Jyotirao Phule Dedicated Gulamgiri to the People of the United States in 1873, Founded the Satyashodhak Samaj That September, and Asked the Hunter Commission in 1882 to Make Primary Schooling Compulsory

Jyotirao Phule (spelled Jotirao in most older sources) was born in Pune on 11 April 1827 and died there on 28 November 1890. His family were Mali market gardeners, a caste usually classed as Shudra, the lowest of the four varnas, or ritual ranks. From 1848 he and his wife ran schools, later he opened a home for widows’ babies, and on 24 September 1873 he founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Truth-Seekers’ Society, less than four months after he signed the English preface to his book Gulamgiri.

A market gardener’s son at a Scottish mission school

Dhananjay Keer’s 1960 biography says that Phule’s father, Govindrao, kept a flower and vegetable shop in Pune and that the family took the name Phule from its work as florists to the Peshwa, the Maratha ruler at Pune until 1818, replacing an older name, Gorhe. After about three years working in the garden, the boy went back to school in 1841, at about fourteen, at a school run by the Scottish Mission, and he finished the English course in 1847. A Brahmin, Sadashiv Ballal Govande, was his closest friend there, and the two read Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, according to Keer.

A Brahmin friend’s wedding procession gave a turn to his life, in Keer’s telling: an orthodox guest drove Phule away as a Shudra. No date is given. The scholar Gail Omvedt retells the incident and finds in it “the hypocrisy and contradictions in brahman reformism”.

Girls’ schools from 1848, a home for widows’ babies in 1863

The Mahatma Phule Chair at Savitribai Phule Pune University dates his first school for Shudra, Ati-Shudra, Mahar and Mang girls to 1848, with more in 1851. Ati-Shudras were the groups ranked below the Shudras and treated as untouchable. Omvedt gives 1849 and 1851, and Keer dates a school at Annasaheb Chiplunkar’s house in Pune to 3 July 1851. Writing to the Education Commission in 1882, Phule said that he and his wife “worked together for many years” in the girls’ school. The schoolmistress herself has an article of her own.

The Chair dates the Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha, a home to prevent infanticide, to 1863, and Omvedt to 1864. Phule’s own account is in his reply to the reformer B. M. Malabari’s notes on infant marriage and widowhood, printed in the Government of Maharashtra’s English edition of his works. The trigger, he says, was Kashibai, a Brahmin widow sentenced to transportation for life for killing her newborn. Right after her trial, he writes, he set up a foundling house in his own compound and had notices pasted on walls where Brahmins lived. By the time he wrote, 35 pregnant widows had delivered there and five of the children were alive. Thirty deaths, he said, came from drugs the mothers had taken to hide their pregnancies.

According to Keer, Phule kept the home away from any committee of Brahmins, and he and Savitribai brought up a boy born in 1873, Yashwant, as their son. The Mali community boycotted the family for it, Omvedt adds.

24 September 1873, and the first wedding without a priest

On 24 September 1873, Keer writes, Phule convened about sixty followers from several centres of Maharashtra in Pune and they agreed to form the Satyashodhak Samaj, with Phule as president and treasurer. The historian Rosalind O’Hanlon quotes the society’s first report, which gives the same date and says its founders meant to free the Shudras from slavery to Brahmins and other priests. Twenty-eight rules followed soon afterwards, she says. Members vowed to worship only the Creator, and the fourth rule barred discussion of politics. Loyalty to British rule was also part of the members’ declaration, Keer adds.

The Satyadipika newspaper reported in October 1873, as O’Hanlon cites it, that about 700 families of kunbi, Mali, potter, carpenter and other Shudra castes were refusing to call Brahmin priests to the ceremonies for male ancestors. The first Satyashodhak wedding without a priest, in Keer’s account, took place on 25 December 1873. The groom was a young widower who worked in Phule’s shop and whom Phule had taught to read, the cost came to the price of betel nut, and the couple took vows Phule composed.

Keer compares the Samaj with the Brahmo Samaj of Ram Mohan Roy and Bombay’s Prarthana Samaj. All three rejected priests as go-betweens, he says, but Phule put truth rather than prayer at the centre, and Brahmo meetings had allowed only Brahmins to officiate since Roy’s time.

