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Literary Review
Theorising caste
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Selected Writings will enable serious researchers as well as activists to place Phule in the context from which he was constructing an agenda for Dalit assertion, says V. KRISHNA ANANTH.
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AN integral aspect of the political discourse during the last two decades of the 20th Century in India has been the emergence of the term Dalits, replacing such other words as Harijan and Untouchables that were used by scholars and commentators while referring to the members belonging to the scheduled castes. This change, indeed, is not just about semantics.
The use of the word Dalits to describe the social group that was kept out of the mainstream by the ruling social elite (and their apologists in the academia) is indeed an expression, even if it is implicit, of a perspective that seeks to condemn the status quo in the social and economic sense of the term. In other words, it is all about the rights of those men and women condemned to live in subjugation simply because the Hindu scriptures ordained it that way.
The use of the word Dalit, hence, is by itself a political statement guided by a firm conviction that such scriptures that sanction stratification and all the odious practices on that basis need to be challenged. And such an exercise, within the academic as well as in the political discourse, cannot be carried out without an in-depth study of one of the leading lights of India's renaissance during the 19th Century. Any work on the 19th Century intellectual tradition in India will, after all, remain incomplete without a detailed study of Jotirao Phule.
In other words, Phule was as original a thinker and intellectual (in the Gramscian sense of the term) as were Ram Mohun Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Bhaskhar Pandurang, and such others whose times and work have been the subject of study by several leading historians. Phule's contributions, in this sense, have not been analysed as much. Among the several reasons for this, one cannot gloss over the fact that Jotirao Phule, during his own life, had struck a different note. Phule was India's first systematic theorist of caste and the most radical opponent of the caste system (in his times); he desired nothing less than a complete smashing up of its oppressive structure.
The book under review is a collection (in English) of what could be described as the most representative works by Phule (in Marathi) that will enable any serious researcher as well as an activist to place Phule in the context from which he was constructing an agenda for Dalit assertion. While the translations, perhaps the first such effort insofar as Phule's writings are concerned, will open up Phule's thoughts to a non-Marathi reader, the introduction by Prof. Deshpande contains an assessment of Phule from the present context.
An appropriate comment in this context is where the editor seeks to place Phule's views on the British rule in India when he states as follows: "You cannot creatively interpret Phule without moving away from his clearly soft position on imperialism." The critical reference here is to the innocence inherent in Phule's thought about the colonial system that was evolving in the times and this certainly was not just a problem with Phule alone. This indeed was a problem with almost all those who took up social reforms in the 19th Century — Rammohun Roy, Vidyasagar, or anyone of their times — guided by a notion that the British in India were engaged in modernising the Indian society. They all were innocent of the fact that colonialism was not just a path to capitalist modernisation.
An understanding of this, indeed, is crucial in not just placing Phule (or his contemporaries) in the context but also in trying to understand the celebratory tone that such social reformers like Periyar E.V. Ramasamy and B.R. Ambedkar adopted insofar as the British rule was concerned and their conflict with Gandhi in later years. While in the case of Phule (or his generation of reformers), it is necessary to stress that they operated in times long before the Indian intellectual tradition had internalised the dynamics of a colonial set-up, things were not the same during the times when Periyar and Ambedkar were responding to the Gandhian strategy in the 20th Century when nationalist thoughts had internalised the colonial reality.
Similarly, yet another critical comment by the editor in his introduction merits mentioning here; the thrust of Phule's strategy, as pointed out by Prof. Deshpande, was that Phule was not writing history. "He was rejecting brahmanical history from a shudradishudra perspective." In that sense, Phule's was a strategy based on constructing a dvaivarnik (two-varna) structure, in place of the traditional chaturvarnya (four-varna) structure, with the brahmans and the shudradishudras forming its two poles. This, according to Prof. Deshpande, was critical to Phule's agenda. "If the caste system itself had to be destroyed, it had to be done by attacking the central element of the system" which indeed was the chaturvarnya system and the rituals prescribed by the smritis.
The introduction, in this way, introduces Phule as among those in his times, who found in the rituals the tools to perpetuate an unequal socio-economic order and hence placed defiance of the rituals at the core of their agenda. A close reading of the text leads one to see through similarities between Phule's core approach and that of yet another intellectual of the era, Sri Narayanaguru, whose crusade against the oppressive caste order had played a crucial role in the making of modern Keralam.
The book, by all means, is a critical addition to scholarship on India's intellectual tradition and Prof. Deshpande, known for his contribution to Marathi theatre (in addition to his scholarship on Sino-Indian affairs), has filled a gap insofar as scholarship on Phule is concerned.
Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, edited, with annotations and introduction, by G.P. Deshpande, Leftword Books, Rs. 450.
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