Savitribai Phule Ran Girls' Schools in Pune From 1848 for No Pay, Was Pelted With Mud and Stones on the Way, and Died of Plague in 1897 Nursing the Sick

Savitribai Phule (3 January 1831 to 10 March 1897) was the schoolmistress of the girls’ schools that her husband, Jotirao Phule, opened in Pune from 1848. A committee report from the early 1850s, quoted in Dhananjay Keer’s 1960 biography of Jotirao, says she “nobly volunteered to devote herself to improvement of female education without any remuneration”.

She is widely called India’s first woman teacher. Mission schools in Pune and Ahmednagar already had women teaching girls, and Keer’s claim is narrower: after listing those mission schools, he writes that Jotirao “was the first Indian to start a girls’ school”. Most of what is known about her comes from the reports and newspapers of the 1850s that Keer reproduced, from Jotirao’s own statements, and from three letters she wrote to him that survive in translation. Where those sources disagree, this piece says so.

A bride of nine who learned to read at home

Jotirao was born on 11 April 1827 and married Savitribai in 1840. The Zubaan account on Google Arts & Culture says she was nine. Keer writes that Jotirao taught his wife at home, and that when he opened his first girls’ school he could not get a teacher, so he took her help.

In 1848, by Keer’s account, Jotirao’s friend Sadashiv Ballal Govande was transferred to Ahmednagar, a well-known centre of missionary schools, and Jotirao went to see them. In a statement published in December 1853 that Keer quotes, Jotirao says he visited the girls’ schools run there by Miss Farrar, an American missionary, and was pleased with the way the girls were taught. “Immediately on my return to Poona,” he continues, “I opened a Low Caste Female school”. Keer describes it as a school for the girls of the Shudra and Atishudra castes, the lower tiers of the caste order.

Keer adds that Savitribai studied for a time in Ahmednagar with Saraswatibai Govande, the friend’s wife. He also says Keshav Shivram Bhavalkar, a teacher at a government Marathi school in Pune who took up the post on 1 November 1848, taught her, and he cites Bhavalkar’s autobiography for the work of preparing a class of women to teach in the last quarter of that year. Punekar News says she trained at the teacher-training school that Margaret Mitchell of the Scottish mission ran in Pune, but it cites only “various documents” and names none.

Bhide’s house in 1848, Chiplunkar’s in 1851

Keer places Jotirao’s first girls’ school in the house of a man named Bhide in Budhwar Peth, a Pune neighbourhood. A large old town house is a wada, which is why the site is called Bhide Wada. The Mooknayak dates the opening to 1 January 1848, two days before her seventeenth birthday. Keer gives no day. He says the school ran five or six months, then closed when Jotirao’s father drove the couple out of his house and Jotirao had to earn a living. The Phule Chair at Savitribai Phule Pune University dates their leaving home to 1849.

The dates in Jotirao’s own evidence do not match neatly. In his written statement to the Education Commission (the Hunter Commission), dated 19 October 1882, he says he “was induced, about the year 1854” to open a girls’ school in Pune, “in which I and my wife worked together for many years”. The printed text carries an editor’s footnote calling 1854 a typographical error for 1851. That year fits the school Keer documents from papers of the time. It opened on 3 July 1851 in the wada of Annasaheb Chiplunkar, also in Budhwar Peth, with eight girls on the roll, a number that rose to 48 “in a short time” in the committee secretary’s account. A second school opened at Rasta Peth on 17 September 1851 and a third at Vetal Peth on 15 March 1852. The 1848 date comes from Keer’s narrative and the university’s timeline. The dated reports Keer quotes begin with the school of July 1851, where Savitribai was made head mistress. John Warden, president of the Board of Education, called it, in Keer’s quotation, “a small school established by stealth”.

A grant from a fund that once paid Brahmin scholars

The committee that ran the Budhwar Peth school wrote in its report that it could pay only small salaries, and that teachers left as soon as they found better posts. In the same report, which Keer footnotes to a volume dated 1852, Savitribai is named as the one who volunteered to work unpaid. Keer also says Jotirao and his wife both served the schools without remuneration.

