PARALLELS BETWEEN THE REVOLUTIONARY LIBERALISMS OF THOMAS PAINE AND MAHATMA JOTIRAO PHULE

Abstract

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and Mahatma Jotirao Phule (1828-1890) were both revolutionary thinkers in their respective times and geographical spaces, concerned about radically altering the unjust foundations on which their respective societies were based. Their thought revolved around creating a just sociopolitical order that would ensure liberty and safeguard the rights of people. Phule's contemplation of the degeneration of the Indian society brought him to identify the cause of discrimination. Paine 's ideas in his Rights of Man proved to be an inspiration that enabled Phule to articulate the dissent against the varna-caste hierarchy propagated by the ideology of Brahminism in the modern terminology of rights. Paine reminded the people in the western world of the need for keeping the spirit of revolution alive by being vigilant about rights. Phule's legacy in India is his scathing attack of the ancient and haloed systems of social organization that actually undermined the rights of people.

Headnote

Abstract.

Thomas Paine (1737-1809) and Mahatma Jotirao Phule (1828-1890) were both revolutionary thinkers in their respective times and geographical spaces, concerned about radically altering the unjust foundations on which their respective societies were based. Their thought revolved around creating a just sociopolitical order that would ensure liberty and safeguard the rights of people. Phule's contemplation of the degeneration of the Indian society brought him to identify the cause of discrimination. Paine 's ideas in his Rights of Man proved to be an inspiration that enabled Phule to articulate the dissent against the varna-caste hierarchy propagated by the ideology of Brahminism in the modern terminology of rights. Paine reminded the people in the western world of the need for keeping the spirit of revolution alive by being vigilant about rights. Phule's legacy in India is his scathing attack of the ancient and haloed systems of social organization that actually undermined the rights of people.

Keywords: Thomas Paine, Mahatma Jotirao Phule, Revolutionary -Liberalism, Rights, Social Revolution in India, Shudraatishudras.

1. Introduction

Mahatma Jotirao Phule (1828-1890) has been hailed as the father of the Indian social revolution on account of his work in analyzing the socio-religious roots of slavery related to the toiling shudraatishudra (the shudras and the atishudras, the low and the downtrodden castes, respectively) masses and in reconstructing Indian society on the basis of justice, equality and reason (Keer 1974: vii). The influence of the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Paine on Phule's liberalism has been reported by various scholars (Vora 1986: 107; Keer 1974: 14). The present paper discusses the revolutionary liberalism in Phule's thought in the light of the influence of Paine's Rights of Man. It seeks to bring out parallels between their thoughts and indicate the striking similarities of the backgrounds and temperaments between the two.

2. Life and work of Phule

Jotirao Phule was fondly conferred with the title of 'Mahatma' (a great soul) by the people of Pune in Western India, in present day Maharashtra, in recognition of the impact of his theoretical-instructional and agitational-organizational work. He is regarded as one of the most important political thinkers of the Indian Renaissance (Deshpande 2002: 3). Belonging to the educationally backward Mali (Gardener) caste, which is among the so-called lower peasant Shudra castes, Phule had an interrupted education up to what could be called secondary school level by 1848. By then, his father had given up the traditional family occupation of growing flowers for temple worship and was running a successful business as a building contractor, which he joined thereafter. In 1840, he married to Savitribai, whom he taught to read and write, inspired by the activities of an American Christian mission school for girls run by one Miss Farrar at Ahmadnagar, near Pune. Miss Farrar lamented on the state of women's education in India and told him that if each educated Indian male took up the task of educating his wife, the latter could help him in the spread of education (Keer 1974: 23-24).

Having understood the significance of education in removing the ignorance of the poor gullible shudraatishudras and women who were at the mercy of the Brahmin priests and the order created and entrenched by their scriptures, Phule started a lifelong crusade for the education of the shudraatishudras and women, by starting the first school for girls in Pune in 1848, with his wife as a teacher. This was the first school for girls in India. Two more schools were started in Pune in 1851. He felt that education would be the key to rational thinking and understanding of the existing inequalities and oppressiveness of the socio-religious order in 19th century India. This work annoyed the conservative Brahmin opinion and they created a lot of hurdles in his way. But determined that his path would lead to the establishment of an egalitarian society, Phule continued at his avowed mission even at the cost of a discord with his father who was opposed to going against tradition.

