Savitribai Phule

Savitribai Phule (1831-1897) was an Indian teacher, poet, and social reformer who is widely recognised as the first female teacher of India and one of the founders of girls' education in the country. She was born in Naigaon, a small village in what is now the state of Maharashtra. Her family were farmers from the Mali caste — a community that faced social restrictions in the caste system but was not among the most oppressed. She was married at the age of nine to Jyotirao Phule, who was thirteen. This was normal for the time, when child marriage was widespread. What happened next was not normal. Jyotirao recognised that his young wife was intelligent and deserved an education, which was denied to almost all women and all lower-caste people in the India of that period. He began teaching her at home. She was a quick student. Within a few years she was literate in Marathi and beginning to read English. In 1848, when Savitribai was seventeen and Jyotirao was twenty-one, they opened a school for girls in Pune. This was an extraordinary act. Girls of any caste were not supposed to be educated. Lower-caste children were particularly forbidden from learning. Savitribai was the first woman in India to teach in a formal school. On her way to teach each day, people threw stones and cow dung at her. She reportedly carried a second sari so she could change when she arrived at school. The couple later opened schools for Dalit children (the community then called untouchables), a well for drinking water open to all castes at a time when lower-caste people were denied clean water, and a home for pregnant women who had been abandoned. Savitribai wrote poetry in Marathi. Her collections Kavya Phule (Poetry's Flowers, 1854) and Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar (1891) are considered among the earliest examples of modern Marathi poetry. She adopted the son of a widow she had helped and raised him as her own. After Jyotirao's death in 1890, she continued their work alone. She died in 1897 while caring for patients during a plague epidemic in Pune; she caught the disease from a boy whose life she had tried to save.

Origin

India (Maharashtra)

Lifespan

1831-1897

Era

19th century

Subjects

Education Women's Education Caste Reform Dalit Rights Indian Social Reform

Skills

Ethical Thinking Cultural Heritage And Identity Creative Expression Critical Thinking Research Skills

Why They Matter

Savitribai Phule matters because she helped open one of the most important doors in modern Indian history — the door of formal education for girls and lower-caste children — and because she did so at great personal cost in a society that violently opposed what she was doing. Her work had several dimensions. First, she was one of the earliest teachers in India to reject the idea that education belonged only to upper-caste men. By teaching girls and Dalit children, she rejected a system that had kept knowledge in the hands of a small minority for centuries. Second, she argued through her own practice that girls could learn as much and as well as boys. This was not a theoretical claim but something she demonstrated in her classrooms. Her students passed exams and went on to work, marry, and raise children who were themselves educated. Third, she connected education to broader social change. Her schools did not just teach reading and writing. They taught girls and Dalit children that they were the equals of anyone and had the right to the same knowledge and opportunities. Fourth, she wrote poetry that gave voice to the suffering and aspirations of women and lower-caste people in a language they could read. Her poems called for education, rejected caste oppression, and celebrated the dignity of working people. Her influence was recognised in her lifetime and has grown since. Her work provided the foundation on which later educational reforms built. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution, came from a Dalit background similar to the one Phule had worked to lift; his own educational path was made possible partly by the groundwork she helped lay. Modern India has made her birthday (3 January) Mahila Shikshan Din — Women's Education Day — and she appears on postage stamps and in school curricula. Universities have been named after her. Her life is an example of how individual teaching, backed by the right principles and sustained against opposition, can change what a society thinks possible.

Key Ideas

Education as the key to change

Savitribai Phule believed that the deepest problems of her society — the oppression of women, the cruelty of the caste system, the acceptance of child marriage and widow abandonment — could only be solved through education. Not because education alone changes laws or customs directly, but because educated people can see the injustice of what they have been told is natural. A woman who could read could study her own situation. A Dalit child who learned history could discover that the caste system was a human arrangement, not a divine order. Phule's work as a teacher rested on this belief. Every girl she taught to read was one more person who could question what she had been told to accept. This is why the opposition to her schools was so fierce. The opponents understood, as Phule did, that education could change everything.

Teaching those who had been excluded

The schools Phule ran with her husband Jyotirao were opened for the specific groups that the existing education system would not serve. Girls of any caste were their first students. Dalit children — at the time called untouchables — were welcomed when they opened additional schools. Muslim girls attended their schools as well. In most of India at that time, education was available mainly to upper-caste boys. Phule turned this upside down. Her schools deliberately served the groups that had been left out. This was not an act of charity; Phule believed these children had the same capacities as any others and deserved the same access. Her students' achievements supported her belief. Girls who had been said to be incapable of learning did learn. Dalit children who had been kept in ignorance for centuries could read and write. The exclusion had never been about capacity. It had been about who was allowed to show their capacity.

