The rediscovery of Jotirao Phule, to whom Dr B.R. Ambedkar (who was born one year after Phule died) dedicated Who were the Shudras, is long overdue. Mahatma Phule, as he was known decades before M.K. Gandhi received this title, has not only been the first ‘low’ caste social reformer, but has initiated an emancipatory repertoire that remains most relevant today. That was not a caste movement since it intended to represent the ‘bahujan samaj’, literally, the majority of the people, the masses. Jotirao Phule (1827-1890) was a Mali (gardener), a cultivating caste in close contact with towns where its members sold their products. In one of these towns, Poona, Phule could attend a school of the Scottish Mission. The writings of Thomas Paine then exerted a special influence on Phule, who discovered the notions of liberty and equality in The Age of Reason and Human Rights. This source of inspiration developed in conjunction with that of Christianity. For Phule, Jesus Christ epitomises equality and fraternity. He also regards him as the spokesman for the poor people. However, Phule did not convert to Christianity and in Slavery (pages 36-38) writes of how he translated the Christian idiom into a new discourse focusing on King Bali, the subterranean god who reigns in the underground world according to Hindu mythology. Through the vernacularisation of Christian values and symbols, Phule endowed them with a new, positive identity to his people. More importantly, Phule was – to my knowledge – the first India thinker to interpret caste from an ethnic point of view in order to emancipate the Dalits and the Shudras from curse of sanskritisation: instead of thinking about these groups as the social categories at the bottom of the social pyramid, Phule depicted them as forming a different people. The claim that (according to the British Orientalists) the ‘upper’ castes traced their origin from Aryan conquerors allowed him to, in turn, argue that they descended from foreign invaders who had settled in India at a rather late period to subjugate the first inhabitants of India and destroyed their civilisation. For him, the ‘lower’ castes were the descendents of these autochthonous people.Also read: What Dalit People Taught Us About Education and Why We Must Commit to ItIn this reinterpretation of the past, the invaders are identified as Brahmins whereas the indigenous groups are described as descending from the original ruling class, the Kshatriyas. In Phule’s ideology, this category does not refer to the second varna but includes all original Indians, from peasant castes to Untouchables . For him, they formed a people, united by the bond of a common origin and of a warrior ethos:The Kshatriyas in India (the land of Baliraja) that is the original masters of the land here where known as Astiks, Pishachas, Rakshasas, Ahirs, Kakatas, Bhut, Kolis, Mangs, Mahars etc. They were extremely adept in fighting without the aid of arms (weapons) and were famed as brave and valiant warriors. They were of an epicurean (joyful) temperament and were given to the enjoyment of the goods things of life. The kingdoms of most of these rulers (chiefs) were in a prosperous condition, and it would be no exaggeration to say that the land of King Bali was literally flowing with milk and honey .The king of these original Kshatriyas, Bali, is described by Phule as reigning over a rich country and this prosperity was the very reason for the Aryan invasions:The extreme fertility of the soil of India, its rich productions, the proverbial wealth of the people, and the other innumerable gifts which this favourable land enjoys, and which have more recently tempted the cupidity of the Western nations, attracted the Aryans […] The original inhabitants with whom these earth-born gods, the Brahmans, fought, were not inappropriately termed Rakshasas, that is the protectors of the land […] The cruelties which the European settlers practised on the American Indians on their first settlement in the new world had certainly their parallel in India in the advent of the Aryans and their subjugation of the aborigines […] They originally settled on the banks of the Ganges whence they spread gradually over the whole of India. In order, however, to keep a better hold on the people they devised that weird system of mythology, the ordination of caste, and the code of crude and inhuman laws to which we can find no parallel among the other nations. Thus, Phule was clearly the first ‘low’ caste leader who avoided the traps of sanskritisation by endowing the ‘low’ castes with an alternative value system. For the first time, the ‘low’ castes were presented as ethnic groups which had inherited the legacy of an antiquarian golden age and whose culture was therefore distinct from that of the wider Hindu society. This ethnicisation of caste endowed the ‘lower’ castes with a new self-esteem: they did not need to imitate the Brahmin anymore – and claimed that they used to be Brahmins before or that they, in fact, followed a vegetarian diet – because they could be proud of the blood running in their veins. Phule, here, set a pattern that was to be emulated by the architects of the Dravidian identity, who would go on to also present the South Indian common people as “sons of the soil”. Ambedkar himself would also describe the Dalits as the followers of a common culture, as former Buddhists who have been suppressed by ‘upper’-caste outsiders. Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations in Bengaluru. Photo: PTI.Phule played a second, related, pioneering role. The moment he described the ‘lower’ castes as the original inhabitants of India, in ethnic terms, he circumvented the problem of caste-based divisions which continue to undermine the solidarity of the plebeians in India. Indeed, his efforts in favour of the ‘low’ castes were not confined to his castefolk only: he wanted to unite the Shudras and the Atishudras (Dalits), who formed the Bahujan Samaj – a formula he coined and that Kanshi Ram was to promote from the late 1980s onwards. Here, Phule’s reformism goes beyond words and finds expression in actions. As early as 1853, he opened schools for Untouchables. This initiative reflects another characteristic of Phule’s contribution to social reform, the third original feature that needs to be highlighted: he spoke his mind and called a spade a spade, in particular when he projected himself as the spokesman of the non-Brahmins at large. This is most obvious when he targeted the Brahmins in vehement pamphlets where he presented them as rapacious moneylenders and corrupts priests eager to extort as much as they could from poor and ignorant villagers. Fourthly, Phule was also the first ‘low’ caste organiser. In 1875 he was attracted by the Arya Samaj , but he kept his distance from this movement because he did not trust the ‘upper’ caste reformers who pretended to fight against the social system but they observed its rules – like M.G. Ranade. Phule also remained aloof from the Congress, which he regarded as a Brahmin movement. Nationalism, according to him, was an illusion created by ‘upper’ caste manipulation to conceal the inner divisions of Indian society.Also read: Release of ‘Phule’ Postponed After CBFC Asks Makers to Remove Caste-Based Terms, Reference to ManuInstead, he founded the Satyashodak Samaj in 1873 in order to strengthen the sentiment of unity among the ‘low’ castes. At least in the late 19th century and early 20th century, the Satyashodak idiom embraced rich peasants as well as agricultural tenants who belonged to very different castes and in some places ‘the Sathya Shodhak message seemed to have reached even the untouchable’. A major spokesman of the non-Brahmin movement in Maharashtra in the 1910-1930, Mukundrao Patil, the son of Phule’s colleague, Krishnarao Bhalekar, was for instance a radical defender of the Untouchables even though he was a rich peasant. He advocated ‘the general Satyashodak ideology, of opposition to Sanskritisation and assertion of the “non-Aryan” unity of Maharashtrian natives’. By that time, Phule’s view of the non-Brahmins as non-Aryas had made an impact on the small Dalit intelligentsia. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.In 1909, Kisan Faguji Bansode (1870-1946), a Mahar from Nagpur, warned the ‘upper’ castes in the following terms:“The Aryans – your ancestors – conquered us and gave us unbearable harassment. At that time we were your conquest, you treated us even worse than slaves and subjected us to any torture you wanted. But now we are no longer your subjects, we have no service relationship with you, we are not your slaves or serfs…” The Satyashodak Samaj eventually attracted even Marathas such as the Jedhe family, from Poona, who realised ‘the futility of a purely Maratha politics’. Keshavrao Jedhe adopted ‘the long-held Satyashodak view of history: Brahmans were outsiders to the country and to the ethnic community of true “Hindus”; they desired only their own caste superiority and consolidated their power through treachery, through falsification of historical records, and by weaving a web of religious slavery which set up a social hierarchy of superiority and inferiority and divided the masses’. Maratha princes such as the Maharajah of Baroda strongly approved of Phule’s ideological commitments and donated large amounts of money to his movement. A direct descendant of Shivaji, the Maharajah of Kolhapur, Shahu, who reigned between 1894 and 1922, was even more supportive.While Shahu inherited from the ideological legacy of Phule, he had a different perspective: as a prince, he was anxious to reassert his authority vis-à-vis the Brahmins who were dominating the administration of his state. For Shahu, the non-Brahmin repertoire fits in a strategy of empowerment of the ‘lower’ castes. Last but not least, Phule was a comparative social scientist, preparing the ground, also from this point of view, for the scholarship of Ambedkar. No social reformer before Phule had had the intuition that the fate of ‘low’ caste Indians and the coloured people in the US was so similar. What he learnt about the Blacks in the United States suggested to him a comparison with the ‘lower’ castes – hence his book, Slavery (1873) that he dedicated ‘to the good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self sacrificing devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my country men may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Shudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thraldom’.Phule was born almost 200 years ago, but his teachings remains very pertinent for understanding and fighting caste in India today. The fact that ethnicisation of caste offers a very useful detour is particularly noticeable. But the persistence of caste hierarchies, almost two centuries after the fight for equality started from below, is very revealing of the rather unique resilience of this social system. Ambedkar had lucidly anticipated the magnitude of the challenge when he wrote that the caste system was not only a division of the labour, but also a division of the labourers and that, correlatively, no revolution would easily take place in such a society.Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.Note: This article draws from Christophe Jaffrelot’s book, India’s Silent Revolution. The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2003.