Mahatma Jyotirao Phule

01The flower-sellers of Pune

His family came from Katgun near Satara and were Malis, growers of fruit and vegetables. They had moved to Pune, learned the florist’s trade, and supplied flower mattresses and garlands to the court of the Peshwa Baji Rao II, who granted them land; that is how the name Phule, flower-man, came to them. Jyotirao was born on 11 April 1827, the day of the fair of the god Jyotiba, and named for him. His mother Chimnabai died before he was a year old. His father took him out of school to work in the shop and the fields, but a neighbour persuaded him to send the boy to the Scottish Mission high school, which he finished in 1847. He had been married at thirteen, in 1840, to Savitribai, then nine.

02A school at Bhide Wada

In 1848 he was turned away from a friend’s wedding procession and told that a man of his caste should have known to keep out. The same year he visited the girls’ school of the American missionary Cynthia Farrar at Ahmednagar. He taught Savitribai to read and write, and with her and Sagunabai Kshirsagar opened a school for girls in January 1848 in the house of Tatyasaheb Bhide in Pune. When his father, under pressure from the community, put the couple out of the house, his friend Usman Sheikh and his sister Fatima took them in. By 1852 there were three Phule schools with 273 girls, and they opened schools for children of the Mahar and Mang castes. In 1863 they started a home where widows could give birth in safety, to stop infanticide, and he opened the water tank of his house to people barred from the village wells.

Place · Old town on the Mula–Mutha; resettled by Shahaji and Jijabai in the 1630s; Peshwa capital from 1730PuneThe town where Shivaji grew up under Jijabai’s eye, and for nearly a century the seat of the Peshwas, from which Maratha armies rode to Attock and Bengal. Later it became the workshop of Tilak, Agarkar and the Deccan Education Society.Read →

03Satyashodhak Samaj and the last years

In June 1869 he published a powada, a Marathi ballad, on the life of Chhatrapati Shivaji. In 1873 came Gulamgiri, ‘Slavery’, an attack on caste hierarchy and on the hold of priests over the lower castes, and on 24 September 1873 he founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Society of Truth-seekers, open to people of every caste and faith, which conducted weddings and rites without priests. He sat on the Poona municipality from 1876 to 1883, built for the government as a contractor, farmed sixty acres at Manjri, and in 1882 told the Hunter Education Commission that primary education should be compulsory in the villages. His Shetkaryacha Asud, ‘The Cultivator’s Whipcord’ (1881), is about the debt and misery of the peasant. In 1888 he was honoured with the title Mahatma, and the same year a stroke left him paralysed. He died in Pune on 28 November 1890.