Facing violence with persistence

When Phule walked to school each day in Pune, people threw stones and cow dung at her. This was not a one-time event but a daily experience for years. The people throwing the stones were not poor or powerless; many were from the upper castes who saw her work as an attack on the proper order of society. Phule did not turn back. According to many accounts, she carried a second sari so that she could change into clean clothes when she reached school and still teach with dignity. Her response to violence was to keep teaching. This stubborn continuation — the refusal to be driven away by harassment — was itself part of her message. Change in a society that resists change requires people willing to endure the resistance. Phule showed what this looked like in daily practice. The willingness to be stoned rather than stopped is itself a form of teaching.

Key Quotations

"Go, get education. Be self-reliant. Be industrious."

— From her poem addressed to women, 19th century, exact date uncertain

This short verse captures the core of Phule's message to the women of her time. Go, get education — do not wait to be given it; seek it out. Be self-reliant — do not depend on others to define or decide for you. Be industrious — work hard with what you have, develop your capacities. The three instructions together describe a path to dignity. Education gives knowledge; self-reliance gives strength; industry gives skill. Each supports the others. A woman with all three has resources that no one can take from her. The verse is simple enough to memorise and to pass along. Phule understood that her message had to travel beyond her classrooms, and short verses in everyday language were one way it travelled. The advice remains applicable. In many contexts still, the three instructions remain as relevant as when she wrote them.

"Lack of learning is nothing but gross bestiality. It is through the acquisition of knowledge that he loses his lower status and achieves the higher one."

— From her letters and writings, mid-nineteenth century

Phule is stating her view of what education actually does for a person. The language is strong. Without learning, she says, a human being is barely above the level of an animal — not because humans without formal education are less valuable, but because the full development of human capacity requires knowledge. Through learning, a person rises — in understanding, in capacity, in the ability to participate in society as a full member. The claim challenges the caste system directly. The caste system said that some people were permanently lower by birth. Phule's claim says that the status that matters is determined by learning, which is available to anyone who is given the chance. Education, in this framework, is not a privilege for some but a right for all, and it is the mechanism through which hierarchies built on birth can be dismantled. The statement is characteristic of her willingness to make bold claims in direct language.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Ethical Thinking When examining why education matters

How to introduce

Tell students the basic story. In 1848, a seventeen-year-old Indian woman named Savitribai Phule opened a school for girls in Pune. This was the first such school run by an Indian teacher. Most girls in India were not allowed to go to school; lower-caste children of either gender were never educated. On her walk to school each day, people threw stones and cow dung at her. She carried an extra sari to change into when she arrived. Ask students: why was this so threatening? Discuss what happens when a group that has been kept uneducated starts learning. They can read their own history. They can see the injustice of their situation. They can claim their rights. This is why Phule's opponents tried to stop her. Education was not neutral; it was the foundation for change. Connect to contemporary questions about access to education and who is still excluded.

Ethical Thinking When examining persistence in the face of opposition

How to introduce

Ask students: what would it take to keep doing something when people throw stones at you every day? Present Phule's example. She was seventeen years old when she began walking through the streets of Pune to teach at her school. The stone-throwing continued for years. She did not quit. Her response was practical — she carried a second sari so she could teach in clean clothes — and she did not stop the work. Discuss what allowed her to persist. Her belief that the work mattered. Her husband's partnership. The students who came despite their own risks. The daily decision to keep going. Consider what this kind of persistence looks like in other contexts — activists who face arrest, teachers who work in dangerous places, anyone who does work that powerful people oppose. Connect to the broader skill of continuing to do right when doing right is costly.

For a short introduction

Braj Ranjan Mani and Pamela Sardar's A Forgotten Liberator: The Life and Struggle of Savitribai Phule (2008) is an accessible biography.

Sunita Deshpande's Savitribai Phule

First Woman Teacher of India is a clear short introduction. The Savitribai Phule Pune University maintains online resources on her life and work.