A court test came late. Brahmin priests of Otur, a village in Pune district, sued Balaji Kusaji Patil for not hiring them at weddings in his family. The Bombay High Court ruled for Patil on 8 January 1890, Keer says, and he reads the judgment as confirming that Samaj weddings were valid without a priest.

Omvedt dates the founding to 1875 in two of her works. Four other sources give 24 September 1873: Keer, O’Hanlon, the Phule Chair and the Government’s edition.

Gulamgiri and its dedication to the United States

In P. G. Patil’s translation the full title of Gulamgiri is Slavery in the Civilised British Government under the Cloak of Brahmanism. The Government of Maharashtra’s English edition says it appeared in June 1873, and its English preface is signed by Phule and dated 1 June 1873. It is a dialogue between Phule and a questioner, Dhondiba. Sixteen chapters follow, in Keer’s count, the first nine on the history of Brahmin domination as Phule saw it. The argument is that the Brahmins descend from Aryan invaders who came from Iran, enslaved the original inhabitants and devised caste to keep them down.

The dedication, in the Government’s English text, is “to the good people of the United States”, for their “sublime, disinterested and self-sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery”. His hope, he adds, is that his countrymen will take their example as a guide in freeing the Shudras from Brahmin rule. The Government’s introduction says the book was criticised for “venomous propaganda” against Brahmins.

What he told the Hunter Commission on 19 October 1882

The Education Commission of 1882 is called the Hunter Commission after its chairman, Sir William Hunter. Phule’s memorial to it is dated Poona, 19 October 1882, and signed “Merchant and Cultivator and Municipal Commissioner”. The Government’s English edition prints it. In Keer’s verdict, no other witness he reports said so plainly that the government had neglected the education of the lower classes.

Nearly nine-tenths of the villages in the Bombay Presidency, or nearly 10 lakhs (a million) children, were without any provision for primary schooling, Phule wrote, a figure he introduced with “it is said”. Primary education, he asked, “should be made compulsory up to a certain age, say at least 12 years”. Teachers in primary schools were, he said, almost all Brahmins and mostly untrained, on pay “seldom exceeding Rs. 10”. Instead he wanted them trained “out of the cultivating classes” and paid at least Rs 12, and Rs 15 or 20 in larger villages. Schools were to be inspected every quarter and without warning, and to multiply through grants to indigenous schools with trained teachers, half the local education cess, a legal duty on municipalities and provincial or imperial funds. Where Mahar and Mang children were numerous he wanted separate schools, because other schools would not seat them.

Higher education was another matter: he did not ask the government to leave it, saying that withdrawing aid would hurt the middle and lower classes. Part of his Gulamgiri preface went into the memorial, including the line “away with all Brahmin school-masters!” The policy of educating a small English-knowing class first is the subject of Macaulay’s Children. O’Hanlon cites Anil Seal’s count for 1886 to 1887: of 384 people in the executive and judicial branches of Bombay’s Uncovenanted Service, which she calls the elite of the Indian administrative hierarchy, 328 were Hindus, 211 of them Brahmins and one a Shudra. The caste categories in it are crude, she says.

The Whipcord is dated 1883, not 1881

Shetkaryacha Asud, the Cultivator’s Whipcord, carries 1883 dates. The Government’s English edition prints Phule’s introduction to it dated 6 April 1883 and has him writing of “the present time (1883)”. Dated passages inside the text run from 2 November 1882 to 28 July 1883 in the translation by Omvedt and Bharat Patankar. Reading parts of it aloud in several towns, Keer says, Phule finished it by July 1883 and sent copies to the Maharaja of Baroda and to the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin. A letter of 2 June 1886 shows, in Keer’s reading, that it was still unpublished. The translators’ own introduction says it was published in 1881, a date the dated passages inside the text do not match.

