Revision summary
Phule wrote Gulamgiri and Shetkaryacha Asud to name caste as slavery and to defend the peasant. With Savitribai he opened schools for girls and for Mahar and Mang children in Pune. The Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) sought ritual and marriage without priestly monopoly. Women, Dalits and cultivators were treated as one excluded order, which is why “almost all subaltern classes” is a fair phrase. His world was Deccan and agrarian; mill labour would be a later chapter.
Model answer
Introduction
Jotirao Phule (1827–1890) wrote and organised in colonial Maharashtra when caste was both a social prison and a land-and-labour order. Subaltern here means those who were not invited to write the official story: women, Dalits, peasants, artisans. Phule’s pages and schools were aimed at almost that whole field, not at a single polite reform of the upper caste home.
Body
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.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD P[Jotirao and Savitribai Phule] --> G[Girls schools] P --> D[Dalit education] P --> K[Peasant Gulamgiri Asud] P --> S[Satyashodhak Samaj] G --> SUB[Subaltern field] D --> SUB K --> SUB
Conclusion
Phule’s books attacked priestly slavery and the peasant’s whip. His schools and the Satyashodhak Samaj reached girls, Dalits and cultivators together. That is a subaltern reform of almost the whole excluded field of his Maharashtra, not a single-caste charity.
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