Write short note with a sociological perspective: Jyotirao Phule as an agrarian radical. (2015)
Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890), founder of the Satyashodhak Samaj (1873), is conventionally read as an anti-caste reformer. That reading is incomplete. Gulamgiri (1873) attacked Brahmanical religion as a system of slavery; but it is Shetkaryacha Asud — “The Cultivator’s Whipcord”, written in 1883 — that makes him an agrarian radical, for there he treats caste domination and the exploitation of the cultivator as one problem, not two.
The argument of Shetkaryacha Asud
The Maharashtra peasant, the kunbi, is ground between four extractions that reinforce one another:
- the colonial revenue demand, fixed in cash, collected regardless of harvest;
- the Brahmin revenue official and record-keeper (kulkarni), who mediates every transaction with the state and profits from the cultivator’s illiteracy;
- the moneylender, who turns one bad season into permanent debt; and
- the priest, extracting ritual expenditure at birth, marriage and death from households that cannot feed themselves.
His sociological move is to show that British officials, insulated by comfort, never see the cultivator’s condition, while the intermediary caste both administers and interprets the system. Caste is not superstructure here but the mechanism of surplus extraction.
The programme
His remedies were concrete rather than devotional, which marks him off from other reformers:
- Irrigation — small bunds and check dams so rain percolates instead of running off, state upkeep of embankments, incentives for well-digging, and the right to lift silt from rivers and tanks as fertiliser.
- Restoration of village commons and pasture taken into colonial forest reserves.
- Education for peasant and labourer children, against a colonial budget subsidising higher education for the already literate.
- Exclusion of Brahmin clerks from revenue administration — a demand about the composition of the bureaucracy, not its conduct.
He insisted that political freedom without the cultivator’s emancipation was meaningless, setting him against early nationalists seeking representation for the educated; and he refused to detach the shudra–atishudra question from the land question — the labouring castes were poor because they were low, and low because they laboured.
Sociological significance
- He anticipated by a century the caste–class linkage Indian sociology reached only through the modes of production debate and André Béteille’s Caste, Class and Power (1965).
- He is the ancestor of non-Brahman and Bahujan politics: Gail Omvedt’s Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society (1976) traced that descent, Rosalind O’Hanlon’s Caste, Conflict and Ideology (1985) reconstructed his ideological innovation, and Kancha Ilaiah revived his productive-caste argument.
- He offers an early view from below: knowledge produced by and for the labouring castes against the authority of the shastras.
Contemporary relevance
The linkage has not dissolved. National sample survey data for 2018–19 record about 57 per cent of rural Dalit households owning no land, and the National Family Health Survey put it near 62 per cent in 2015–16, against much lower landlessness among other groups. The caste that supplies agricultural labour still does not own the field it works.
Conclusion
Phule matters not as a reformer of manners but as the first Indian thinker to treat the village as a structure of extraction organised by caste. Where nationalists asked who should rule India and Indologists what its civilisation meant, he asked who eats what the cultivator grows — a question agrarian sociology is still answering.