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A Life Lived Well, and Lessons
Thereof
Braj Ranjan Mani
 Jotirao Phule,
and his wife Savitribai, declared war on brahmanic-casteist culture
and religion. This Maharashtrian couple presented the first major
anti-caste ideology and led a mass activism against the ascriptive
norms and values. Their distinct brand of socio-cultural radicalism
was based on uniting all the oppressed, whom they would call
stree-shudra-atishudra. (Literally, stree means women, shudra is
productive servile caste at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, and
atishudra means ‘those beyond the shudras’, earlier despised as
outcastes, or untouchables. In contemporary language, shudras and
ati-shudras are other backward classes and dalits, respectively. But
the Phules included in their notion of the oppressed, other
marginalised groups as well such as adivasis and Muslims.)
After a century
of elitist trivialisation, Jotiba Phule is belatedly recognised as
the father of Indian social revolution. An organic thinker and
system builder, he founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (the Society of
Truthseekers) in 1873, the first grassroots anti-caste organisation,
and wrote many subversive books, including the famous Ghulamgiri
(Slavery), a manifesto of sorts against the caste-brahmanic culture.
His critique of the whole structure of hierarchy and oppression; his
delineation of knowledge-power nexus; his deconstruction of
brahmanic myth-history and attempts to replace it with an
alternative reading of the past and present; his subversion of
brahmanic religion and scriptures; his highly gendered view of
women’s oppression and symbiosis between caste and patriarchy; his
superb exposure of the emergent Hindubrahmanic nationalism as an
extension of obscurantist, self-strengthening movement of the caste
elites; and above all, his life-long campaigns for democratisation
of education, have been highlighted in some scholarly and popular
writings.
 Savitribai Phule
(1831-97), struggled and suffered with her revolutionary husband in
an equal measure, but remains obscured due to casteist and sexist
negligence. Apart from her identity as Jotirao Phule’s wife, she is
little known even in academia. Modern
India’s first
woman teacher, a radical exponent of mass and female education, a
champion of women’s liberation, a pioneer of engaged poetry, a
courageous mass leader who took on the forces of caste and
patriarchy certainly had her independent identity and contribution.
It is indeed a measure of the ruthlessness of elite-controlled
knowledge-production that a figure as important as Savitribai Phule
fails to find any mention in the history of modern India. Her life
and struggle deserves to be appreciated by a wider spectrum, and
made known to non-Marathi people as well.
 Before
underlining the significance of her struggle, let us touch upon the
uniquely beautiful relationship that the Phule couple shared with
each other. What made their match unparalleled was their total
identification with each other, even in public life. She was still a
teenager when she started involving herself in educational
activities with her husband — playing an equally important role in
founding and running schools for women and dalits — in the face of
opposition from the orthodoxy whose power and authority she
challenged. Savitri was only 18 and Jotirao was 22-years-old when
they were maligned, ostracised, and finally turned out of their own
home by Joti’s father who feared a high caste backlash for educating
dalits and women, traditionally debarred under the brahmanic scheme
from the right to education.
Just imagine,
two young people in love taking on the home and the world not for
their romance but for liberating the shackled and the crushed — with
a majestic belief that every woman, every child and every man has a
right, a divine right, a natural right, to get educated and remake
their life. What is more remarkable, they kept alive this
revolutionary spirit throughout their lives, setting a benchmark in
social and political engagement that has few parallels anywhere.
To Savitribai
and Jotirao, the idea of justice and fairness, of equality between
man and woman seems to have been instinctive. Perhaps, it was more
so in the case of Savitribai as she suffered more as a woman. She
never needed convincing for the need of an inclusive and
compassionate world. She had her convictions already from the start
— straight and clear. Does that make her less revolutionary than the
latter-day privileged radicals and feminists who have better
mastered the dialectics and duality of the human world but struggle
to enact their subversive intellectual constructs in their own
lives, let alone animating other people’s lives?
Savitribai’s
life and struggle is an excellent answer to the heart-cry of Marx, a
revolutionary thinker: “Philosophers have only understood the world
in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” She did not
understand the world in different ways, she understood it in one
simple way — the necessity and possibility of making it more humane,
more inclusive, more compassionate. What makes her important is that
she lived up to this simple understanding in a magnificent way.
