Hypocrisy over Jyotirao Phule

It makes little sense to complain about the upcoming biopic’s depiction of the 19th century anti-caste crusader’s vehement opposition to Brahmanism that is rife in his writings

Director Ananth Mahadevan believes he has mollified Brahmin organisations upset over the trailer of his film Phule, a biopic of Jyotirao Phule (his first name is spelt variously), India’s foremost crusader against caste discrimination in the 19th century. After meeting the representatives of the Akhil Bhartiya Brahmin Samaj, Mahadevan claimed they were happy when he told them that the film shows “certain Brahmins” helped Phule set up 20 schools for the lower castes.

The film’s release on April 11, Phule’s birth anniversary, was postponed to April 25, for incorporating the changes the Censor Board ordered after having cleared the biopic earlier. A voiceover explaining the caste system will be deleted, as will terms such as Mahar, Mang, Peshwai and Manu’s system of caste. It’s hoped the deletion of these terms, which pepper Phule’s body of work, does not turn him into a caricature in Phule, the film.

It will indeed be ahistorical to claim Phule wasn’t opposed to Brahmins, for imposing the caste system on society for perpetuating their domination. In fact, Rosalind O’Hanlon’s monumental study, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and the Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, begins thus: “Jotirao Govindrao Phule was the son of an obscure lower caste family who pioneered the attack on the religious authority of Brahmins, and their predominance in the institutions of the British government and administration.”

Phule did befriend Sadashiv Govande and Moro Valavekar, both poor Brahmins, at the Scottish missionary school, from where he passed out in 1847. Both of them were closely associated with Phule’s endeavour to establish schools for the lower castes, including Mahars and Mangs, the erstwhile untouchables. Yet differences between Phule and his Brahmin friends surfaced over their conflicting perspectives on education. Phule, in later years, wrote his Brahmin friends wanted only rudimentary education to be given to the lower castes, in contrast to his insistence on a thorough education for them.

All biographies of Phule date his alienation from the Brahmin community to 1848, the year he was invited to attend the marriage of a Brahmin friend. At the marriage procession, Phule was recognised as belonging to the Mali caste and severely admonished for having the temerity to join it. Shaken, he narrated his experience to his father, who detailed to him the punishment such a “social misdemeanour would have incurred under the rule of the Brahmin peshwas.”

Phule’s perception of the oppressive Peshwa rule, popularly known as Peshwai, was articulated by a 14-year-old Mang girl whom he had taught for three years. Phule handpicked her to read out an essay to a Christian visitor, a convert, to the school. She vividly described the suffering the untouchables were subjected to “under the Brahmin government of the peshwas.” Just these two episodes in Phule’s life should raise questions over the aesthetic-ideological implications of deleting the word Peshwai from the film.

This is because Phule’s experiences inspired his social analysis, which claimed the Hindu religion with its rigid hierarchy, of which the Brahmins were custodian as well as beneficiary, kept the lower castes in servitude. For instance, the commentator in his play The Third Eye asks Malis and Kunbis to “rather let robbers fall onto your house than put your trust into a Brahmin priest.” And to the priest in the play, the commentator says, “You go and do a job of work, and you’ll find that you will make a living in this world very well without insulting Mangs and Mahars.”

Phule’s opposition to Brahmanism constitutes the leitmotif of his ballad Priestcraft Exposed. In yet another ballad, Brahmin Teachers in the Education Department, he underscores the community’s numerical domination in the British administration, their discouragement of the lower castes from educating themselves, and the shallowness of their progressivism.

Arguably, among Phule’s writings, his A Ballad of the Raja Chatrapati Shivaji Bhosale is the most relevant today. In it, Phule depicts Shivaji as the protector of cultivators (Kunbis) from the depredations of the Mughals–and not as the saviour of the Brahmin and the cow, a view the contemporary ideology of Hindutva upholds. The ballad rubbishes the claim that the advice of Brahmin ministers was crucial in the Maratha king’s extraordinary achievements, and instilled pride in the lower castes regarding their military prowess.

An oft-quoted verse from A Ballad has Phule appealing to the British queen to rescue the lower castes from the domination of Brahmins. It reads: “Oh Queen, you have the power; Hindusthan is asleep/Everywhere, there is the rule of the Brahmans; open your eyes and see.” After describing the various sites of Brahmin domination, Phule says, “The Bhats [Brahmans] are everywhere; the Kunbis have no redress/Joti [Phule] says, we run for help; deliver us from these evils.”

This verse alone underscores the incompleteness of fathoming Phule without delving into his opposition to Brahmins, as will also be true of any estimate of Mughal ruler Aurangzeb that doesn’t take into account his spree of temple destruction and brutal execution of Chhatrapati Sambhaji. When communities draw pride from events and personalities of the past, history becomes a casualty—and hypocrisy, censorship and desire for vengeance the outcomes.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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