Jyotiba Phule: Champion of Lower Caste Rights and Education

In 19th-century Maharashtra, a man from the gardener caste decided that the social order he was born into was not divinely ordained but deliberately engineered. Jyotirao “Jyotiba” Phule (1827-1890) spent his life dismantling that order with the most powerful tool he could find: education. While most reformers of his time came from upper-caste backgrounds and sought to fix Hinduism from within, Phule rejected the Brahminical system entirely and built an alternative for those it had crushed. His work on caste, gender, and knowledge laid intellectual foundations that B.R. Ambedkar and later anti-caste movements would build upon directly.

Who was Jyotiba Phule 🔗

Jyotirao Govindrao Phule was born on 11 April 1827 in Pune into a family of the Mali (gardener) caste, a community placed among the Shudras in the caste hierarchy. He completed his education at a Scottish missionary high school in Pune, an experience that exposed him to ideas of equality and rational inquiry that were absent from the orthodox society around him.

A single incident is often cited as his turning point. Phule was reportedly insulted at the wedding of a Brahmin friend, reminded that as a Shudra he did not belong among upper-caste guests. The humiliation sharpened a question that would define his life: why were some people considered polluting by birth while others were considered pure? His answer was unequivocal. Caste was a human-made construct built to serve the interests of a small priestly class, not a natural or sacred arrangement.

Mahatma Gandhi later gave him the title “Mahatma,” and Ambedkar counted Phule among his three gurus, alongside the Buddha and Kabir. For students of Indian social and political thought, Phule represents the moment when reform stopped asking the upper castes to be kinder and started demanding that the oppressed claim power for themselves.

The critique of Brahminical domination 🔗

Phule’s central argument was that Brahmin supremacy was maintained through a deliberate monopoly over religion, ritual, and knowledge. He believed the priestly class kept the lower castes illiterate and superstitious on purpose, because an ignorant population was easier to exploit. Religious texts, in his view, were not divine revelations but tools of control.

Tritiya Ratna and the exposure of priestly exploitation 🔗

Phule’s first work was a play titled Tritiya Ratna (The Third Eye), written in 1855, though it was not published during his lifetime. In the play, a Brahmin priest dupes a poor farmer couple into performing expensive rituals supposedly meant to protect their unborn child. The drama lays bare how ritual and religious fear were used to drain the resources of the uneducated poor.

The “third eye” of the title refers to knowledge itself. Phule argued that education was the faculty that would let the lower castes see through the manipulation they were subjected to. Without it, they remained at the mercy of those who controlled scripture and ceremony.

Gulamgiri and the language of slavery 🔗

His most famous prose work, Gulamgiri (Slavery), published in 1873, gave a historical account of how Shudras and Atishudras had been reduced to bondage. Phule deliberately chose the word “slavery” to describe caste, drawing a parallel with the recently abolished slavery in the United States. He even dedicated the book to American abolitionists, framing the anti-caste struggle as part of a wider human fight for freedom.

In earlier works too, Phule was direct. In Brahmananche Kasab (1869), he exposed the everyday financial exploitation carried out by priests during births, deaths, and weddings. He argued that Brahmins had used fabricated scriptures to present their privileges as divine, and dismissed astrology and ritual prediction as nonsense designed to keep people fearful and dependent.

Education as the weapon of liberation 🔗

If caste was sustained by ignorance, then education was the obvious cure. This conviction was the most practical and lasting part of Phule’s work, and here his partnership with his wife, Savitribai Phule, became central.

The first school for girls 🔗

In 1848, Jyotiba and Savitribai opened a school for girls at Bhide Wada in Pune. It is widely regarded as one of the first indigenously run girls’ schools in the country. Phule first taught his own wife to read and write, and Savitribai went on to become one of India’s first trained female teachers and headmistresses. The curriculum was progressive for its era, covering mathematics, science, and social studies rather than only religious instruction.

The response from orthodox society was hostile. Savitribai was abused and had stones, mud, and dung thrown at her on her way to teach, to the point that she carried a spare sari to change into at school. In 1849, Jyotiba’s father asked the couple to leave the family home because their work was seen as a sin against caste norms. They did not stop. By 1851 they were running three girls’ schools in Pune with around 150 students between them.