Key Ideas

Partnership between teacher and husband

Savitribai's work was done in partnership with her husband Jyotirao Phule. Together they ran schools, opened wells, founded social reform organisations, and raised an adopted son. Their relationship was unusual for their time. Most Indian marriages of that period were not equal partnerships but arrangements in which the husband made decisions and the wife obeyed. The Phule marriage was different. Jyotirao taught his young wife to read and then treated her as a colleague in their shared work. Her intelligence and commitment were recognised, not suppressed. They consulted each other, made decisions together, and worked as partners in their reform efforts. This was not only a personal choice but a political statement. Their marriage demonstrated the kind of relationship between men and women that their broader work was trying to make possible. Each of them was stronger because they worked together. After Jyotirao's death, Savitribai continued their work alone for seven years.

Poetry as teaching

Phule wrote poetry in Marathi, the everyday language of her region. Her collections Kavya Phule (Poetry's Flowers, 1854) and Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar (1891) are among the earliest modern Marathi poetry by a woman. Her poems did more than decorate her life. They taught. She wrote verses urging girls to study, criticising the customs that kept women uneducated, mocking the religious leaders who used scripture to justify oppression, and praising the dignity of working people and Dalits. A poem can reach people that a speech cannot. A poem can be memorised and passed along without a book. Her poetry made her ideas available to people who could not attend her schools but who heard her verses read aloud or sung. Choosing Marathi rather than Sanskrit — the language of upper-caste religious authority — was itself a political choice. It said that literature and knowledge belonged to everyone, not only to those who had been taught the prestigious languages.

Caring for the abandoned

Beyond teaching in schools, Phule opened a home for women in severe distress. In the India of her time, pregnant women who had lost social support — often widows who had become pregnant, or women escaping abusive marriages — had almost no options. They were cast out by their families, had no income, and could be attacked in the streets. Many died, and so did their children. Phule and her husband opened a shelter called Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha (Home for the Prevention of Infanticide) in 1863 where such women could give birth safely and where their children could be cared for. When Phule herself adopted the son of one of these women, she demonstrated that such children were as valued as any others. The shelter work combined with the schools and the shared wells to make a broader pattern: education alone is not enough if the people who need it are dying or excluded from basic resources. The full commitment includes making the conditions in which education can happen.

Key Quotations

"Women are the slaves of slaves."

— Attributed to Phule's writings and speeches

This phrase captures Phule's specific analysis of how women's oppression worked within the caste system. Lower-caste men were treated as slaves by the upper castes — denied land, education, and basic rights. But within lower-caste communities, women were often treated as slaves by the men. A lower-caste woman was therefore doubly oppressed: as a member of a lower caste, and as a woman within that caste. The phrase made the specific point that women's liberation could not be simply added to caste liberation; women needed attention as women, including from the men of their own communities. This analysis was not common in her time. Many reform movements focused on one axis of oppression at a time. Phule's work — education for girls and Dalit children both, with attention to how gender and caste combined — was built on the recognition that oppressions overlapped and reinforced each other. The insight anticipates later analyses of intersecting forms of oppression by a century.

"Awake, arise, and educate. Smash traditions — liberate!"

— From her poem Kavya Phule (Poetry's Flowers), 1854

Phule's poetry often used a direct, urgent voice. Here she addresses her reader with four short commands. Awake — stop sleeping through your oppression. Arise — stand up from the place you have been told to stay in. Educate — learn, and teach others. Smash traditions — destroy the customs that have kept you down. Liberate — set yourself and others free. The verse compresses a programme into four instructions. Each depends on the others: you cannot educate if you do not first wake up; education by itself does not liberate unless it also breaks the traditions that kept you in place. The energy of the verse matches Phule's own life, which was itself a constant refusal to accept what had been made into tradition. The poem also shows her trust in ordinary readers. She does not explain or qualify. She states a challenge and expects her readers to meet it. The combination of urgency and trust is characteristic of her voice.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining partnerships that challenge their culture

How to introduce

Present the marriage of Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule. They were married as children. In most marriages of their time, the husband made decisions and the wife obeyed. Jyotirao instead taught his young wife to read. They became partners in their reform work — running schools, opening wells, founding reform organisations. Ask students: what made this marriage unusual, and why did it matter? Discuss both dimensions. Personally, it gave both partners a life richer than conventional marriage would have given either of them. Politically, it demonstrated publicly the kind of relationship their broader work was trying to make possible. A movement for women's equality needed examples of actual equality between men and women. The Phule marriage was such an example. Consider how institutional change often depends on people who live the changes they want to see in their own relationships.

