Savitribai Phule

Savitribai Phule was married at nine to a man who taught her to read, and became the first woman to teach in a school run by Indians in India. She was born to a farming family at Naigaon and could not read when she married Jyotirao Phule; he taught her at home and she trained formally afterwards. In 1848 the two opened a school for girls in Pune, and she taught in it. Orthodox opponents threw dung and stones at her on the walk, so she carried a second sari and changed when she arrived. Phule's father expelled the couple from the family house over the schools. She ran a home for pregnant widows facing infanticide or suicide, and adopted a son born there, Yashwant, whom she raised and who became a doctor. She wrote poetry in Marathi - Kavya Phule in 1854 - urging education as the way out of caste. When plague reached Pune in 1897 she and Yashwant opened a clinic; she carried an infected boy to it on her back, caught the disease and died. She ran eighteen schools with Jyotirao at their height. The couple opened a well in their own courtyard to untouchables in 1868, at a time when the village wells were closed to them. After Jyotirao died in 1890 she lit his pyre herself, which no woman was supposed to do, and led the Satyashodhak Samaj afterwards. Her second collection, Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar, is partly a verse life of her husband. Savitribai Phule Pune University was renamed for her in 2014, and 3 January is marked in Maharashtra as a teachers day in her name.

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