Schools for Shudras and Atishudras 🔗

Phule did not limit his efforts to gender. He opened schools specifically for children of the Shudra and Atishudra castes, the groups locked out of education entirely under the old Peshwa rule, when Brahmin rulers had placed strict limits on the learning, occupation, and living standards of the lower castes. By educating the next generation of marginalised children, Phule aimed to erode the very foundation of Brahminical hegemony, since an educated population could no longer be told that its low status was natural or deserved.

British rule as a lesser evil 🔗

One of the more debated aspects of Phule’s thought was his attitude toward British colonial rule. Unlike many nationalist contemporaries, Phule did not see the British primarily as an enemy. He viewed colonial rule as a lesser evil compared to the indigenous dominance of the Brahmin elite.

His reasoning was strategic rather than loyalist. He believed that British administration, laws, and modern education could weaken the caste structures that the upper castes had built and defended for centuries. He noticed that the Peshwa Brahmin rulers had collected heavy taxes from the poor without spending on their welfare, while the new colonial regime at least opened schools and showed some willingness to reform. Phule wanted the lower castes to seize the opportunities of the colonial period to enter education and local bureaucracy, and so escape the tyranny of caste.

His attitude toward Christianity followed similar logic. In works like Gulamgiri, Phule pointed to conversion as a possible escape route from caste oppression, valuing the missionary schools that had educated him and that treated lower-caste children as equals. His point was less about theology and more about dignity: any system that recognised the humanity of the oppressed was preferable to one that denied it.

It is worth noting the tension in this position. Phule’s openness to British rule was a calculated bet that an external power could be a tool against an internal one. For an Indian audience studying the nationalist period, this is a useful reminder that the freedom struggle was not a single story. For Phule, political independence meant little if it simply handed power back to the same upper-caste elite who had ruled before.

The Satyashodhak Samaj 🔗

In 1873, Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the “Society of Truth Seekers.” This was the organisational heart of his movement. Its goals were to unite and uplift the Shudras and other lower castes, promote social equality, and reverse the inequality produced by the caste system.

What the Samaj actually did 🔗

The Samaj was radical in both its membership and its practices. It was open to anyone regardless of caste or religion, though its leadership came largely from non-Brahmin communities such as malis, telis, kunbis, and dhangars. Critically, it encouraged people to conduct weddings and life ceremonies without Brahmin priests, directly cutting into the economic and ritual power of the priestly class. Phule even opened his personal water well to people of all castes, a powerful symbolic act in a society where lower castes were forbidden from common wells.

Gender equality and social justice 🔗

The Samaj actively promoted women’s rights, widow remarriage, and inter-caste marriage. Phule and Savitribai opposed child marriage and the practice of sati, and campaigned against the cruel treatment of widows, including the custom of shaving their heads. In 1854 they opened a shelter for widows, and they later ran a home to prevent female infanticide. These were not abstract positions; the couple even adopted Yashwant, the son of a Brahmin widow, who went on to become a doctor.

The legacy of Phule’s thought 🔗

The Satyashodhak Samaj declined after Phule’s death in 1890, but its ideas did not. In the early 20th century, the movement was revived, and the ruler of Kolhapur, Shahu Maharaj, reserved a large share of state civil service posts for non-Brahmin communities in 1902, an early experiment in what would later become India’s reservation policy.

Phule’s deepest influence runs through B.R. Ambedkar, who treated him as a guru and carried forward the argument that caste could not be reformed away politely but had to be confronted at its roots. The constitutional commitment to social justice, the framework of affirmative action, and the modern anti-caste intellectual tradition all draw on the foundation Phule laid. His insistence that education was the route to dignity, and that the oppressed had to organise on their own terms rather than wait for upper-caste generosity, remains one of the most influential ideas in modern Indian thought.

What do you think? Was Phule right that an external colonial power could be used as a tool against internal caste oppression, or did this overlook the costs of colonial rule? And given that he saw education as the key to liberation more than 170 years ago, how far do you think access to education has actually dismantled caste hierarchy today?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jyotirao-Phule
2. https://thesatyashodhak.com/education-for-liberation-exploring-mahatma-phules-work-in-education/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyotirao_Phule
4. https://livewire.thewire.in/livewire/mahatma-jyotibha-phule-a-birth-that-continues-to-bring-this-society-to-life/
5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Savitribai-Phule
6. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/20647/1/Unit-12.pdf
7. https://www.iassite.com/satyashodhak-samaj-1873-upsc/