The rediscovery of Jotirao Phule, whom Dr. Br ambedkar (who was born a year after Phule’s death) dedicated Who were the shudras, It is very late. Mahatma Phule, as decades was known before MK Gandhi received this title, has not only been the first social reformer of ‘Bajo’ castes, but has initiated an emancipatory repertoire that remains more relevant today.
That was not a caste movement, since it intended to represent the ‘Bahujan Samaj’, literally, most people, the masses.
Jotirao Phule (1827-1890) was a Mali (gardener), a cultivating caste in close contact with the cities where their members sold their products. In one of these cities, Poona, Phule could a school of the Scottish mission.
Thomas Paine’s writings then exerted a special influence on Phule, who discovered the notions of freedom and equality in The age of reason and Human rights. This source of inspiration was developed together with that of Christianity. For Phule, Jesus Christ personifies equality and fraternity. He also considers it as the spokesman for poor people. However, Phule did not convert to Christianity and Slavery (Pages 36-38) Write about how the Christian language translated into a new speech focused on King Bali, the underground god who reigns in the underground world according to Hindu mythology. Through the ingracularization of Christian values and symbols, Phule gives their people a new and positive identity.
More importantly, Phule was, that I know, the first thinker of India to interpret the caste from an ethnic point of view to emancipate the Dalit and the shudras of the curse of the Sanskrit: instead of thesis phyms, phymims, phymids, phymids, phyimid, phyimy, the social category, the social categor, categor categor, categor categor. The social category category, the social category they form as different people. The statement that (according to the British orientalists) the ‘superior’ castes tracked their origin of the Aryan conquerors allowed it, in turn, to argue that they descended from foreign invaders who had established the subjugated civilization of fires. For him, the ‘lower’ castes were the descendants of the thesis.
In this reinterpretation of the past, invaders identify as Brahmins, while indigenous groups are described as descending of the original ruling class, the Kshatriyas. In Phule’s ideology, this category does not refer to the second Varna But it includes all the original Indians, from peasant castes to untouchable. For him, they formed a town, together with the link of a common origin and a warrior spirit:
The Kshatriyas in India (the land of Baliraja) who are the original teachers of the Earth here where they are known as Astiks, Pishachas, Rakshasas, Ahirs, Kakatas, Bhut, Kolis, Mangs, Mahars, etc. They were extremely experts in fighting without the help of weapons (weapons) and were hungry for warriors and brave. They were of an epicurean (cheerful) temperament and were given to the encryption of the goods of life. The kingdoms of most of these rulers (bosses) were in a prosperous condition, and it would not be exaggerated to say that the land of King Bali was literally flowing with milk and honey. [Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule. Vol. II, Bombay, Government of Maharashtra, 1991, p. 8. ]
Phule describes the king of these original kshatriyas, Bali, as the reigning of a rich country and this prosperity was the reason for the Arias invasions:
The extreme fertility of the soil of India, its rich productions, the prosverbial wealth of the people and the other innumerable gifts that the favorable lands enjoy, and what they have tempted the most to the cupidity of the western nations, attracted, attracted, attracted, attracted, attracted, attracted, attracted, attracted, attracted, attracted and attracted. […] The original inhabitants with whom these gods born on Earth […] The cruelties that European settlers practiced in the American Indians in their first settlement in the New World certainly had their parallel in India in the advent of the Aryans and their subjugation of the Aboriginal […] Originally they settled on the banks of the Ganges Whescence that gradually extended throughout India. However, to maintain better control over people who devised that strange mythology system, the castor’s ordering and the Code of Raw and Inhuman Laws to which we cannot find parallel among the other nations. [Cited in G. Omvedt, Dalit visions, New Delhi, Orient Longman, 1995, pp. 17-18]
Therefore, Phule was clearly the first ‘bass’ caste leader who avoided the traps of the Sanskrit when giving the ‘low’ castes with an alternative values system. For the first time, the ‘low’ castes presented themselves as ethnic groups that had inherited the legacy of an antique gold age and whose culture was different from that of the broader Hindu society. This caste ethnicity endowed the ‘lower’ castes with a new self -esteem: they no longer needed to imitate the Brahman and said that they used to be Brahmin before or that, they followed a guy of vegetarian diet, here, they established a pattern that was emulated by the architects of the Dravidian identity, who would also go to the common people of the southern India as “Sons of the Soil”. “. Ambedkar himself would also describe the dalits as the followers of a common culture, as former Buddhists who have the legs suppressed by the ‘superior’ strangers.
Phule played a second related and pioneering role. At the time he described the ‘lower’ castes as the original inhabitants of India, in ethnic terms, they eluded the problem of caste -based divisions that continually undermine the solidarity of the Plebianans in India. In fact, his efforts in favor of the ‘low’ castes were not limited only to his caste: he wanted to unite the Shudras and the Ataisehudras (Dalits), which formed the Bahujan Samaj, a formula that coined and that KoNSHI RAM had to promote. Here, Phule’s reformism goes beyond words and finds expression in actions. As an early axis of 1853, he opened schools for untouchables.
