A Woman Visionary Who Was Erased Deliberately: Remembering Savitribai

The urban dwelling and affluent section of our country’s populace associate 3rd January with nothing more than the exhaustion of the annual year-end Holiday season and dreading the working weekdays' arrival. The majority of the country remains oblivious to the date and its significance in the life of women and the castes that have been ostracised against for centuries. Probabilities are that if you are a woman reading this article now, you have had the privilege of attaining education. Does it then ever occur to anyone how the highly stratified society of our nation managed to deploy the percolation of knowledge to the lowest rungs?

The answer of “Social Workers”, that is so commonly associated with social issues, often also comes with a preconceived image of a man in the role. It is seldom the face of a woman, especially a child bride clad in a saree, that caters to the social workers’ idea for people. Savitribai Phule is one such name who worked all her life to uplift the downtrodden but also one that got lost in the long struggle for emancipation and its legacy.

Remembering Savitribai on her Birth Anniversary

Savitribai was born in a small Satara, Maharashtra village to the backwards Malis community. Savitribai was married to Jyotirao Phule at the age of 10, acquired an education with the help of her husband post marriage and emerged as one of the most prominent women of the 1800s. She, along with her husband and two other female colleagues, Shaguna Bai and Fatima Sheikh, started schools to teach young girls and members belonging to the lower castes. Education, a luxury, was limited to the upper caste men in the 1800s and it was considered a sin to allow women and the “neechi jaatis” to get educated through Vedas and Shastras.

The beginning of schools, especially by women, was met with great difficulties. Not only was it protested against vehemently, the founders also had to endure extreme humiliation and assault regularly. But the will to create an environment where everyone could attain knowledge without being discriminated against kept them afloat amidst all the barriers. Savitribai could be called a visionary, apart from a staunch feminist, since she believed that only studying shastras would not be enough for students. She supported English education since it washed the mind off the ills of the caste system, according to her. She also had in mind a more practical approach towards education and encouraged arrangements where industrial work and everyday work would be taught along with other subjects.

Savitribai Phule, along with her husband, created the Satyashodhak Samaj to start the practice of widow remarriage and protest against social evils like child marriage and dowry. They were supporters of intercaste marriage and believed that the man-made shackles of the caste system were not the yardstick of judging whether a person was pure or polluted. Savitribai was of the opinion that only true education can make or break a human and teach them the morals of leading life.

Another exemplary reform of Savitribai was her Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha, an initiative started in her own house where she would take care of survivors of female infanticide. It also welcomed rape survivors and women pregnant out of wedlock to have their deliveries in able and safe hands. If the child's mother could not take care of them, she was allowed to leave the child with the others in the Home.

The above-mentioned works of Savitribai are just a fraction of her lifelong gifts to Indian society. This article is not one that would list her achievements to prove her worthy of remembering; rather it is a medium to question her erasure and forgetting and trying to decipher the sociological factors at play behind this phenomena. It surely can not just be a coincidence that in the majority of history books, she appears at the backdrop of her husband, Jyotirao Phule’s works towards society. Even though stalwarts of her time, like Mama Paramanand, held high regards for her, the recent reduction of her individuality as a woman fighter to merely being a man’s helping hand is painful to witness.

In the case of Savitribai Phule and the likes of her, Double Oppression bares its ugly fangs upon their representation. Not only are they invisibilised because of their lower stature in the caste system, but also because of the gender that they belong to. The intersectionality of their identity curbs them from being immortalised in the ages of our history books. In other words, it is Brahmanical Patriarchy that highlights the works of upper caste and upper class men. The only other ones who find honorary mentions are Dalit and men from the other backward castes. Sadly, the chunk that gets left behind are the women who had spent their lives in agony only to provide the liberation they always truly deserved to the masses.

The names of these women reformers and activists of the freedom struggle have been conveniently invisibilized by the education system that has predominantly been controlled by the people in the upper layers of the highly divisive caste system. It is indeed a poetic tragedy that the very education system that Savitribai Phule thought would help in eradicating the caste problem, concretized the same further and in the process, made her a victim of it herself. The conventional narratives did not provide the space that was necessary for these stories to flourish.

Suggested Reading:

Savitribai Phule: Teacher, Activist And Mother Of Indian Feminism

Every year on her birth anniversary, a few remember her and demand that the date be celebrated as Teacher’s Day in India, only for all the pleas and agitations to fall on deaf ears. In India, will a woman forever be known in relation to a male member of her family- even if that male member is literally a child of five years? It is always “His Wife”, “His daughter”, “His sister” or “His Mother”; a woman is never only an individual - even if she has achieved the greatest feats of her time and contributed an unquantifiable amount of works to the freedom struggle. In Savitribai’s case, very few of us would actually recognise her if she would not be called by her husband’s last name, even though she had equal and more contributions to everything that they built.

This 3rd January, let us remember Savitribai, the pioneer of the Indian Feminist Movement, the first woman educator of India and an extremely giving woman, who was forgotten and only referred to in relations. Let us celebrate womanhood and the strong women who were all lost in time. This new year, let us change the narratives of the smallest of thighs and witness a larger change in society.

The views expressed are the author's own.