For the rest of his life, Phule involved himself in the task of awakening - among the shudraatishudras and women - the confidence that had been dampened by the socio-religious system labeling them as impure. He did this not only by spreading education among them, but also by criticizing the Hindu religious beliefs and practices and questioning the various texts that sanctified this inequality. The stimulus to his thinking came initially from an insult that he encountered at a marriage ceremony of a Brahmin friend, where some conservative elders shooed him off the marriage procession labeling him as low caste (Keer 1974: 17). Infuriated because of the insult, he began to think of the causes regarding the status based on birth in Indian society. He vowed to remove heredity as a basis of assigning social status as he concluded that was the cause of humiliation and lack of human dignity in Indian society. This was the beginning of his crusade against the varna - caste system in India.

Phule established the Satyashodhak Samaj (The Truth-Seekers' Society) in 1873 that proclaimed the need to save the "lower castes from the hypocritical Brahmins and their opportunistic scriptures" (Sarkar 1983: 57). The Samaj was established by Phule in line with other such religious reform initiatives being taken in his times by social reformers who believed that if the degenerate aspects of the religion were removed, it would be restored to its pure and sublime form. Phule, on the other hand, believed that the very basis of Hindu religion was flawed as it was founded on inequality and lack of human dignity. Accordingly, he strongly opposed this religious order and wanted to completely do away with it. He scrutinized the various texts that propagated this hierarchical social organization, i.e. the Vedas,14 the Smriti literature or the legal codes as well as the Puranas, or the mythological literature. In order to expose the capriciousness of the Brahminical15 order, he wrote several books, journal articles and some literature in the popular genre that could be presented in popular art forms, such as the play ?Tritiya Ratna' (1855), the ballad ?Shivajicha Powada' (1869), the lyrical ?Bramhanache Kasab - Priestcraft Exposed' (1969), the dialogues ?Gulamgiri - Slavery' (1873), and the ?Sarvajanik Satyadharma Pustak', translated by Deshpande as The Book of the True Faith (1891, published posthumously by Phule's adopted son), etc. He used these genres so that the ideas could be propagated in the oral form across the illiterate shudraatishudra audience. He also wrote a full-fledged exposition upon the condition of the farmers in India, entitled ?Shetkaryacha Asud - Cultivator's Whipcord' (1883). Apart from these writings, he also wrote numerous notes, pamphlets, retorts, letters that reflect his active participation in the theoretical discourse of his times (Phadke 1991).

3. Intellectual influences on Phule

Phule read Thomas Paine's Rights of Man in 1847 and contemplated upon the various ideas about rights. He became familiar with the history of the American War of Independence and became a great admirer of George Washington, just as he was of the medieval King Shivaji in Western India. Phule was acquainted with the American developments during his times and tried to connect the question of slavery with the socio-religious slavery of the shudraatishudras and women in India. He dedicated his work 'Gulamgiri - Slavery', published in 1873, to "the good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self-sacrificing devotion in the cause of negro slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Shudra Brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thralldom" (Phadke 1991: 124).

Having studied in a Scottish Mission School and not in one of the schools run by the East India Company opened him up to a different world than merely that of the British history and political development. Additionally, Paine's ideas had an influence on some Scottish thinkers, so that this book might be recommended for reading to the students in the Scottish Mission School.

Through Paine, Phule was introduced to the Lockean school of revolutionary liberalism, while other contemporary Indian social reformers were deeply impressed by the second phase of classical liberalism in the tradition of British reformism, since that tradition was the most accessible to them due to the presence of British rule in India (Vora 1986). "With the exception of Phule, virtually all other social reformers/ revolutionaries stayed constrained by the limits imposed upon them by the rather weak English branch of European liberalism, exemplified most of all by Mill and Spencer" (Deshpande 2002: 3). Thomas Paine's Rights of Man influenced Phule especially since it was a strong critique of the British conservatism and a reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. In his boyhood, Phule had strong nationalistic aspirations of freeing India from the British rule, so that a book that criticized some aspects of colonization might have been attractive to him. However, he went on to read and contemplate deeply about it, providing him with a grounding in the modern discourse on rights, which essentially enabled him to articulate his discontent about the condition of the shudraatishudra masses in the language of rights.