The introduction opens: “For want of education, intellect was lost; for want of intellect, morality was lost”. Hunter, Phule says in the draft translation by Omvedt and Patankar, toured the three presidencies in a railway carriage without visiting farmers’ huts, and took evidence mostly from upper-caste witnesses. The call for teachers from the farmers’ own castes and for compulsory school attendance by law appears there again.

The Mahatma title of 11 May 1888 and a death on 28 November 1890

Keer places the honour on 11 May 1888, in the Koliwada Hall at Mandvi in Bombay, at a meeting his Bombay followers arranged. After speeches, Keer writes, the leaders “conferred upon him the title” of Mahatma, and “The title was conferred upon him by the common people.” His account names no single person as the giver. The Phule Chair gives the same date and says the public conferred it. Damodar Savalaram Yande, who says he was at the gathering, wrote that Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda told Phule’s colleagues in Bombay to confer the title, when Phule was in the city to lecture at the samadhi of Raghunath Maharaj. Keer’s version has the same maharaja, through the same Yande, proposing “Booker T. Washington” instead.

A stroke in July 1888 left him paralysed on his right side, Keer writes. He died at twenty minutes past two on the morning of 28 November 1890, in Keer’s account, and the Phule Chair gives the same date. The will asked that he be buried. Colleagues apparently did not know, Keer says, and the funeral procession took two hours to reach the cremation ground. Gandhi, in Yeravda jail in May 1933, called Phule a real Mahatma, Keer reports, citing a 1949 special issue of the Din Bandhu.

Where the historians part

Rosalind O’Hanlon’s Caste, Conflict and Ideology (Cambridge University Press, 1985) starts from what Phule and other non-Brahmin activists argued in their Marathi sources, she says, rather than passing straight to “a ready-made set of political and economic interests” assumed to be the real force. Missionary writing and older Hindu traditions of dissent both fed his thinking, in her account. His picture of one Brahmin conspiracy is, for her, “a highly sophisticated and effective polemical instrument” that, in distorted form, reflected a real fact: Brahmin communities drew a kind of unity from shared religious loyalties. As for the Brahmin share of official posts, she finds that his claim has “a clearly identifiable basis in objective reality”.

Omvedt, in a 1971 article, argues that Phule should be seen as “the primary renaissance figure”, writes that with him “the low-caste, non-Aryan, peasant masses of India came to consciousness”, and says the non-Brahmin movement traces its origins to the Indian renaissance and should not be read as communalism or a product of British divide-and-rule policy. Phule also stood outside the Hindu tradition, she adds, and almost never used the word Hindu. O’Hanlon, by contrast, stresses sources within Hindu traditions of dissent. In 2008 Omvedt called O’Hanlon’s book the major account of Phule’s life and thought.

On the Aryan invasion, O’Hanlon says Phule drew very heavily on missionary accounts, above all John Wilson’s India Three Thousand Years Ago. The first avatars of Vishnu, she records, he read as stages of the assault, the fish and the tortoise being the boats of successive waves. Omvedt and Patankar call him perhaps the first to turn the Aryan theory upside down and use it to explain Brahmin control, and note that Ambedkar disagreed. In his 1946 book on the origins of the Shudras, Ambedkar writes: “The theory of invasion is an invention.” A 2019 paper in Science by Vagheesh Narasimhan and colleagues, based on 523 ancient individuals, puts the arrival of Steppe ancestry in South Asia in the first half of the second millennium BCE and reports that groups of traditionally priestly status tend, with exceptions, to carry more of it than expected. Its authors write of a “movement of people” and of mixing.

The Government of Maharashtra’s English edition, translated by Patil for the state’s Phule death-centenary committee, came in two volumes, Slavery on 28 November 1991 and the selections, scheduled for 3 January 1992. In the second volume D. T. Rupwate, the committee’s executive president, writes that Phule is often called anti-Brahmin and answers that the harshness of his language matched the harshness of the system he faced. G. P. Deshpande, a Marathi playwright whose play Satyashodhak is about Phule, edited a LeftWord English edition that prints Gulamgiri and the Whipcord in full along with the Hunter deposition. Ambedkar, who rejected the invasion theory, inscribed his 1946 book to Phule’s memory as “The Greatest Shudra of Modern India”.