Warden described a visit he made to the first two girls’ schools in Pune in 1851, when he was judicial commissioner. The mistress, he said, was “the wife of a gardener who educated her”, and she had to be persuaded with difficulty to examine a class while he watched. A class of young married women who had formed themselves into a normal class, a teacher-training group, refused to see him at all.

Government money did come. The Dakshina Prize Committee managed a fund whose money had once gone as gifts to Brahmins, and in 1852 it sanctioned Rs 75 a month for the girls’ schools, according to the Bombay governor Lord Falkland’s despatch of 10 November 1852 as Keer quotes it. The Poona Observer of 21 August 1852 reported Rs 25 a month from the same committee for Jotirao’s two schools in Vetal Peth, for Mahar and Mang children, communities then treated as untouchable. On 16 November 1852 Major Candy, Principal of Poona College, presented Jotirao at a public meeting with a pair of shawls that the government had bought for Rs 193. In her letter of 1856 Savitribai reminds her brother that “the British Government had organised a function to honour my husband”.

Jotirao told the Education Commission in 1882 that the committee had handed the girls’ schools to the Education Department, “under the management of Mrs. Mitchell”. The same statement complained that government spending on higher education “tended to educate Brahmins and the higher classes only”. The 1835 education decision that came before that spending is covered in Macaulay’s Children. A generation earlier in Calcutta, Ram Mohan Roy had written to the governor-general on what Indian schools should teach, and that letter is told in Ram Mohan Roy and the 1829 sati ban.

Mud, stones and a peon

Keer writes that Brahmin opponents and their hired men threw mud, dirt and stones at Savitribai as she walked to school. He reports that she would stop and say, “God forgive you. I am doing my duty. May He bless you.” He gives no source for the words. At the Budhwar Peth school, he says, a peon was employed to take her to and from her house. The Mooknayak adds that she always carried an extra sari.

In another 1853 statement that Keer quotes, Jotirao described the cost to the family: “my father at last drove me out of his house”. Keer also writes that most of Jotirao’s colleagues were Brahmins, who “humanely and courageously stood by him”, and he lists teachers, a surveyor and government clerks among the school’s committee members. The opposition he describes came from part of the Brahmin community of Pune, not all of it.

The widows’ home, the Samaj and three letters

The Phule Chair’s timeline dates the Infanticide Prohibition Home, the Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha, to 1863. Keer says Jotirao had handbills pasted on the walls of Pune houses telling widows to “come and deliver here safely and secretly”, and that he refused to put the home under a committee of Brahmins. Savitribai, Keer writes, looked after the children there “as if she were their mother”. One of them was Yashwant, born in 1873 to a Brahmin widow named Kashibai. Keer’s account, which draws on Jotirao’s will of July 1887, has Savitribai cutting the infant’s navel string, and the will says the couple regarded the boy as their son. Jotirao founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Truth-Seekers’ Society, on 24 September 1873, according to the Phule Chair.

Three letters from Savitribai to Jotirao survive in a translation from Marathi. In October 1856 she wrote from her parents’ home, where she was recovering from an illness, that her brother had told her she and her husband had been rightly excommunicated for serving the untouchables. Her answer, as she reports it: “Yes, we both teach girls, women, Mangs and Mahars.” On 29 August 1868 she wrote from Naigaon, near Satara, that a Brahmin man named Ganesh and a Mahar girl, Sharja, six months pregnant, were being paraded through the village and threatened with death. She rushed to the spot, she says, and warned the crowd of the consequences under British law. She sent the couple on to Jotirao.

The third letter is from Otur, near Junnar, and dated 20 April 1877, in the famine years. It says Satyashodhak volunteers had formed relief squads, that fifty of them were arrested, and that the Collector ordered them freed. The viceroy’s response to the same famine is told in 65,000 Died of Hunger in Madras While Lord Lytton Threw India the Grandest Party It Had Ever Seen.

