We Need To Remember Jyotiba Phule, A Champion Of Feminism And A Critic Of The Caste System

Fighting enemies as a soldier is very straightforward. The enemy wears a different uniform. The enemy soldier is from another nation. There is no sense of brotherhood at all.

Fighting social evils is much more difficult. It is propagated by your own countrymen. And it is so deeply ingrained that it takes much more than a simple bullet to eradicate it. It takes years of preaching and influencing people to open their eyes to the right way.

And even then there is an inherent risk associated with people who try to challenge social norms. RTI activists get killed almost every month for trying to show people the truth in India.

Mahatma Phule was an activist far ahead of his time. He fought against woman oppression and casteism eve before people thought of opposing it. And it all started at a wedding of his friend.

Jyotiba Phule was attending his Brahmin friend’s wedding and like every friend, he participated in the marriage procession too. Because he was from the lower Mali caste, he was insulted.

He was deeply affected by the incident and he started to think about fighting the system in a peaceful manner.

He had also married a 13-year-old Savitribai Phule, in a child marriage that was a norm at the time.

 

He taught Savitribai to read and write and gave her books like ‘Rights Of Man’ to read. And to replicate this, at the age of just 22 he opened the first school for untouchables and women.

If you thought that he did all of this without opposition, you are grossly mistaken. He was forced to leave his parental home for taking this bold step.

And to put it into the perspective of how ahead of his time he was, he started the school 20 years before MahatmaGandhi was born.

 

He even attacked the Vedas, considered by practising Hindus to be the fundamental texts of Hinduism. He called them false consciousness. He also coined the word ‘Dalit’.

Insulting the Vedas out in the open is still very difficult to do even in today’s times. But in those times, the Vedas were the stronghold of the upper caste Brahmins. They misused the texts to oppress the lower castes and gave their own caste a higher standing.

Mahatma Phule called them out for exploiting the texts to up their own social standing.

 

Even though he lived more than one and a half century ago he strongly fought against female foeticide and fought for widow remarriage.

His stand on caste system was so strong that in comparison even a national leader like Lokmanya Tilak was apprehensive about it. Tilak refused to sign a memorandum that aimed to abolish untouchability.

 

Even though he was against caste discrimination, he never discriminated himself. He even adopted a Brahmin boy as his own. He went ahead and gave away 60 acres of his land away to the adopted son.

This shows how liberal he was at the time. Even today, people would rather go for an IVF or a surrogate baby than straightaway adopt a kid. And it would be straight improbable that a person would give away all his assets to an adopted son.

Jyotiba Phule deserves much more credit for social reform than what he gets today. He should be among the great freedom fighters, right up there with Gandhi and Sardar Patel. Because he tried to free people’s minds.

Which is a far more difficult thing to do as compared to freeing a country from foreigners.

Sources – DNA, Velivada