Mahatma Jotirao Phule's writings and efforts of social reforms touched issues of almost all subaltern classes. Discuss.

Writing that named the structure

In Gulamgiri (Slavery) Phule compared caste to American slavery and attacked the Brahmanical claim to knowledge. Shetkaryacha Asud (The cultivator’s whipcord) turned to the peasant crushed by moneylender, official and priest. He used the Bali legend to give the labouring majority a history in which they were not born to serve. That is writing as social theory from below. He and Savitribai Phule also wrote for girls’ schooling when female literacy was treated as a scandal.

Work that was not only a book

In 1848 they opened a school for girls in Pune. They opened schools for Mahar and Mang children. The Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) asked for truth-seeking without a priestly middleman: cheaper marriage, no ruinous ritual, a language the peasant could hear. Phule supported widow dignity and argued against infanticide. He saw British rule as a possible lever against local tyranny, which later nationalists found uncomfortable, but his test was always who ate and who read.

Almost all subaltern classes

Women, Dalits, peasants, and the urban poor of the Deccan were not separate files in his head. A girl kept from school, a Mahar kept from the well, and a kunbi kept from the crop surplus were one order of exclusion. That is why the question’s “almost all” is fair. Limits exist: industrial labour in Bombay mills would become a later socialist subject; Phule’s world is still agrarian and small-town. He did not write a complete theory of class in Marx’s sense. He did write the first sustained modern Marathi case that caste and gender and the field belong in one reform.

The discussion is complete only if Savitribai is not a footnote. The school gate was their joint politics.