The most notable Brahmin social reformers, like Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842-1901), Gopal Ganesh Agarkar (1856-1895) and Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915), and the Parsee liberals, like Dadabhai Nowrojee (1825-1917) and Pherozeshah Mehta (18451915), espoused the ideas of slow progress or evolutionism and elitism (Vora 1986: 92). Phule, however, had a chance of understanding the Lockean revolutionary liberalism because of reading Paine's Rights of Man. He therefore had faith in the notion of collective wisdom of the society and looked at education of the masses as a means of manifesting it. Being a preUniversity thinker, Phule was largely self-taught. The first batch of graduates passed out of Bombay University in 1858, by which time Phule had already started his work of spreading education among the shudraatishudra masses and girls.

In his reading of several books in the Indian tradition along with his friends, he came across a Sanskrit text called 'Vajrasuchi' that had been rendered or adapted variously in Marathi by several saint poets and scholars during the medieval saint movement. This text attributes the agonies of the Hindus to the pernicious caste system. The other text that Phule and his colleagues seem to have been tremendously inspired by is the 'Beejak Grantha ' by another medieval saint from North India, Kabir. The part 'Bipramati' (the mind/ intellect of the Brahmin) that describes the nature, selfishness and behaviour of Brahmins made an imprint on Phule's mind and he began to contemplate how to free the masses from the clutches of the Brahminism and from the socio-religious system (Phadke 1985: 42-43). Phule rooted his critique of the Brahminical order in those philosophical traditions in India that questioned Brahminism.

One can notice that the indigenous roots of Phule's critique of the Brahminical socioreligious order are fairly strong. Though the critique of the Hindu religion and social system made by the missionaries gave him his earliest direction, the missionary polemics and discourse was not the only inspiration to his analysis of the Hindu socio-religious system. He was working out his thoughts about the unjust nature of Brahminism on the basis of his own experiences and through acute observation of society around him. Because of this strong rooting in indigenous traditions, conversion to Christianity never posed itself as a viable option for Phule. Nor did he become an Atheist (Phadke 1985: 42-43). Phule's liberalism couched in religious language as socio-religious liberty has been understood as the step towards economic and political freedoms. The task of understanding Phule's liberalism thus requires a decoding of his religious discourse, which is also true of the other socio-religious reformers of India at that time.

4. Sarvajanik Satyadharma, an alternative to Brahminism

Phule argued that the shudraatishudras and women were condemned to the status of Dasas and Dasis, or servants in the Indian society. The Brahminical superiority arrogated to itself ritual purity with which they denied religious rights to these sections. Therefore, in the ritualistic aspects of religion, the shudraatishudras had to depend upon the Brahmin priests and this was a major way in which the former were 'duped' by the latter (Phule 1873/1991). Not only did Phule deny the priest as the go-between in the relationship between the devotee and God, but also challenged the rational basis of the existing rituals in religion. While he attacked the existing religious customs and practices as unjust and irrational, he also made a conscious effort to create new rational rituals to take the place of the old ones. Otherwise, a mere destructive criticism would have been dangerous and make for an incomplete revolution. He wrote and published a booklet towards the end of his life for this purpose. It includes, for example, a rational ceremony for marriage, naming ceremony for a new bom child, etc., in tune with the new ethos of an egalitarian and just society that Phule envisages. These rituals are revolutionary in that they don't need a Brahmin priest to carry them out. They imply freedom of the shudraatishudras from the bondage of priest craft or the cheating of the credulous masses by the Brahmins (Phule 1887/1991). Various rituals are still discussed and explained as a part of his philosophical treatise, Sarvajanik Satyadharma Pustak, with their true importance and rationale.