Critical Thinking When examining how different kinds of oppression combine

How to introduce

Present Phule's insight that women are the slaves of slaves. Lower-caste men were treated as slaves by upper-caste Indian society — denied land, education, basic rights. Within lower-caste communities, women were often treated as slaves by the men. A lower-caste woman was therefore oppressed in two ways at once. Ask students: does this kind of pattern appear elsewhere? Discuss how different kinds of disadvantage can overlap. A poor immigrant woman may face disadvantages from her poverty, her immigration status, and her gender combined — disadvantages that are worse together than each would be alone. A black woman in many countries faces combined effects of race and gender that are different from what either black men or white women face. Phule saw this specific pattern in her own context a hundred years before scholars began describing it with the term intersectionality. Connect to the skill of seeing how different factors interact rather than treating each alone.

Creative Expression When examining poetry as a form of activism

How to introduce

Tell students that Phule wrote poetry in Marathi — the language of ordinary people in her region — rather than in Sanskrit, the prestigious language of religious authority. Her poems called for education, attacked caste oppression, and praised the dignity of working people. Ask: why poetry? Discuss what poems can do that other forms cannot. A short poem can be memorised by people who cannot read. It can be passed along and recited. It carries feeling as well as argument. It can reach places that printed essays cannot. Consider how poetry and song have often been used in movements for change — in the American civil rights movement, in anti-colonial struggles, in workers' movements worldwide. The choice of form is often part of the message. Writing in Marathi rather than Sanskrit said that knowledge belongs to everyone, not only to those who have been taught prestigious languages. Connect to broader questions about who gets to produce and consume art.

Further Reading

Phule's own writings have been translated into English in Selected Works of Savitribai Phule (edited by M.G. Mali, Sahitya Akademi). Krishna Kirwale's biographical research provides substantial primary source material. Rosalind O'Hanlon's Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (1985, Cambridge) is a major scholarly study of the Phules' joint reform work.

Key Ideas

Critique of religious justifications for oppression

Phule and her husband did not only work around existing religious authority. They criticised it directly. Their organisation Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of Truth-Seekers), founded in 1873, argued that many religious practices — the denial of education to women, the exclusion of Dalits from temples, the ceremonies that required payment to priests — were not divine commands but human arrangements that benefited specific castes. Phule's poetry often mocked priests who charged money for rituals and used religion to keep ordinary people in fear. This critique was dangerous. Religious authority was deeply respected in the society they worked in. By challenging the religious grounding of caste and gender oppression, the Phules were attacking the source from which the system drew its strength. This approach shaped later Indian reform movements, including Ambedkar's work a generation later. The combination of practical service and direct religious critique was characteristic of their method.

The cost of reform work

Phule's life shows the personal costs of sustained social reform. The daily harassment in the streets was one dimension. Her family faced social exclusion, which meant losing relationships with relatives and communities. Her husband was disinherited by his father because of their reform work. They faced threats of violence, legal trouble, and continuous financial difficulty. Their schools struggled for funding throughout their existence. When Savitribai died in 1897, she had spent a life in a state of permanent conflict with the dominant powers of her society. The question her life raises is why she and her husband continued despite these costs. Their own writings suggest a combination of conviction and specific experience — they had seen what education could do and what exclusion could cost, and they believed that someone had to do this work even if it meant paying a high personal price. The model of reform she offered is not easy. It shows what genuine change often requires.

Recognition and legacy

For most of the twentieth century, Savitribai Phule was remembered mainly in Maharashtra and among communities concerned with caste reform. The broader national recognition came later. As Dalit and women's movements grew in strength in independent India, Phule's place as a founder became more widely acknowledged. Her birthday, 3 January, is now celebrated as Mahila Shikshan Din (Women's Education Day) across India. Universities have been named after her, including Savitribai Phule Pune University (formerly Pune University), renamed in 2014. She appears on postage stamps, in school textbooks, and in public statues. The expansion of her recognition reflects broader changes in whose history India remembers. For many decades the independence movement received most of the attention, with earlier nineteenth-century reformers often forgotten. The recovery of Phule's memory is part of a broader recognition that the freedoms modern India celebrates were built on the foundations laid by figures like her. The process of recognition is still incomplete and continues.

Key Quotations

"Let girls and women study and thereby transcend the calamity of being illiterate, ignorant and suffering."

— From her speeches and writings, mid-nineteenth century

Phule is making three claims at once. First, that illiteracy is not just a condition but a calamity — a disaster, a genuine harm in a life. Second, that this calamity includes not only the inability to read but the ignorance that follows from it and the suffering that follows from the ignorance. Third, that study — specifically for girls and women, whom most of society had decided did not need study — can transcend this calamity. The word transcend is important. It does not mean reduce slightly or make slightly more bearable. It means to rise above, to leave behind, to escape from the condition. Phule is claiming that education is this powerful. It does not solve every problem, but it removes a specific kind of bondage and opens possibilities that illiteracy forecloses. The claim has been confirmed repeatedly in the century and a half since, as widespread female literacy has transformed the possibilities of billions of lives.

