4 min readApr 8, 2026 06:19 AM IST
First published on: Apr 8, 2026 at 06:19 AM IST
As we mark the beginning of the bicentenary year of Mahatma Jotirao Phule, born on April 11, 1827, he is rightly remembered as a social reformer, educator, fierce critic of caste, and pioneer of women’s education. Yet, to stop there is to miss the deeper significance of his work. Phule’s life and thought can be understood as a constitutional project. Even if it did not produce a legal text, it reimagined the foundations of social order on the principles of equality, dignity, and the redistribution of power.
Born into a Shudra community, Phule experienced firsthand the injustices of a graded society. Yet, what transformed experience into critique was his encounter with new intellectual resources. Reading English classic texts furnished him with a vocabulary through which he could begin to articulate claims of rights, equality, and justice. A transformational moment was his engagement with Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in 1847.
Paine wrote that every individual possesses certain natural rights due to “his existence”, and certain civil rights for “being a member of society”. Paine also understood a constitution as a foundational structure of political power. A constitution is a “body of elements” containing the principles on which government is organised, with the ultimate purpose of promoting “the general happiness”. Phule’s subsequent interventions aimed at promoting the rights of all through institutional and structural efforts: The establishment of schools for women and oppressed castes, the opening of public wells to those deemed “untouchable”, and advocacy for widow remarriage alongside a critique of child marriage.
Phule was also a keen observer of global constitutional developments. In his seminal work Gulamgiri (Slavery), 1873, he situated the struggle against caste oppression within a transnational history of emancipation. In the preface, Phule referred to the abolition of slavery in the US and dedicated the book to “the good people of the United States, as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self-sacrificing devotion” against slavery, “and with an earnest desire that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thraldom”. This positioned Phule as one of the earliest Indian thinkers to envision constitutional responses to the oppression of marginalised communities.
His focus on equality and equitable measures is also evident in his submissions to the Education Commission of 1882. Phule argued for compulsory primary education up to the age of 12. He insisted that higher education must be within the reach of all, and proposed targeted government scholarships for those communities “amongst whom education has made no progress”, alongside “more liberal” and proactive measures to advance women’s education.
Phule’s constitutional imagination extended to the material conditions of labour and agrarian life. In Shetkaryacha Asud (Cultivator’s Whipcord, 1883), he exposed how caste domination operates within the agrarian economy. The Shudra farmer, he wrote, is so burdened by exploitation and deprivation that even the possibility of sending his children to school is foreclosed. At the same time, he directed sharp criticism at colonial administrators, observing that White officers had neither the time nor the inclination to inquire into the conditions of the cultivators.
What emerges from Phule’s writings and interventions is a deeper insight: That social hierarchy, economic exploitation, and state indifference are mutually reinforcing. He identified the failure of governance to respond to systemic injustice. In doing so, he implicitly called for a reordering of state priorities to focus on the lived conditions of the most vulnerable.
Phule passed away in 1890, but his ideas continued to inform India’s evolving constitutional imagination. B R Ambedkar drew upon his vision of social transformation and gave it concrete expression in constitutional guarantees. Phule’s bicentenary places upon us a renewed responsibility to confront the continuing challenges of inequality.
Bhaskar is the author of The Foresighted Ambedkar: Ideas That Shaped Indian Constitutional Discourse
Jyotirao Phule. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 
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