Jyotirao Phule

Jyotirao Phule attacked caste at its root rather than asking for reform inside it, and coined the word Dalit for the people it crushed. He came from a Mali gardener family in Pune, was educated at a Scottish mission school, and was humiliated at a Brahmin friend's wedding procession for walking with the party. In 1848 he and his wife Savitribai opened a school for girls, and then schools for Mahar and Mang children, which cost them the support of his father and their home. He opened his household well to untouchables when no public well would serve them. Gulamgiri, published in 1873, compares caste to American slavery and argues that the Brahmin order was an Aryan conquest dressed as religion - a reading later scholarship disputes and which was politically explosive at the time. He founded the Satyashodhak Samaj the same year to conduct marriages without priests. He campaigned for widow remarriage, opened a home for pregnant widows, and argued for compulsory primary education before Congress did. He gave Savitribai the teacher training himself when no institution would take her, and the school of 1848 is generally counted the first for girls in India run by Indians. Gulamgiri is dedicated to the abolitionists of the United States. He was given the title Mahatma at a public meeting in Bombay in 1888, eight years before Gandhi returned to India. Ambedkar named him as one of his three teachers, with the Buddha and Kabir. His writing on the peasant, Shetkaryacha Asud, argues that caste and rural debt were the same machine seen from two ends.

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