"The lack of education made animals out of us. We ceased to think."

— Letters from Savitribai to Jyotirao Phule, 1860s

In a letter to her husband, Phule reflects on what the denial of education had done to women and lower-caste people. The language is stark. Without education, she writes, we ceased to think — not because we lacked capacity, but because the conditions of our lives gave us no occasion to develop thought. The claim is about what denial of opportunity does to human potential. Capacity without opportunity dies. Minds that could have thought complex thoughts never do so because they have never been given the material to work on. The tragedy is not only the knowledge people do not have but the persons they do not become. This is why Phule treated education as urgent rather than optional. Every child not educated was a mind not fully becoming what it could have been. The observation applies far beyond nineteenth-century India. Wherever education is denied, the same tragedy is unfolding.

Using This Thinker in the Classroom

Ethical Thinking When examining the full shape of reform work

How to introduce

Present the range of Phule's work: schools for girls, schools for Dalit children, a well open to all castes at a time when lower-caste people were denied clean water, a shelter for pregnant women who had been abandoned, a reform organisation that challenged religious justifications for inequality. Ask students: why so many different activities? Discuss the pattern. Education alone is not enough if the people who need it are dying of thirst, or if they have no safe place to give birth. Water is not enough if the children who drink it cannot read. Shelter is not enough without schools to give the children in it a future. Phule understood that reform had to address the whole condition of the excluded, not just one aspect. The lesson applies to any genuine effort to change a situation. Single-issue solutions often fail because the problems reinforce each other. Real change addresses the connections. Connect to how contemporary reformers think about combined approaches.

Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining who history remembers

How to introduce

Tell students that Phule was relatively unknown outside Maharashtra for most of the twentieth century. Her broader recognition came later, as Dalit and women's movements grew stronger. Now she is honoured with postage stamps, named universities, and annual commemorations. Ask: what does this pattern tell us? Discuss whose history gets written and remembered. In many countries, the dominant history tends to feature people from dominant groups. When marginalised communities grow in political power, they often recover the histories of their own founders — historians and teachers from previous generations who had been forgotten by the mainstream. Phule's recovered prominence reflects the growth of constituencies for whom her work matters. Consider which other figures have been similarly recovered, and which may still be waiting for wider recognition. Connect to the broader question of how historical memory is made and remade.

Common Misconceptions

Common misconception

Savitribai Phule was just a teacher; her husband was the real reformer.

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What to teach instead

Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule worked as equal partners in reform for decades. Jyotirao began teaching Savitribai when she was young, but by their adult years they were colleagues rather than mentor and student. Both opened schools, both wrote, both led reform organisations. Savitribai was the first woman in India to teach in a formal school and the first female headmistress; she managed the schools day by day. She also wrote poetry that stands on its own literary merits. After Jyotirao's death in 1890, she continued the work alone for seven more years, demonstrating that her role had never been secondary. Treating her as supporting cast rather than as a leader in her own right reflects the common pattern of minimising women's contributions to reform movements, even when the evidence of their leadership is substantial. The honest account treats both Phules as major figures in their own right.

Common misconception

Phule's work was important only for lower-caste communities.

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What to teach instead

Phule's schools served girls and children from many backgrounds. Her earliest students included girls from upper castes whose families wanted them educated; her later schools served Dalit children and Muslim girls. Her poetry and reform writing addressed a wide range of social issues affecting all of Indian society — child marriage, widow treatment, the economic exploitation of farmers, the connection between religion and oppression. The beneficiaries of her work extended far beyond Dalit communities, and her influence on how Indians think about education is genuinely national. Reducing her legacy to one community misses the breadth of what she did and the scope of the reforms her work supported. Her foundational role in Indian education applies across the society she was part of.

Common misconception

Opposition to Phule's schools was only from extreme conservatives.

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What to teach instead

The opposition to Phule's work came from large parts of the society she lived in, not just from extremists. Upper-caste neighbours threw stones. Her husband's father disinherited him. Religious authorities condemned their schools. Many people who would have considered themselves moderates in other contexts saw the education of girls and Dalit children as a threat to the social order. This is worth remembering. Reform of long-established injustice often faces opposition not only from the clearly cruel but from the respectable mainstream. What the Phules did required them to break with much of the society around them, not just with its worst elements. Understanding this helps us read the opposition to reform movements accurately. The argument that opposition to change is confined to extremists is often false; change is often opposed by many people who consider themselves moderate and reasonable.

