Person · educator & social reformer · India
Savitribai Phule
Also known as Savitribai Phule — Pune
The 19-century Dalit education reformer Savitribai Phule (1831-1897), who with her husband Jyotirao Phule (1827-1890) founded India's first school for girls at Pune in 1848 — the first institutional girls' school in modern India and the first school open to Dalit girls. Savitribai was born into a Mali (gardener-caste) family at Naigaon near Satara. She was taught to read by her husband after their 1840 marriage (she was 9, he was 13). The 1848 school at Bhide Wada, Pune, was opened against Brahmin opposition; Savitribai became its head teacher. She founded 17 more schools by 1852, the Mahila Seva Mandal (Indian women's association) in 1852, and the Satya Shodhak Samaj (Society of Truth-Seekers) with Jyotirao in 1873 to combat caste discrimination. She died in 1897 while nursing bubonic plague victims. The 2006 Savitribai Phule Pune University renaming (from University of Pune) honours her legacy.
- Date
- 1848–1897
- Function
- Social reform & movement
- Condition
- historical person + institutional memory
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 18.520, 73.860
About the place
Placed at Pune, where she and Jyotirao Phule opened the first school for girls run by Indians in 1848 and where she died nursing plague patients in 1897.
Connections (2)
- Life routeShaniwarwada, Pune
Savitribai Phule taught in Pune. She and Jyotirao opened the first school for girls of any caste at Bhide Wada in 1848, less than a kilometre from Shaniwarwada, and the Peshwa city’s Brahmanical order is the whole context of what they did — the two of them were pelted with dung on the way to class and continued for years, and the Satyashodhak Samaj they later founded grew from the Peshwa capital that had ended in this same fort in 1818.
- Married toJyotirao 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.
Sources
Phule writings, school records and modern histories of education and anti-caste reform.
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