Few people today think of Savithribai Phule as a poet or a scholar or indeed as an activist in her own right. If she is remembered at all, it is as the wife of Jotiba Phule (1827-1890), who, in 1873, formed the Satyashodhak Mandal, one of the earliest and most significant movements of the lower castes against the oppressive power of the high-caste brahmins. Though Jotiba and Savithribai themselves never used the phrase, and always referred to these castes as mang-mahar, mangs and mahars were traditionally “untouchables”. The anthropologist Irawati Karve points out that the mahars, who are possibly the largest caste in Maharashtra, were important village servants: they carried messages, guided strangers, and assisted the headman. They also guarded the boundaries of the village and kept it clean. Besides, they often settled land disputes, for they were living reference books of village and family history and contemporary social relations. As village economies broke down, their importance declined. The mangs were rope makers, basket weavers, and musicians. Both castes lived outside the village and were allowed to draw water only from separate wells.
Savithribai was the first woman teacher in modern Maharashtra. Together, she and her husband started the first school for women, in 1848. Though there was a period in which Jotiba Phule’s work was also trivialized and dismissed, today he is remembered as the father of the nonbrahmin movement in Maharashtra. But it is only after the work of scholars such as G. B. Sardar and M. G. Mali, whose biography of Savithribai was published in 1980, and who brought out her collected works in 1988, that we have begun to appreciate her important role in that movement. Savithribai was married to Jotiba in 1840, when she was nine. With his support she was able to study. In 1848, when Savithribai was only seventeen, they opened five schools in and around Pune, and in 1851, one meant especially for the girls from the mang and mahar castes. Savithribai and Jotiba, together with another colleague, Fatima Sheik, taught in them until 1856 when Savithribai fell seriously ill and went back to her parental home in Naigaon (Khandala taluk, Satara district), where she was nursed back to health by her elder brother, “Bhau.” The letter translated here was written at that time. Both Savithribai and Jotiba Phule were maligned, socially ostracized, and attacked by the orthodoxy whose authority and power they had questioned. Yet Savithribai had special burdens to carry.
Women are traditionally charged with the responsibility of preserving societal “purity” and maintaining its norms. When they rebel, they are policed and punished in a thousand ways that rarely touch the men. Like the wives and co-workers of so many of the enthusiastic male reformers of that period, Savithribai bore the brunt of the attack against the Phules and the Satyashodhak Mandal even as she strained to shield her husband. Another letter, written in 1868, also from Naigaon, gives us a glimpse of a different aspect of Savithribai’s life. It tells the story of a mahar girl and a brahmin boy who fell in love. The girl got pregnant and the infuriated villagers wanted them both killed. Savithribai rescued them and sent them to Jotiba in Pune. A third letter, written in 1877, describes the work of the Satyashodhak Mandal during the fierce drought and famine of 1876. All three extant letters have recently been published in M. G. Mali’s edition of her collected works.
Savithribai and Jotiba were not alone in their crusade. They were part of a group whose impact, as Gail Omvedt has shown, was strong and widespread, and from whose work grew a remarkable body of writing. The independence of thought and the sharpness of argument that mark the work of Muktabai, for example, who studied at the Phules’ school in Pune, or of Tarabai Shinde, whose vigorous polemical style has been associated with Jotiba’s, were not matched for many years to come.
Savithribai was not only a teacher and an activist but also a writer. Her first collection of forty-one poems, Kavyaphule (Poetry’s Blossoms), was published in 1854. Many of the poems are nature poems; others speak in the main of the wealth that comes with education, give advice to children, and decry the caste system. Her second book, Bavankashi Subodharatnakar (The Ocean of Pure Gems), 1892, a more ambitious book, is a biography, in verse, of Jotiba Phule. Jotiba had developed a critique of the brahmin interpretation of Maratha history in the ancient and medieval periods. He presented the Peshwa rulers, who were overthrown by the British, as decadent and oppressive, and Savithribai reiterates these themes in her biography. In addition to these two books, Savithribai edited for publication four ofJotiba’s speeches on Indian history.
A few of her own speeches were published in 1892. Because Savithribai s correspondence is so unique, and especially because of the insights it provides into her life and into women’s experiences in one of the most important social movements of the times, we have chosen to include a letter rather than poetry
— Savitribai Phule (1831-1897), in, Women Writing in India, Volume 1: 600BC to the Early 20th Century, edited by Susie Tharu and K. Lalita.