Common misconception

Phule's achievements were possible because Indian society was becoming more open in her time.

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What to teach instead

Nineteenth-century India was becoming more open in some ways — British rule had introduced certain reforms, Western education was spreading among upper-caste elites, reform movements were active. But for girls and lower-caste children, the situation remained deeply restrictive. Phule did not ride a wave of acceptance; she pushed against a wall of exclusion. Most of the change that made her work possible came from her own activity and the activity of others like her, not from spontaneous social opening. Attributing her achievements to favourable conditions understates the cost and difficulty of what she actually did. The schools opened because she opened them, against resistance, and continued against further resistance. Reform in her time was produced by specific people at specific cost, not generated by background conditions.

Intellectual Connections

Anticipates

B.R. Ambedkar

Ambedkar, born thirty years after Phule, is widely regarded as the greatest figure in the Dalit movement and the principal architect of the Indian constitution. His own educational journey — from a Dalit village boyhood to doctorates from Columbia and the London School of Economics — was made possible by the kind of education Phule had pioneered for Dalit children. Ambedkar explicitly acknowledged the Phules as early founders of Dalit liberation. Reading them together shows how the work of one generation provides the foundation on which later generations build. Without the Phule schools that made Dalit education thinkable, Ambedkar's path would have been more difficult or impossible. He built on what they opened.

Complements

Paulo Freire

Freire, writing a century after Phule, argued that education should liberate rather than domesticate — that learning to read and write should help poor people understand and change their situation rather than simply fit into it. Phule's work had already demonstrated this approach in practice. Her schools for girls and Dalit children did not just teach basic literacy; they taught students that they were the equals of anyone and had the right to understand their world. The theoretical framework Freire developed fits what Phule had done in her classrooms. Reading them together shows how similar commitments to liberating education have emerged across very different contexts — nineteenth-century India and twentieth-century Brazil — with each enriched by knowledge of the other.

In Dialogue With

Maria Montessori

Phule and Montessori were educators from different centuries and contexts but shared the conviction that children excluded from mainstream education were capable of the same learning as anyone else. Phule worked with girls and Dalit children in nineteenth-century India; Montessori worked with poor children and children with disabilities in early twentieth-century Italy. Both demonstrated that the perceived inability of excluded groups was a product of exclusion rather than of their actual capacities. Phule did this through running schools against violent opposition; Montessori through the development of a new method. The specific approaches differed, but the underlying respect for children who had been written off was common to both.

Complements

Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft, writing in England fifty years before Phule, had argued that women's apparent inferiority was a product of denied education rather than of nature. Phule, working in India, made a similar argument both in her writings and through her actual teaching. The contexts were very different — Wollstonecraft was a philosophical writer, Phule a practising teacher and activist — but the core commitment was shared: equal education would reveal equal capacity. Reading them together shows how similar arguments emerged in very different parts of the world during the long struggle for women's education. Wollstonecraft's abstract argument and Phule's lived example complement each other; together they make a stronger case than either alone.

Anticipates

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban in 2012 for campaigning for girls' education in Pakistan, occupies in the early twenty-first century a position similar to Phule's in the nineteenth. Both faced violent opposition. Both insisted that girls had the right to education. Both gained international attention for work that had been intended to serve a specific community. Malala's survival and continuing activism echo Phule's persistence despite the stone-throwing. Reading them together shows that the struggle Phule engaged in is not over. Girls are still denied education in many parts of the world, still attacked for seeking it, and still demonstrating through their persistence the same thing Phule demonstrated — that the denial of education is not based on any real inability of the excluded, and that the work of opening education continues.

Complements

Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi, born eight years before Phule died and working mainly in the early twentieth century, led the Indian independence movement while also engaging with questions of caste and education that Phule had addressed earlier. Gandhi's own approach to caste evolved over his life and has been critiqued by Dalit thinkers including Ambedkar; Phule's more direct challenge to caste was in some ways stronger than Gandhi's. Gandhi built his national movement partly on foundations laid by earlier reformers including the Phules. Reading them together shows how different streams of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Indian reform — Gandhi's national and spiritual focus, the Phules' caste and education focus — both contributed to the independent India that eventually emerged. Neither alone captures the full story.