Thinkers Timeline

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.