Articles

Rashtrapita Jyotirao Phule and his movement

Then name of Jyotirao Phule who was born on 11 April 1827 known around the world because of the migration of Mulnivasi Bahujan. When I say Mulnivasi Bahujan, it includes Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes and converted Minorities. As far as the class of Minorities is concerned, we include in it all those people from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes who in historical times accepted conversion and became Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Buddhist.  Jyotirao Phule was the great. How great he was? There is no need to give certificate to him. It has been proven that Dr. Babasahab Ambedkar considered him as one of the three teacher.  The object of the article is not to justify how great Jyotirao Phule was or what he has achieved in his life time, but to understand what was his movement, objective of his movement and what lesson we can learn from it and how we can revived his movement to achieve its objective.

To understand his work we have to analyze the history in the perspective of movement rather that social reform. Some people can argue that why to dig corpse, on that Dr. Babasahab Ambedkar said those who do not know their history, do not build their future. So if we want to build future we have to dig corpse in the history.

Once Jyotirao Phule went to the wedding of his Brahmin friend Sakharam Yashavant Paranjape at Pune.  As it was the wedding of Brahmin most of the participants were Brahmins and Jyotirao Phule was walking shoulder to shoulder along with them.  So those who Sanatani Brahmins were got very angry how could, this Shudra is walking with us shoulder to shoulder. Today a Shudra has come, tomorrow the second will come, the third will come again and then the fourth will come, so the system we have created will be finished and our honor will be finished, thinking that those Sanatani Brahmins humiliated Jyotirao Phule threw him out of the procession. Jyotirao got angry, he was very angry, he stayed on there and the procession went ahead. He was thinking, what does it mean that I am a Shudra? What does it mean that I am impure? From behind a tree an untouchable was watching all this who had a bowl tied around his neck and tied a broom in the back. When Jyotirao asked him about it, he replied it is due to the past life sin.  When you have self-respect and someone humiliate you, you get angry but how can you humiliate self. A person who do not have self-respect eventually become helpless. So that untouchable becomes an inspiration behind the Jyotirao Phule’s self-respect movement.  Jyotirao Phule went back home, he wasn’t able to sleep whole night, at last, he got an answer of all his question in Varna System or Caste System. There are four Verna’s Brahmin, Kshatriyas, Vaishya, and Shudra.  In this social system Brahmin’s, Kshatriyas, Vaishya’s are the beneficiaries of the system and Shudra’s 85% population of India which we called Mulnivasi are victim of the social system who don’t have any rights.  So Jyotirao Phule understand that it was the social system due to which he was humiliated and threw out from the procession. As long as this social system exists, we will continue to be insulted. So this social system of slavery has to be eradicated.

Chhatrapati Sivaji Maharaja got humiliated, Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaja got humiliated all because of this system. Social system is the cause and humiliation is the result, insult will continue till the time the cause remains. He thought, he has to work to eradicate the cause, he has to run the self-respect movement. He alone understand that but rest of our people were illiterate.  So he made his first decision that he has to educate our people. If Brahmans has deliberately kept our people illiterate, then we will have to teach them deliberately. Brahmins, wrote religious scriptures, by writing these scriptures they kept our people illiterate, forced slavery on them, treated them like animals. So Jyotirao Phule decide that he has to consciously awaken them, stand against this system of slavery. He opened a first school at Pune on January 1 1848, the name of the school was Ahilya Shram. The first phase of the movement started with education. His first school was for girls, he gave more significance to the education of girls because when a girl become educated she can change two families verses when I boy gets educated he becomes educated alone.  He has created the definition of education, ‘to create an ability to recognize the difference between right and wrong and fight for right and courage to oppose wrong.’  How many educated people today who fight for right and oppose wrong?  It is because the education which was expected by Jyotirao Phule do not exist. If Jyotirao Phule’s education had been taught today, the Brahmin religion would have been annihilated. Brahmin’s cleverly do not allow Jyotirao’s education to reach to our people. It was Dr. Babasahab Ambedkar because of him we come to know about Jyotirao Phule. He open a school for untouchables in 1853 and for all the Mulnivasi Bahujan in 1855.  At the time when Peshwahi was on the pick, he facilitated education for our people. Earlier, people were illiterate due to lack of education, but today people are more illiterate because of the kind of education we get. Today, illiterate people protest against the wrong and educated people know the wrong but cannot dare to protest. Education was his first phase of movement.

