Nov. 28 was the 102th death anniversary of Mahatma Phule. Mahatma Phule’s centenery was not celebrated with the fervor that Dr. Ambedkar’s birth centenery was, yet it saw both mass rallies and a renewed realization of the importance of this earliest great social radical, especially among the awakening Dalit and “low caste” masses.
In Maharashtra, Mahatma Phule’s memory has never been erased, though brahminical forces suppressed his works for a long time and he was stigmatized (with Dr. Ambedkar) as pro-British by the upper castes. Only a few years ago a pandit of a Bombay Sanskrit institute tried to attack him as a British puppet and vulgar casteist; a wave of mass protest throughout the state was the result.
Bali Raja : The publication of a new volume of his Marathi collected writings saw people stroming its Bombay distribution center to finish off, in one day, the first 10,000 copies published. And Mahatme Phule’s symbol of the peasant masses, Bali Raja (Mahabali to Keralites), is the strongest contender to the Aryan Rama for popular identity.
The women’s movement, the farmer’s movement, peasant-based environmental movements and the anti-caste movement in Maharashtra all view him as a forerunner; as one of the most popular Marathi women’s songs has it in a way that would make Bombay/Delhi fashionable feminists wince, “My first salute to Jotiba, who gave birth to women’s liberation”. Yet this heritage has become fragmented today.
Dalit and “lowcaste”radicals can quote his scathing attacks on brahminism without dealing with his analysis of peasant exploitation; Sharad Joshi can focus on peasants but avoid stressing the caste aspects of gulamgiri; Madhav Gadgil and Ram Guha can cite his description of the interdependence of forests, grasslands and cultivation in traditional village society without worrying if Mahatma Phule’s total vision contradicts their thesis of the ecological functions of caste. The fragmentation of vision reflects the disconnected, inchoate, conflicting state of the movements themselvs.
Mahatma Phule, in his own way, anticipated this and had his own answer to it: the core of his philosophy, seeking truth. Vidya, science, knowledge, education was central to his thinking and was the opposite of the shastra of the brahmans. Education was not to be a gateway to employment, an acquisition of the “information base” of modernity, an indoctrination that would upgrade clerks and wives according to the needs of a patriarchal elite. Rather it was to be a road to human liberation, which would help those who acquired it to question authority, to overthrow the puranas and sacred books, to constitute themselves as full human beings and the foundation of all authority.
Nehru platitudes: Mahatma Phule would have been as appalled at the rote character of learning today (whether it is Hindu nazi mantras or Nehruvian platitudes students are taught to memorize) as he would by the fact that only 30% of the education budget is spent on primary and secondary education. Seek truth was his theme; the satya shodhak samaj was his organization (a fitting contrast to “brahmo”, “arya” and “prarthana” samajes!) and his call for this has an almost postmodern ring to it:
All ideologies have decayed;
No one views comprehensively;
What is trivial, what is great
Cannot be understood.
Philosophies fill the market
Gods have become a cacophony,
To the enticements of desire
People fall prey …
All, everywhere has decayed,
Truth and untruth cannot be assayed
This is how people have become one,
Everywhere.
There is a cacophony of opinions,
No one heeds another
Each one thinks the opinion
he has caught is great. .
Pride in untruth
Dooms them to destruction
So the wise people say,
Seek Truth
