national rebellion’. However, Phule could not come to affiliate with the sepoy revolt, seeing it as a retrogression towards the ascendant theocracy of the Peshwa rule. He could not see a way to reconcile his social revolution with the tempest of 1857. Phule felt that the obstinacy of the orthodox upper-caste Hindus would consign the Dalits back into a state of depredation.
Writing in Gulamgiri (Slavery), Phule says, “This system of slavery, to which the Brahmins reduced the lower classes, is in no respects inferior to that which obtained a few years ago in America. In the days of rigid Brahmin dominancy, so lately as that of the time of the Peshwa, my Sudra brethren had even greater hardships and oppression practised upon them than what even the slaves in America had to suffer. To this system of selfish superstition and bigotry, we are to attribute the stagnation and all the evils under which India has been groaning for many centuries past.”
“Only slaves can understand what it is to be a slave and what joy it is to be delivered from the chains of slavery. Now the only difference between them and the slaves in America is that whereas the blacks were captured and sold as slaves, the shudras and atishudras were conquered and enslaved by the bhats and brahmans,” he states.
But Phule was also able to see that economic strengthening of the working poor among the lower castes could be a key to overthrowing the social imbalances. In his ‘A Statement for the information of the Education Commission’, Phule writes, “In villages also most of the cultivating classes hold aloof, owing to extreme poverty, and also because they require their children to tend cattle and look after their fields. Besides an increase in the number of schools, special inducements in the shape of scholarships and half-yearly or annual prizes, to encourage them to send their children to school and thus create in them a taste for learning, is most essential. I think primary education of the masses should be made compulsory up to a certain age, say at least 12 years.”
In his Satsar (The Essence of Truth), Phule defended the right of Pandita Ramabai to convert to Christianity, the only non-Christian defence of its sort. The text is imagined as a dialogue between a Brahman and a Shudra.
“Brahman: But Tatya (younger brother), which religion do you belong to?
Shudra: Forget God and serve the brahmans! Do you think this ought to be our religion? We shall adopt Christianity or Islam whenever we feel like for our convenience. Or perhaps we shall ask for a religion for us from our Creator. You do not have to worry about us.”
A constructive approach
In his Shetkaryanche Asud (Farmer’s Whip), Phule argues for a constructive approach on the part of the administration.
Many of his ideas therein provide a secular alternative to resolving the extant questions of cow slaughter, the increase in crop production, and the development of civil infrastructure.
“The benevolent government should educate all the farmers, and until they become mature enough to use machines to do the usual things on the farms like European farmers, all the white people and the Mussalmans should slaughter goats and sheep instead of slaughtering cows and oxen; or they should import cattle and slaughter and eat them here, because otherwise there will not be sufficient supply of cattle for the farms, and there will not be enough compost and other fertiliser as well, and so neither the farmer, nor the government will benefit,” Phule writes.
Arguing for the involvement of military administration in the work of civil construction, Phule says, “…construct small dams and bunds in such a way that this water would seep into the ground, and only later go and meet streams and rivers. This would make the land very fertile, and the soldiers in general, having got used to working in open air, will also improve their health and become strong. Even if they labour to the value of one anna every day, this will mean an increase in the government’s earnings to the tune of twenty-five lakh per year, because our careful government has, including the police department, at least two lakh sepoys.”
“… the government should allow the farmer to collect all the silt and other things extracted from rivers and lakes, as in the olden times, and it should also return all the cow pastures to the villages, which it has included in its ‘forest’; it should, however, make sure that no firewood is collected, or land tilled in the areas that belong to it, and it should also forbid the cutting of wood for selling as wood for construction and destroy the oppressive the Forest Department,” Phule contends.
The flowering of a true faith
Phule shared a complex and evolving relationship with both doctrinal religion and the idea of God. In his early years, he credits his childhood Muslim friends for revealing to him the fallacy of the Brahminical faith, and later still the work of the Christian missionaries likewise provides him with a robust critique of Hindu orthodoxy. Phule even wrote an abhang titled Manav Mahammand (Muhammad the man), which extolls the prophet of Islam as having liberated his people from the yoke of superstition and orthodoxy of his age. But Phule was also inspired by Paine’s Age of Reason, and in his later years drew on the deistic strain of humanistic faith therein.
An echo of this rationalist tendency is most evident in his Sarvajanik Satya Dharma Pustak, a sort of last testament of his beliefs and convictions. In it, Phule responds to a query regarding the existence or lack thereof of a true scripture in this manner. “All the religious and revelatory books that man has produced on our planet, one and all, do not contain a consistent universal truth. This is so because in every such book are to be seen passages interpolated into those texts by certain groups of individuals as the situation in their view warranted and as their dogmatism and mulishness dictates. Consequently, those religions or faiths did not in the final analysis work towards the good of all. This in turn resulted in sects and sectarianism. Small wonder that these sects hated and turned against each other.”
Rejecting sectarianism and supremacism, Phule reminds the reader that, “In sum, this solar system and naturally the planet earth which we inhabit are created by one Creator. Why is it then that the human beings living in different States and nations hate each other? How and why are the foolish passions of religions and national hatreds generated? There are any number of rivers on our planet. All of them eventually meet the sea. How and why, then can only one of those rivers be sacred? Does that sacred river ever hesitate to carry dogs’ excreta to the sea?”
Denying any fundamental sacredness of some human beings over others, Phule stipulates that this is “clearly untenable”. “All human beings on our planet are equipped with similar physical and intellectual facilities. How can some of them be ‘sacred’ generation after generation? Are they not born and do they not die like everyone else, and do they not have qualities good and bad like everyone else?” he writes.
Writing against the unevenness of polygamy, Phule presents a polyandrous argument to offset his counterposition. “Some lustful men who marry more than once, maintain almost a harem; justify their action with reference to some senseless religious text written by equally mulish men. How would they take it if some women were to marry more than one man to satisfy their lust? Would not these men think of right and wrong and be critical of their behaviour?” Phule contends therein.
Phule reminds the reader that the pernicious practice of caste is a human invention. Of it he opines, “Animals, birds, etc., all differ from each other anatomically. Likewise, two-legged human beings are different from four-legged animals. It is said that the Arya Brahma has created the four castes. He would have done so for the animals as well. Can you tell me then who are the brahmans among the donkeys, crows, etc.?”
Phule’s life and times continue to be a source of inspiration to many radicals to date. His struggles, sometimes at risk to his own life and limb, and his tenacious pursuit of the ideal of a society liberated of its orthodox shell, are something worth learning from for our own age.
Published – April 10, 2025 10:34 pm IST