Bombay; A record in the Marathi book world was created when 10,000 copies of the collected works of Mahatma Jogia Phule were sold out within two days.
The 840-page hard-bound publication by the state government’s Maharashtra Rajya Sahitya Ani Sanskriti Mandal, was priced only at Rs 10. This was certainly a big incentive. But the brisk sale also shows the great interest in the work of the reformer in the non-Aryan movement who founded a school for girls in 1851 and for untouchables in 1852 in Pune, then dominated by Brahmins.
As soon as chief minister Sudhakar Naik released the book at the MLAs hostel, there was a big scramble to buy it. The queue stretched past several buildings in the neighborhood.
This is the fourth edition of Mahatma Phule’s collected works. The first came out in 1969. Subsequent editions carried additional material as growing research by Indians and westerners on Phule revealed substantial new information. The latest edition has 300 pages of new material, including reports of the schools through which Phule pioneered women’s education in the country.
The new edition also carries fresh material on the Satya Shodhak Samaj, founded by Phule, and obituaries written by newspapers on the reformer in 1990, Phule’s writing has also been published in chronological order and errors in the earliest editions have been corrected.
A century after his death, Phule’s relevance is being increasingly recognized because of his passionate attacks against social inequality, the caste system and Brahminism and his championing the cause of women and untouchables.
The target of severe criticism from Brahminism during his life-time and later, Phule became the subject of renewed controversy in Maharashtra three years ago when Bal Gangal, attacked him in vile terms in the weekly Sebat.
