Mahatma Phule’s Strategy to Mobilise Dalits

Mahatma Phule showed remarkable imagination and creativity in his attempt to mobilise the Shudras. First, he projected the Brahman as the villain of the piece, responsible for the present plight of the Shudras. Second, he made education of dalits the cornerstone of his strategy and tirelessly worked for spreading education among them. Finally, He sought to project a new collective identity for all the lower castes in Maharashtra. He sought to bring together the Mali-Kunbis and the Mang-Mahars into a single community of the oppressed.

Time and again Phule presents the Brahman as the villain solely responsible for the plight of the low castes and for the oppressive caste system. One play in which such a portrayal of the Brahman comes out most forcefully is ‘Traitya Ratna’ written by Phule sometime in 1855 but first published in 1979 in the journal Purogami Satyashodhak (April-June). 

The principal characters of the play are a poor cultivator and his wife, a Christian missionary and Phule himself who makes interventions as the commentator. The plot is simple. The Brahman priest visits the pregnant wife of the cultivator and cautions her against an unfortunate conjunction of the zodiac which can destroy her unborn child. The only way to ward off the danger is to propitiate the God Maruti and feed a large number of Brahmans. The cultivator and his wife incur a heavy debt in order to give the feast to the Brahmans. The Brahman is not only portrayed as a cunnin; rascal who plays on the ignorance and credulity of the simple peasant, bu also as heartless and unscrupulous. During the feast the Brahman keeps the peasant couple waiting in the hot sun and when it is over spares the tired, exhausted and hungry couple only a few left-overs.

Shortly thereafter, the cultivator and his wife come across a Christian missionary preaching by the roadside and enter into a discussion with him. As the missionary explains the true nature of God as kind and good who could never have willed the inhuman caste system and explains how he cannot be found in idols, the cultivator’s anger grows and he comes to understand how he has been fooled, cheated and robbed in the name of propitiating the idol of Maruti and planetary forces. The play ends on the happy note of the cultivator and his wife realising their folly and resolving to educate themselves at Phule’s own night school.

What the play brings out clearly is not only the fact that the Brahmans, acting as the guardians of Hindu beliefs and institutions, exploited and robbed the ignorant low caste people, but also the existence of a conspiracy on the part of the Brahmans to deliberately keep the Hindu masses ignorant and illiterate. Phule’s endeavour in the play (as also in his other writings) is to show how the Brahmans conspired to use the doctrines of karma, dharma and the ideas of varna and jati not only to exploit and plunder the low castes but also to keep them permanently backward. The commentator urges the Malis and the Kunbis, the Mangs and the Mahars to cease fearing the Brahman and to no longer fall a prey to his conspiracy, for now, God has sent the English into this country to revoke the disabilities which the Brahmans had imposed on the Shudras.

In Priestcraft Exposed (Phule, 1969b: 50) which is a collection of ballads or pavadas, Phule depicts the miserable dependence of the Kunbi on the Brahman priest at every stage of his life. He narrates how the Brahman priest plunders the poor and ignorant Kunbi at the time of birth in the family, at the time of his marriage, at the time his daughter reaches puberty and when the Shudra builds his house. The picture that emerges is of a simple and hardworking peasant who earns by the sweat of his brow only to have the crafty priest loot him at every stage. In a short ballad entitled ‘Brahman Teachers in the Education Department’, Phule tells us how Brahman teachers discriminate against low caste students; how they repeat lessons and explain them well to the high castes and punish them judiciously; whereas in the case of other (low caste) children, they strike them with their fists, twist their ears sharply, and in general treat them such as to make them run away from school. Phule also narrates how Brahman school teachers send misleading reports to the Education Department regarding the aptitude of the children of cultivators, portraying them as unfit for higher studies, and accuses the British of taking no interest in the education of low castes. In Phule’s colourful language, ‘When a blind man grinds the corn, the dogs eat all the flour’.

In Slavery Phule makes a more frontal attack on the ‘Brahman Priest’ and the ‘Village Kulkarni’ (the village clerk-cum-accountant also a Brahman) as exploiters. Phule’s condemnation of the Brahman and the Kulkarni and his equation of them with the heartless money-lenders, was to later influence the non-Brahman ideologues’ portrayal of the ‘Brahman and the baniya’ as the real enemies of the low castes.

A crucial aspect of Phule’s strategy for the uplift of the Shudras was to free them for their dependence on the Brahmans for rituals and education. Thus he urged friends and relatives to arrange marriages in their families on the basis of the qualities of the prospective bride or bridegroom and not on the advice of the Brahman priest or Astrologer. Likewise, he urged the British to train the Malis, the Kunbis, the Mahars and the Mangs to become teachers and appoint them in schools. Phule’s belief in a deliberate and well planned Brahman conspiracy to oppress and keep backward the low castes as well as his portrayal of the Brahman as a villain appears more polemical than historically true. But then, Phule, it must be remembered, was using the conspiracy theory as a political and ideological weapon.