She also wrote poetry. Her collection Kavya Phule appeared in 1854, and The Wire dates a later collection, Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar, to 1892. Dr Aalochana Gaikwad’s 1994 translation of her poem “Go, Get Education” includes the lines “Be self-reliant, be industrious” and “All religions recognise the right to learn.”

Fatima Sheikh: what the record holds

Fatima Sheikh’s place in this story was challenged in January 2025, when the activist Dilip Mandal posted on X that she “never existed”. In the same post he said he had invented the name, though he had written about her in ThePrint in 2019. ThePrint withheld that article, consulted scholars, and republished it with a note saying it found “several references to Fatima Sheikh scattered throughout history”.

The documents hold this much. Savitribai’s October 1856 letter names a Fatima: “I know my absence causes Fatima so much trouble but I am sure she will understand and won’t grumble.” Alt News reports that the letter appears in the anthology Women Writing in India, edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha, which it dates to 1991 in one place and 1990 in another. The anthology says Fatima Sheikh was a colleague who “taught in them until 1856”, meaning the Phules’ schools. Alt News also quotes M. G. Mali’s 1980 biography of Savitribai as saying Fatima Sheikh studied at the normal school the Phules opened and became the first student.

Shraddha Kumbhojkar, who heads the history department at Savitribai Phule Pune University, told Alt News that “there is only one concrete piece of evidence”, the letter, though it strongly implies a female colleague who took on Savitribai’s duties. Tahera Shaikh, a Pune researcher, said “public records on Sheikh are few”. Mandal argued that the letter’s tone toward Fatima shows little respect and suggested she “may have been a household servant or helper”.

ThePrint’s profile goes further than the letter. It says she and Savitribai opened a girls’ school in her house in 1848 and that she taught at all five of the Phules’ schools until 1856. The same profile says her birth year is unknown and that there is “no evidence” for the 9 January birth anniversary some social media accounts give. Keer’s 1960 biography, which quotes the Bombay newspapers and Board of Education reports in detail, does not name her. Maharashtra’s textbook bureau, Balbharati, acknowledged her contribution in 2014, ThePrint reports.

Plague in March 1897, and the memorials

Jotirao died at 2:20 a.m. on 28 November 1890. Keer describes Yashwant saying prayers at the pyre and does not mention Savitribai there. The Zubaan account says she lit it herself. In February 1892, Keer writes, the Maharaja of Baroda sent a cheque for Rs 1,000, from which she was to receive Rs 50 every three months.

Plague arrived in Maharashtra with famine in 1897, according to Forward Press. It reports that Savitribai went to the sick and took them to hospital, and that she carried on her back the son of Pandurang Babaji Gaekwad, a boy from the Mahar settlement outside Mundhwa, when no one would go near him. It adds that she called Yashwant, by then a doctor serving in the army, to Pune. The Zubaan account puts her clinic at Hadapsar and the child’s age at ten. Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd in The Wire says only that the clinic was on the outskirts of Pune and that “she contracted the disease while serving the patients and succumbed to it on March 10, 1897”.

The accounts differ on Yashwant. Ilaiah says he died of plague after treating patients at the clinic. Keer writes that Yashwant passed his matriculation in 1893, took a medical diploma and joined the army, and that “it seems” he died about eight years after Savitribai.

India Post issued a commemorative stamp for the death centenary of Savitribai Phule on 10 March 1998. In July 2014 the Maharashtra cabinet approved renaming the University of Pune as Savitribai Phule Pune University, Forward Press reported on 1 August 2014. Bhide Wada is now to become a national memorial: the Bombay High Court allowed the Pune Municipal Corporation to acquire it on 16 October 2023 after 12 years of litigation, and The Leaflet reported on 5 November 2023 that the Supreme Court had dismissed the occupiers’ appeal and given them one month to vacate.