This initiative reflects another characteristic of Phule’s contribution to social reform, the third original characteristic that should be highlighted: he said his mind and called a shovel a shovel, in participation when he projected as the spokesman of the non -pastor of the non -beer. This is more obvious when he went to the Brahmins in vehement pamphlets where he presented them as rectamists raptors and corrupts the priests anxious to extort as much as they could of the poor and ignorant villagers. [See, ‘Priestcraft exposed’ in J. Phule, Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule, Vol. 2, op. cit., p. 67 and ‘A poem about the crafty, cunning and spurious (religious) books of the Brahmins (A contrast between the comfortable lives of the Brahmins and the miserable lives of the Shudras)’ in Slavery – Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule, Vol. I, op. cit., p. 81.]
Fourth, Phule was also the first caste organizer ‘Bajo’.
In 1875, Hey was attracted to Arya Samaj, but maintained his distance from this movement because they did not trust the caste reformers ‘high’ who pretended to fight the social system, but observed their rules, as Mg RANADE. Phule also remained away from Congress, which when it was a Brahman movement. Nationalism, according to him, was an illusion created by the manipulation of ‘superior’ castes to hide the internal divisions of Indian society.
Instead, he founded the Satyashodak Samaj in 1873 to strengthen the feeling of unity between the “low” castes. At least at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the Satyashodak language hug [M.S. Gore, Non-Brahman Movement in Maharashtra, New Delhi, Segment Books, 1989, p. 26.] A great spokesman for the Non Brahman movement in Maharashtra in 1910-1930, Mukundrao Patil, son of the colleague of Phule, Krishnarao Bhaalekar, was, for example, a radical defender of the untouchables just although he was a rich peasant. He bequeathed the legislation “The General Ideology Satystahodak, or opposition to the Sanskrit and the affirmation of the” No Aria “unit of the natives of Maharashtrian”. [G. Omvedt, ‘The Satyashodak Samaj and Peasant Agitation’, Economic and Political Weekly, 3 November 1973, p. 1973] At that time, Phule’s vision of the non -Brahmins as not Earos had had an impact on the small Dalit intellectuality.
In 1909, Kisan Faguji Bansode (1870-1946), a Nagpur Mahar, warned the ‘superior’ castes in the following terms:
“The Aryans, their ancestors, conquered us and gave us unbearable harassment. At that time we were their conquest, they treated us even worse than the slaves and subjected us to any torture that you are. Are you Arsh?
The Satashodak Samaj Possible Marathhas such as the Jedhe Family, of Poona, who realized “the uselessness of a purely marathon policy.” [G. Omvedt, ‘Non-Brahmans and Nationalists in Poona’, Economic and Political Weekly, Annual Number, February 1974, p. 207.] Keshavrao Jedhe adopted ‘the vision of the history of long -date Satystashodak: the Brahmins were strangers to the country and the ethnic community of the true “Hindu”; They wished only their own superiority of caste and consolidated their power through betrayal, through the falsification of historical records, and to weave a network of religious slavery that established a social hierarchy of superiority and dedicated to the masses.
The Princes of Marathha, such as Baroda Maharajá, strongly approved Phule’s ideological commitments and donated large amounts of money to their movement. [Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule, Vol. II, op. cit. p. 81 et 97. The Maharajah of Baroda also tried to uplift the untouchables through education but he could not find teachers other than Muslims and Arya Samajists for his schools (Presidential Speech of His Highness the Maharajah Gaekwar at the All-India Conference on the Abolition of Untouchability, Bombay, 1918, p. 10).] A direct descendant of Shivaji, the Maharajá of Kolhapur, Shau, which reigned between 1894 and 1922, was equally more supportive.
While Shahu inherited from Phule’s ideological legacy, he had a different perspective: as a prince, he was anxious to reaffirm his authority, fish to the Brahmins who dominated the administration of their state. For Shau, the non -Brahmanic repertoire fits a strategy to empower the ‘lower’ castes.
Last but not least, Phule was a comparative social scientist, preparation the land, also from this point of view, for the scholarship or ambedkar. No social reformer before Phule had the intuition that the fate of the caste Indians ‘low’ and the people of color in the United States was very similar. What he learned about blacks in the United States suggested a compound with the ‘lower’ castes, hence his book, Slavery (1873) that he dedicated “to the good people of the United States as a sign of admiration for their sublime selfless devotion and self -consciousness in the cause of black slavery; and with a sincere desire, so that my men in the country can take their noble examples as their guide in the emancipation of their Shudra brothers of the Trammeles de la Ladrina Brahmin ‘.
Phule was born almost 200 years ago, but their teachings are still very relevant to understand and fight caste in India today. The fact that the ethnicization of caste sacrifices is a very useful detour is particularly notable. But the persistence of caste hierarchies, almost two centuries after the struggle for equality began from below, is very revealing the fairly unique resistance of this social system. Ambedkar had lucidly anticipated the magnitude of the challenge when he wrote that the caste system was not only a division of labor, but also a division of workers and that, correlation, no, to the revolution, he would not easily like.
(Christophe Jaffrelot is a member of senior research at Ceri-SCIENCES PO/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Policy and Sociology of India at King’s College London and president of the British Association of South Studies.
