While Phule’s powada on Shivaji, titled ‘Chhatrapati Shivaji Raje Bosale yancha Powada’ where he recuperated the history of Shivaji as a non-Brahmin leader, seems to be within the celebratory tradition of the genre, he yet commemorated this beloved Maratha king as a Shudra protector of his people, infusing into his narration the consciousness of caste identity and solidarity. However, in both ‘Brahmananche Kasab’ (‘Priestcraft Exposed’ in Phule’s English title) that presented the theme of an idyllic pre-Aryan India under the just rule of the folk king Baliraja and the destruction of this by multiple Aryan/Brahmin invasions) and ‘Vidyakhatyateel Brahman Pantoji’), Phule deploys the form subversively for modern political purposes, interrogating power and hierarchy. It may be noted that in keeping with the traditional features of the powada, Phule does construct in ‘Brahmananche Kasab’ a historical memory. This memory, however, is not of a recent event but that of the ancient past. It builds on the hypotheses of an Aryan race and invasion, then current in emerging disciplines of comparative philology and Indology. In this powada Phule presents an alternative and subversive counter-historical memory of a harmonious pre-Aryan society destroyed by the cruelty and cunning of the invading Aryan/Brahmins.
In his third ballad, ‘Vidyakhatyateel Brahman Pantoji’ which he wrote in 1869 (henceforth ‘Brahmin Teachers in the Education Department’), Phule jettisons historicity and focuses on contemporary educational institutions and the conditions obtained therein. Structured on two complementing stanzaic forms and rhythms, this powada deftly sketches a realistic portrayal of the rural environment and its intrinsic connection to larger oppressive structures at the macro level. While music and performance are essential for the full appreciation and enjoyment of a powada, we will attempt nevertheless to examine the main issues which Phule dramatises through his presentation of the functioning of a village school.
Phule’s ‘Vidyakhatyateel Brahman Pantoji’
The powada opens with a moving evocation of hardworking, impoverished, lower-caste parents grieving over their children’s lack of access to schools and the sight of their wards at work when they ought to have been getting an education. In sharp satiric couplets, Phule contrasts their situation with the callousness of the Brahmin teacher and the village upper castes who are instrumental in driving the Untouchable Mahar child away, but are eager to ‘shake hands with the English’. The alternating longer stanza establishes the larger political background of the times: Brahmins reject the Shudratishudra and curry favour with the English even as they slyly instigate rebellions against the Queen. Like most subaltern leaders, Phule clearly reposes faith in the colonial government to safeguard the interests of the lower castes within the exploitative caste structure. The description of the enslavement of the Shudra and the clever positioning of the reference to the abolitionist movement in North America is meant to show the correspondences between the caste system and slavery. It is also an appeal to the colonial government asking for its understanding and support.
Phule sketches the figure of the Brahmin teacher at work with scathing satire: he favours the Brahmin child and beats up the Shudra children. Phule’s stinging derision quickly notes the dozing teacher: the Pantoji in Marathi, a term which superbly captures the hypocrisy of the pompous Brahmin, who is startled awake by the recess bell and rushes home for a leisurely lunch and siesta and who may or may not go back to work. The longer stanza questions the school master’s putative virtues since his interests are only in inflating his report for the English inspector and fabricating ideas about the dullness of the Shudra caste.
The alternating rhythms focus on two related spatial and temporal dimensions. The first is the immediate present comprising the village school and its Brahmin teacher doctoring his books so as to please his English superiors. The second is at the macro level caustically critiquing Brahmin duplicity in general: ‘Liberal thoughts only to please the English/Back home stone idols are their worship’. The last long stanza is an appeal to the colonial government, pleading that experienced teachers from the lower and Untouchable castes be appointed in order to educate deprived children. It is a petition to the colonial government urging it to reject Brahmin teachers who are more often than not inept, insincere and unconcerned about the education of the lower-caste, underprivileged children. Only then, says the poet, will the English government ‘be hailed as great’ when it ensures ‘schooling for the disadvantaged’.
It is necessary to recuperate, translate and examine this powada in the present context for a number of reasons. I will list only three: First, the conditions of the nineteenth-century academic environment which Phule describes uncannily resemble the contemporary system of public education in rural India. It is crucial to examine its historical evocation if the problem is to be understood comprehensively and if these historical lacunae and the exclusions inherent in the delivery of educational policies are to be addressed with any degree of sincerity. Second, both nationalist and subaltern historiographies have erased the significant contributions of Phule’s movement on behalf of the lower castes and his original and radical interventions in the creation of a non-Brahmin identity in the politics and culture of his times. The reasons for the erasure may have been the perception that he is ‘soft’ and rather uncritical about exploitation resulting from forces of imperialism. However, within the context of his times, modernity in the form of the colonial government and its secular institutions must have seemed a real alternative to Phule, disillusioned as he was by the tenacious hold of the caste structure in the minds and hearts of people. Third, the category known as Dalit literature in the last few decades is perceived, it seems to me, in curiously flattened and unhistorical terms. Phule’s literary works form a legacy that helps recuperate this rich past of interrogations and interventions. The translation is an attempt to historicise the significance of a Dalit literary past.
This excerpt from Rohini Mokashi-Punekar’s ‘The Third Eye and Other Works: Mahatma Phule’s Writings on Education’ has been published with permission from Orient BlackSwan.