The latest biopic on Jyotiba Phule, whose 198th birth anniversary is on April 11, has come at a time when the Department of Taking Offence is super-active.
Utkarsh Mishra feels it will be interesting to see if the film portrays his attack on Brahminism in the same 'no holds barred' manner -- and, if it does, what reaction it provokes.
The year 1848 was significant for reform and revolution in Europe.
In February, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels came up with The Communist Manifesto, which was followed by the outbreak of revolutions across the continent. Although they were short-lived, they succeeded in bringing much-needed labour reforms over the subsequent years.
In India too, 1848 gave birth to an exceptional revolutionary thinker and social reformer: Jyotirao Govindrao Phule.
Although young Phule had long been a revolutionary in the making, it was an incident in 1848 that determined the path of reform he would follow for the rest of his life.
It was a path that, 40 years later, led to the title of 'Mahatma' being conferred on him -- much before it was given to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. In fact, Gandhi himself called Phule 'the real Mahatma'.
Now, an eponymous movie on Phule is set to release on April 25, with Pratik Gandhi playing the titular role. It is directed by Ananth Mahadevan.
The trailer shows a young Jyotiba fighting against caste oppression and orthodoxy to promote female education, widow remarriage, and other causes that became his life's mission after that fateful year of 1848.
Jyotirao was born into a family of gardeners (Malis) in 1827. In the Hindu caste hierarchy, the Malis were categorised as Shudras, which meant that, traditionally, the doors to education were shut to them. But Jyotirao's father Govindrao Phule admitted his son to a village school in Poona (now Pune) that was run by missionaries.
Phule's biographer Dhananjay Keer writes that the young Jyotirao was a brilliant student. Yet, a Brahmin clerk advised his father to take his son out of school because 'he might refuse to work in the fields if he is educated'.
Oxford University Professor Rosalind O'Hanlon, in her book Caste, Conflict, and Ideology, terms this incident 'very difficult to document' but still there was a three-year gap in Phule's studies before he was admitted to the Scottish Mission High School, from where he completed his education in 1847.
At high school, he met two Brahmins who were to be his lifelong companions in his struggle: Sadashiv Ballal Govande and Moro Viththal Valavekar. As per his biographers, young Phule and his friends 'were fired with ideas of liberating their country from foreign rule.'
They read about the lives of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and George Washington which had a great impact on them. But the work that most affected Phule and his friends was Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, which they read in 1848.
Inspired by these great lives and by the ideas of the American Revolution (in which Thomas Paine played an instrumental role), the boys had started physical training to be ready for any future action.
Keer recalls an incident that Phule had with two British soldiers in 1847, soon after finishing his education. Incensed by their 'feeling of superiority and arrogance', the 'stout, sturdy and valiant' Jyotirao thrashed them both.
Till then, in his own words, Phule was 'possessed with the idea of driving out the British from India'.
But in 1848, Phule went to attend the wedding of one of his Brahmin friends. There, he was 'recognised as a Mali' by an orthodox attendee and was treated indignantly for 'violating caste rules' by walking alongside Brahmins in the procession.
Keer points out that this incident had a deciding effect on young Jyotirao, and from the revolutionary-in-the-making who wanted to drive the British out, in the words of O'Hanlon, 'his emphasis shifted towards a concern with social problems seen as the consequence of social and religious practices badly in need of reform.'
In his later writings, most prominently in Gulamgiri (Slavery), Phule describes British rule as having been sent to India by 'the divine Creator of the universe to liberate the disabled Shudras from the slavery of the Aryans'.
Again, O'Hanlon asserts that the significance of the wedding incident has been 'embroidered' by Phule himself and his biographers but agrees that it was not 'inconsistent with his intellectual development' in 1848.
It was the same year that he visited an American mission school run in Ahmednagar for girls belonging to the depressed classes. He followed its example by opening a similar school in Pune in August 1848, thus becoming the 'first Indian to start a school for the untouchables and girls in Maharashtra'.
And his wife Savitribai became the first female teacher in India.
Historian Ramachandra Guha writes in Makers of Modern India: 'Phule was convinced that Western education, with its rationalist outlook, could play a key role in the emancipation of the low castes and the concomitant undermining of Brahmin power.'
Phule welcomed -- argues Professor Dorothy Figueira of the University of Georgia -- Western Indological scholarship as a divine instrument for revealing the long-hidden truth of selective and deceptive interpretations of the Vedas by the Brahmins to justify their social dominance and condemn the majority of Indians to ignorance and subjugation.
However, in his submission to the Indian Education Commission of 1882, also known as the Hunter Commission, Phule chides the government for spending 'profusely a large portion of revenue on the education of the higher classes'.
He is critical of the idea that if the higher classes are educated, it will lead to the spread of education to other sections of society as well. Phule argues that this hasn't happened and the government must 'open schools for Shudras in every village'.
However, he insists those schools should be free of Brahmin teachers and should instead have trained Shudra teachers, who would also be able to teach trades like farming and carpentry to the students.
He also requested the Commission to 'sanction measures for the spread of female primary education on a more liberal scale'.
Phule's insistence on educating women, for which he faced a backlash not just from the upper castes but also from his own community, can be understood from a play called The Third Eye, which he wrote in 1855.
The play describes how a poor cultivator and his pregnant wife were defrauded by a Brahmin priest who threatens them with the death of their unborn child, citing an unfortunate conjunction of the zodiac, if they failed to perform certain ceremonies and give a feast to a large number of Brahmins.
After spending all their money on the ceremonies and the feast, the peasant couple is met by a Christian missionary, who tells them how they were fleeced by the priest.