S avitribai’s
role in the anti-caste and women’s struggle is unique. She emerges
as the only woman leader among all social movements in nineteenth
century
India who linked patriarchy with caste. The nineteenth century is
celebrated in history textbooks as the century of glorious
socio-cultural regeneration led by an array of luminaries such as
Rammohun Roy, Dayananda, and Vivekananda. What is not stated is the
fact that the Indian Renaissance, confined to the upper echelons of
society, was closely intertwined with the hegemonic neo-brahmanic
Hinduism and the self-strengthening cultural nationalism. Savitribai
Phule, on the other hand, was in the forefront of a socio-cultural
struggle that challenged the tendency to focus only on higher social
groups—brahman and allied castes. She encouraged a reversal of
traditional subservient roles of women and depressed castes.
Apart from
setting up the first ever school for women in
India,
Savitribai started a women’s association called Mahila Seva Mandal
as early as 1852. The association worked for raising women’s
consciousness about their human rights and other social issues.
Being a woman, she easily recognised the double downtroddenness of
most women as she saw the gender question in relation to caste and
brahmanic patriarchy. She engaged herself at various levels to
address women-specific problems. She campaigned against
victimisation of widows. She advocated and encouraged widow
remarriage. She canvassed against infanticide of’illegitimate’
children. She opened a home to rehabilitate such children. Her own
home became a sanctuary for deserted women and orphaned children.
She went on to organise a successful barbers’ strike against the
prevailing practice of shaving of widows’ heads. She did all this
taking grave personal risks. Many of these misogynistic practices
have now receded in the background. But in her time, they tormented
and destroyed countless women. Maligned, humiliated, and attacked
for challenging the anti-women practices, Savitribai’s struggle
encouraged and inspired a whole generation of outstanding
campaigners for gender justice in
Maharashtra
— Dr Anandi Bai Gopal Joshi, Pandita Ramabai, Tarabai Shinde,
Ramabai Ranade, and many others have been inspired by her efforts.
A unique
spiritual vision sustained and animated Savitribai’s life and
struggle. A deeply devout and compassionate person, she drew
inspiration and strength from the benevolence of a higher power. Her
belief in a higher power, however, led her to wage a war against
discriminatory brahmanic gods. She despised caste-obsessed brahmanic
religion and its rituals, but she was a great admirer of many moral
and ennobling tenets of other religions. At the heart of her
religiosity were compassion and a sacred morality that bound the
individual with society. Like Jotiba Phule, she appreciated the
power of culture and religion in the politics of transformation.
Institutionalised religions, especially the caste-brahmanic
Hinduism, have long been the target of social revolutionaries. But
the tendency among many radical secularists to dismiss all religio-spiritual
experiences as hoax is preposterous. Even Marx was not as dismissive
of religion as he is generally made out to be. This becomes clear
when we read him carefully.
As he writes in
Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Religious
suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real
suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the
opiate of the people.” In other words, religion is not unreal for
the people. The important thing is, the use or abuse of religion.
While most institutionalised religions have tended to align with the
powers that be, thus going along the oppressive status quo, there
have been other traditions where religio-spiritual greats have
invoked God and religion to build an exploitation-free world. Kabir
… would employ religious idioms to attack the oppressive political
and religious authority. In (his) hands, religion became a weapon of
the oppressed. On the other hand, Tulsidas, the author of
Rania-Charita-Manas, did the opposite — he used religion in a most
blatant manner to bolster caste and brahmanism. There is a world of
difference between a Kabir and a Tulsidas. Unlike many atheist
radicals, Savitribai and Jotiba Phule were sensitive to the power
and hold of religion on people’s imagination. They saw real religion
beyond caste and brahmanism, and strived to build an emancipatory
religion.
At the centre of
Savitribai Phule’s struggle was material and socio-spiritual
liberation of the oppressed. It is a measure of her greatness that
she lived up to this ideal more in her deeds than in her words.
Anyone who is familiar with her life knows that she cared for
others’ children like her own, and she was particularly fond of the
weak and the abandoned. She died while she was nursing a plague-
affected child — she got infected while serving the affected people.
In her life and her death, she embodied the noble and the sublime.
Not grandiloquent words and great ideals in abstract, but her
day-to-day public life, her suffering with the suffering people
makes her majestic.
Also Read:
Of Life
in Brahmanical India
9
April
2008
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