On April 11, we commemorated the birth anniversary of Mahatma Jyotirao Govindrao Phule, a towering figure in India’s social history. Born in 1827 into a society steeped in the cruel hierarchies of caste and patriarchy, Phule rose not merely as a social reformer but as a fearless visionary who imagined an egalitarian future far ahead of his time. His fight was not for reform alone—it was for a moral and political revolution.

At a time when Hindu society was bound by ritualistic orthodoxy and entrenched caste-based discrimination, Phule waged an unrelenting war against Brahminical supremacy. But what distinguished his resistance was the weapon he chose—education. In the face of condemnation, boycott, and threats, Phule and his equally radical partner, Savitribai Phule, dared to open the first school for girls in Pune in 1848. They educated Dalits and women when the orthodoxy declared it sinful. Phule believed, and rightly so, that knowledge would break the shackles of ignorance, and that education was the sword with which social slavery could be cut.

Phule’s conception of education was deeply political. For him, to teach the oppressed to read and write was not simply about imparting knowledge—it was about challenging the very grammar of power. His words still ring with force today: “Without education, wisdom was lost; without wisdom, morals were lost; without morals, development was lost; without development, wealth was lost; without wealth, the Shudras were ruined." This was not a poetic lament—it was a structural diagnosis.

Even today, the denial of quality education to marginalised communities—whether by systemic neglect or deliberate exclusion—mirrors the oppressive patterns Phule condemned. His life remains a manifesto demanding that education be reclaimed as a weapon of liberation, not hoarded as an instrument of privilege.

But........

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