They realise their folly and criticise the Brahmins for 'exploiting generations of poor and ignorant men like himself'.
As described by Professor O'Hanlon, the couple then 'resolves to educate themselves at Phule's own night school, since in education and knowledge lay the key to a true understanding of their own society, of events in the world, and of the real natures of God and men.'
O'Hanlon argues that in Phule's view, the conservative mindset of the lower castes was one of the greatest obstacles to their acquisition of modern education and skills.
This deeply ingrained attitude hindered the progress of his reform efforts.
He believed that for any meaningful social transformation to occur, it was essential to first reject Brahminical authority and the hierarchical values that had long justified the oppression and subjugation of the lower castes. Only then could true emancipation and empowerment become possible.
On the other hand, the play's portrayal of the peasant's wife, who persuades him to obey the priest despite his misgivings, shows Phule's awareness of the crucial role women played in the transmission of traditional culture and religious attitudes.
It also describes how Phule held Brahmins responsible for the misery of the peasantry.
He described this in detail in his 1883 book Shetkaryacha Asud, where he argues that a tyrannical religious order, the overwhelming dominance of Brahmin officials in government departments, and the complacent, luxury-seeking attitude of British administrators combined to deceive and oppress the Shudra farmers.
Phule had strong disagreements with his colleagues over the extent to which he held Brahmins responsible for the condition of the depressed classes, whom he was the first to describe as Dalits, instead of Shudras.
On September 24, 1873, Phule convened a meeting of his followers and admirers, where it was decided to form the Satya Shodhak Samaj (the Society of Truth-Seekers).
In the introduction of Volume 2 of Phule's Collected Works, the main objectives of the organisation are described as 'to liberate the Shudras and Ati-Shudras and to prevent their exploitation by the Brahmins'.
'All the members of the Satya Shodhak Samaj were expected to treat all human beings as children of God and worship the Creator without the help of any mediator. The membership was open to all, and the available evidence proves that some Jews were admitted as members,' it says further.
As described earlier, Phule refused to regard the Vedas as sacrosanct, and believed that these religious scriptures were not divine truths but tools of control, authored and perpetuated by the Brahmins to consolidate power and ensure the continued marginalisation and enslavement of the indigenous people -- namely, the Shudras, Dalits, and tribal communities.
Professor Figueira describes Phule's radical reinterpretation of the Aryan myth to expose and dismantle the ideological foundations of caste oppression.
Unlike the prevailing discourse that glorified a Vedic Golden Age as the cradle of Indian identity, Phule portrayed the Aryans not as noble forebears but as barbaric invaders who conquered and enslaved the indigenous people.
In Phule's view, true Indian culture was not derived from the Aryan invaders but from the indigenous Dasyus, whose virtuous past was symbolised by the mythical reign of King Bali -- a just and enlightened ruler dethroned by Aryan deceit.
By reclaiming this non-Aryan past, Phule sought to empower the oppressed castes to recognise their historical worth and demand justice.
He turned the very authority of the Vedas against the Brahmins.
In doing so, Phule didn't reject textuality but called for a reinterpretation of sacred texts through the lens of reason and justice, urging the Shudras to discard false consciousness and embrace a new, inclusive vision of Indian identity -- one rooted in the legacy of the oppressed rather than the myths of their oppressors.
This reinterpretation by Phule is again heavily inspired by the idea of deism that is contained in Paine's Rights of Man. Paine believed in a single, benevolent Creator, not because of religious texts or church teachings, but because the natural world, governed by laws and order, points to a divine designer.
This means that nature itself is the true revelation of God -- not scriptures written by human beings.
These ideas are echoed in the words of Phule: 'The divine Creator of the universe is the controller and regulator of the universe, and He has endowed all of us with the intellectual faculty. Taking pity on us Shudras, He has brought the British rule to India... with the intention of emancipating us Kshatriyas from the stranglehold of the Brahmin demons. And these kind-hearted English people have imparted the true knowledge to the oppressed and ignorant people like us. This blessed development has created a strong urge in our minds to free ourselves from the said stranglehold of the cunning and treacherous plot of the Brahmins'.
From the 1860s, writes Guha, Phule's interests shifted from managing his schools to wider programmes of social reform, such as widow remarriage.
In 1863, he opened a 'Home for the Prevention of Infanticide', where pregnant widows could come and give birth secretly and quietly return to their families, leaving the babies at the home.
One such baby was adopted by the Phules as their son, whom they named Yeshwant.
In 1876, Phule was nominated as a member of the Poona municipality and served in this position till 1883.
Phule supported his social work by setting up a business with the money he inherited from his father's second wife. He established a metalwork shop in Pune and supplied metal-casting equipment.
As Phule completed his 60th year in 1887, his followers decided to pay homage to their leader for his ceaseless struggles for their cause.
On May 11, 1888, at a large gathering in his honour in Mumbai, Phule was conferred the title of 'Mahatma'.
Two months later, in July 1888, Mahatma Phule was felled by a stroke that paralysed the right side of his body. He was confined to bed from September to December 1888.
His correspondence from those days shows him using the motto 'Satyamev Jayate' on his letterhead -- the maxim that Independent India adopted in its emblem.
Two years later, on November 28, 1890, Phule passed into the ages.
His life and work have always served as an inspiration for those who struggle against the marginalisation of Dalits and other depressed classes.
Dr B R Ambedkar regarded Phule as one of his three Gurus, alongside Buddha and Kabir.
The latest biopic on Phule has come at a time when the Department of Taking Offence is super-active. It will be interesting to see if it portrays his attack on Brahminism in the same 'no holds barred' manner-- and, if it does, what reaction it provokes.
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