When he gave education to our people, now they need literatures for reading, they will read Brahmins literatures which will again destroy the fighting spirit against the slavery.  So his second phase of movement, the creation of literatures. He created literatures. He wrote his first book in 1873 called Ghulamgiri (Slavery). We were told that the mutiny of 1857 was our first freedom movement. That was a movement for independence from the slavery of the British, it was a movement for freedom for all people. Govind Ranade went to Jyotirao Phule, and requested him to join the freedom movement. Jyotirao not only refused to join, but what he wrote in his first book Ghulamgiri that, ‘As long as the British are in India, to get freedom from the slavery of Brahmins, Shudras must start their own freedom movement.’  So there is the difference between slavery of British vs slavery of Brahmins. Before Britisher come to India our people were slaves of Brahmins, when Britisher come to India they made Brahmins slave and our people become twice slaves. Jyotirao Phule was very much aware of this so he was consciously through his literatures guiding our people what should be the objective of his movement.  He wrote so many books one after another ‘Farmers Hunter’, ‘Cunningness of Brahmins’, ‘Satsar I’, ‘Satsar II’, ‘Akhand’, ‘Shetkaryacha Asul’, ‘Sarvajanik Satya Dharm’. In his ‘Sarvajanik Satya Dharm which he wrote on 10 July 1887, he wrote a Will. In that Will he wrote ‘Do not let any Brahmin’s shadow fall on my dead body’.  What a dangerous man he was.  Why did he wrote like that, he knew the characteristic of Brahmins? What Brahmins do, first they protest, then they kill, then they bramhanize the ideology and then they say that Jyotirao belongs to us.  Today what they call Buddha, incarnation of Vishnu, but when Buddha was alive they used to protest against Buddha. They massacred monks, burnt all their literatures but when they found that name of the Buddha cannot vanishes they called him the tenth avatar of Vishnu. They destroy all the existence of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, but today same people trying to bramhanize Shivaji Maharaj literatures. Tomorrow they can say Shivaji Maharaj as eleventh avatar, they can say Jyotirao Phule as twelveth avatar, they can say Periyar is thirteen avatar, they can say Dr. Babasahab Ambedkar is fourteenth avatar. Because today’s India the numbers are very important in democracy, which Brahmins do not have, due to this, they use pictures of our great men in their programs, celebrating their birth anniversaries. But this does not mean that they believe in their ideology, it is their compulsion. Jyotirao Phule knew all the things, what they did with the literatures of Buddha and what they did with the literatures of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. To read our people, we should have literatures, that’s why Jyotirao created literatures, literatures for movement to direct towards the objective of movement which was the second phase of the movement.

In his literature he wrote a letter to Parshuram, why he wrote a letter to Parshuram, because Brahmins spread a fear of Parshuram in the society, what is the fear of Parshuram?  He freed the earth from Kshatriya, 21 times, that’s why Jyotirao wrote a letter to Parshuram with an address wherever you are, and he asked him to come before him. Jyotirao wrote a letter to Parshuram to eliminate the fear of Parshuram in the mind of our people, when people read it and people felt, if Jyotirao Phule does not have fear of Parshuram, we should not be afraid either. Similarly in South India, Periyar removed the fear of God from the minds of people.

The third phase of his movement was Women. How brilliant he was, so systematically and strategically he was working towards the object of movement. Savitri Phule, the first female teacher of India, who was taught by Jyotirao Phule, because he knew that when a woman is a slave, the family become slave, when the family is slave, the society become slave, and when society is slave, the country become slave. That’s why educating women and organizing them is very important. When a woman get educated, she educates the family, when the family get educated, the society become educate and when the society become educated, the country progresses. The condition of the women were in the worst state in the social system. It was not only the case of only Mulnivasi women but also the case of all women in India because all women irrespective of which Verna their parents, or husband are, women are considered as Shudra. Question may arise in your mind, why all women including Brahmins women has been declared as Shudra? Its answer lies in the history of India and which has been scientifically proved by the recent research done by Michael Bamshad, M.D., a geneticist at the University of Utah.  If anyone has work most for the women, he was Jyotirao Phule. Due to system of tradition of child marriage, tradition of Sati, women used to become a victim of the other men in the society results into pregnancies. Jyotirao Phule opened an orphanage for those babies born through such pregnancies.  Dr. Babasahab Ambedkar consider Jyotirao Phule as his teacher, Dr. Ambedkar gave all those rights to the women through Hindu Code Bill which Jyotirao Phule wanted to give but could not able to give to women.

After all these phases for the movement, the fourth phase of the movement was a need of a source of inspiration. He chose Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as a source of inspiration. Before 1869 all the history of Shivaji Maharaj was vanished from India, not songs, even his pictures were not available.  Brahmins had destroyed all existence of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. Jyotirao did four things to revive this source of inspiration. First he discovered his tomb which was in Raigad, trees were grown on it. Second Jyotirao celebrated his birth anniversary for the first time in 1869. Third he wrote books and poems on Shivaji Maharaj. Fourth Jyotirao Phule gave him the first title which was ’Kulwali Bhushan’. Kulwali means cultivator. ’Kulwali Bhushan’ means Cultivator’s Grace. Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj who has established Shivaji Maharaj’s first statue and what Dr. Babasahab Ambedkar did, at Mahad town which is situated at the bottom of the Raigad Fort, he burned Manusmruti, Manusmruti which prevented Shivaji from becoming king and humiliated him as a Shudra. In 25 December 1927 Dr. Ambedkar burnt that Manusmruti.

Jyotirao Phule established ‘Satya Shodhak Samaj’ in 24 September 1873. What does it mean by Satya Shodhak, it means Truth seeker. It means Phule want to build a society which seek for the truth and fight for truth. It means the society which was exist that time was based on false. In 12 years of work as a President of Satya Shodhak movement, he worked hard toward his goal.  What was his movement’s objective?  ‘As long as the British are in India, to get freedom from the slavery of Brahmins, Shudras must start their own freedom movement’. Brahmins realized the potential of Satya Shodhak Samaj and established Congress in 1885 against British rule.  Till the end of Jyotirao’s life on 28 November1890, he was constantly fighting for the freedom of our people from Brahmins. After him Satya Shodhak movement when into the hands of Maratha’s which later submerged it into Congress. In 1947 Brahmins got freedom from British and become rulers which was ruler before Britisher, but the movement started by Jyotirao to abolish the thousands of years of slavery of Brahmins and obtain freedom has not been achieved. Dr. Babasahab Ambedkar was able to incorporate all the rights for our people which was denied by Caste and Verna System. So Constitution is in support of Mulnivasi Bahujan but the ruler are against it. Hence we have to revive Jyotirao Phule’s movement to fight and eradicate the thousands year old slavery of our people from Brahmins.