A section from the journey

The Phules and the Schools for the Excluded

In 1848, Jyotirao Phule and his wife Savitribai opened one of the first Indian-run schools for girls, in Pune. Savitribai became a pioneering woman teacher. They founded a society of truth-seekers, open to all. They worked for those long shut out by birth, and against untouchability. Jyotirao wrote a famous book that likened caste exclusion to slavery. In the same Marathi west, Pandita Ramabai gave her life to the learning and dignity of women, above all widows. We tell their work as honest history, and take no side in the quarrels of our own day.

We have met reformers who reached for the one formless God. We have met one who opened the law-books for suffering widows. Now we meet two who carried the work of mending to the darkest edge of society. They went to the children no one else would teach.

The scene is the city of Pune, in western India, in the year 1848. A young man named , together with his wife Savitribai, did something almost unheard of. They opened a school for girls, one of the first ever run by Indians themselves. In a time when learning was guarded for the few, they threw a door open to the many.

It took great courage. Many were shocked that girls should be taught at all. They were angrier still that the children of the lowest communities should sit and learn their letters. Savitribai walked to the school each day. She was sometimes jeered at and pelted with mud. She is said to have carried a second sari, to change into when she arrived. She did not stop. She became one of the very first women teachers of modern India, and a poet in her own tongue.

The Phules' work grew. In 1873 they founded a society they called the seekers of truth, open to people of every caste and every faith, with no priest required and no rank honored at the door. Its purpose was the lifting up of those long held down, and the plain dignity of every human being. They worked, too, for widows in distress, and against the cruelty of untouchability, the shutting-out of whole communities as if they were unclean.

Jyotirao set his thoughts down in a famous book, written in his own Marathi. In it he compared the shutting-out of the lower castes in his own land to a great wrong across the ocean. He meant the slavery of Africans, which had just been ended in the United States after a long and bloody struggle. He dedicated his book, in admiration, to the people of that country and their fight to free the enslaved. He hoped his own countrymen would take their example to heart. We present this as his own argument, his own reading of his society, set down in his own time.

Now a careful teacher must pause and be honest. The question of caste, of birth and rank and exclusion, is among the most debated in all the study of this land, and it touches the politics of our own day. So we step to the Threshold. We will set out what scholars find and what the tradition holds, plainly and fairly, and we will take no side in any quarrel now alive.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differIs caste, with its exclusions by birth, an ancient feature of the tradition, or was it substantially reshaped and hardened under colonial rule?

What scholars find

Historians broadly agree that colonial rule reshaped caste, as its surveys, courts, and census counted, ranked, and rigidified identities that had been more fluid and locally negotiated, with a census of 1901 even tying caste to ideas of race. They differ on how much. A strong view holds that under British rule caste became a single term able to name and gather India's many forms of social identity; note that this is not the claim that the British invented caste from nothing. A moderate view holds caste to be a real and ancient institution, rooted in varna and jati ideas and in earlier state-formation, but contingent and variable, and substantially transformed in the modern age. The honest picture is a spectrum, and the lived exclusion the Phules fought was real whatever its history.

As the tradition holds

Within the tradition, varna and jati are ancient categories, met in earlier eras, and a Hindu social and religious self-understanding long predates British rule; the colonial state hardened and counted what already existed rather than conjuring it. The tradition also carries, from its own scriptures and sages, the ideal that true worth lies in conduct and character rather than birth. Reformers such as the Phules can be heard as calling their society back to that ideal and against the exclusions that had grown over it, a summons raised from within, not imposed from without.

Phule was not alone. Across India other reformers gave their lives to the same labor of dignity, and women were among them. In the west, in the Marathi country, there was . She was so learned in Sanskrit that scholars honored her with rare titles. She gave herself to the teaching and rescue of women, above all of widows cast out and helpless. She founded homes where they could find shelter, learning, and a life of their own.

These reformers stand at the tender meeting-place of two things. On one side, the hard fact of exclusion by birth, which crushed real lives. On the other, an ideal the tradition itself had long carried, that a person's true worth lies in their character and conduct, not in the family they were born to. You met that ideal long ago, in the sages who honored truth over birth. The reformers, in their own way, were calling their society back to it.

Savitribai Phule died in 1897, of a plague she caught while nursing the sick, serving others to her very last breath. Her husband had gone a few years before her. They had not won every battle. But they had lit lamps in the darkest rooms of their world, and lamps, once lit, are hard to put out.

And here our chapter of reformers comes to rest. Look back at them all: the scholar who sought the formless God, the firebrand who cried back to the Vedas, the saint who tasted every path, the lion who woke the world, the gentle scholar who opened the law-books for widows, and these two who taught the children no one wanted. Each loved this tradition. Each labored to make it more true to its own deepest heart. That, too, is part of the long story we are following.

Savitribai changed her muddied clothes and kept walking to the school, day after day, through scorn. Where in your own life have you had to keep going toward something good, even when others tried to shame you out of it?