Person · anti-caste social reformer · India
Jyotirao Phule
Also known as Jyotirao Phule, Jyotiba Phule, Mahatma Phule, Jotirao Govindrao Phule
Nineteenth-century Pune reformer who with his wife Savitribai opened the first school for girls in India at Bhide Wada in 1848, founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873 to work against caste discrimination, and wrote the Gulamgiri (Slavery) in 1873 as the first substantial anti-caste polemic in a modern Indian language. His argument that Shudra and Dalit communities were the subcontinent's original inhabitants later displaced by Aryans gave twentieth-century anti-caste movements their founding historiographical frame. Ambedkar named him among his three gurus and worked from the Phule analysis.
- Date
- 1827–1890
- Function
- Social reform & movement
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; contemporary chronicles and institutional records as applicable.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The Bhide Wada school enrolled nine girls in its first year. The Pune Brahminical establishment forced the Phules out of their home and threatened Savitribai with cow-dung when she walked to school; she carried a spare sari to change into once she arrived. The couple also ran a well in their garden open to Dalits — a social act for which they were ostracised. Jyotirao took the title Mahatma from the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1888.
About the place
Placed at Pune, the base of the Satyashodhak Samaj and the first girls' school.
Connections (2)
- Married toSavitribai Phule
Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule were married in 1840 when Savitribai was ten and Jyotirao thirteen, and together they ran the first school for girls in India at Bhide Wada in Pune from 1848, the Satyashodhak Samaj from 1873, and the home-and-school refuge for Brahmin widows carrying illegitimate children from 1863. Their joint reform programme — education of Shudras, Dalits and women; opposition to Brahminical ritual; the Satyashodhak marriage ceremony without a Brahmin priest — makes them perhaps the subcontinent's earliest documented reformer couple with equal public presence.
- Based atPune
Jyotirao Phule's Pune — the Peshwa capital that had been the Maratha Brahminical establishment's centre for a century — was the backdrop against which his reform programme was deliberately staged. The Bhide Wada girls' school of 1848, the Satyashodhak Samaj headquarters of 1873, the first anti-caste writings and the family home with its open well for Dalits were all within the Shaniwar Peth neighbourhood where orthodox opposition was fiercest. The confrontation between the Phule household and Peshwa-era Brahminism is the shape of Pune nineteenth-century social history.