The theoretical basis of his philosophy is to be found in the book Sarvajanik Satyadharma Pustak (1891), or The Book of the True Faith. In this treatise, Phule presents his vision of the ideal society and the principles on which it should be based. He seeks to put forward an alternative liberal framework for the liberation of the shudraatishudras. In the 19th century India, several efforts were made towards religious reformation through the establishment of different societies by different social reformers. Phule found these efforts too slow and inadequate to establish a just socio-religious order. He did not appreciate these efforts for they didn't oppose the scriptures for the fear of public opinion and, as a result, they merely remained revised versions of the same Brahminism. He established the Satyashodhak Samaj, or the Truth Seekers' Society to propagate the ideas of his new philosophy. It was based on the philosophy of Deism that completely rejected the theistic basis of Hindu religion, paving the way for a complete transformation of the ethos of religion. Once again, the influence of Paine on Phule is evident. In this book, Phule proposed thirty-three rules for a votary of Truth, which bear an imprint of the influence of Paine's thought on human rights. Phule made untiring mention of all 'men and women in the world' in these rules, never using a common identity 'man' and letting the woman to be present. This shows Phule's attitude of inclusion and paves the way for women to be counted in.

5. Conception of rights in Paine and Phule

The argument for equal rights in Phule's discourse takes a path that strongly resembles the arguments of Paine in his Rights of Man. In the present section, I attempt to point out the similarities in the arguments of Phule and Paine. The radical, almost revolutionary content of Phule's liberalism can be attributed to the early influence of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. The following section discusses the way Phule appropriated the insights of Paine's Rights of Man, integrated them with his world view and applied them in the task of building his philosophy of total social transformation.

Paine was conscious of living in fluid times, that a new order was about to be established and a new ethos and ethic needed to be conceived for shaping the relationship between the individual, society and state. Having an uncanny premonition of revolution, Paine created a vision for the new order unfolding in the United States as well as in France. He also hoped that the two revolutions might rekindle the revolutionary spirit in his own England. Not only he participated in the American War of Independence as a foot soldier, but also was many a times the central influence in the morale boosting of the soldiers through his messages. His profuse journalistic writings in America set the tone of the thinking about the revolution itself and the kind of order to emerge. A new politics taking shape along participatory democratic lines in America provided the context for Paine to build upon the vision for the Rights of Man, which he hailed as republicanism (Hitchens 2007). I will discuss the views of Paine and Phule on the topic of rights with respect to the following themes: origin of rights, end of state, right to revolt and universality of rights, by drawing parallels between their ideas.

5.1. Origin of rights

By grounding himself in the deistic philosophy, Phule posited that the universe and all its creatures have been created by the 'Nirmik' or <'Nirmankarta\ with the same meaning in Marathi as Paine's Maker. He argued that all human beings were naturally equal, implying that there were no natural distinctions between human beings. He upheld the principle that all human beings were therefore free and endowed by their Nirmik equally with rights and freedoms, including freedom of thought and expression, as well as religious and political freedom. All the bounty of the Nirmik's creation was for all the human beings to enjoy, meaning that the resources of the earth belonged to everyone. Paine also posited that all human beings were born free and equally endowed with rights by their Maker (Paine 1791/1995: 462). Paine has been understood to have popularized the natural rights doctrine as his ideas echoed the Lockean premises and made a strong argument for the defense of the same. Rooted firmly in the natural law tradition, Paine talked of inherent rights that were contained in human beings by virtue of being individuals. As a result, rights were also inalienable for Paine. This implies they were imprescriptible as natural rights; governments didn't grant them, nor could they take the rights away (Paine 1791/1995: 462).

Paine concluded that just as everyone was equal at the time of creation in the eyes of the Maker, human beings should also be equal in front of the law. Moreover, people should have the right to a government that is representative for their interests and views. These ideas clearly reflect the theory of natural rights and representative government upheld by Paine. Phule pointed out that the traditional Hindu Smritis or law codes applied differently to different varnas and unjustly favoured the Brahmin men. He therefore thanked Providence for the British rule over India as the British imposed the Rule of Law and brought the entire country with its entire population under a single administrative rule. According to Phule, legal equality would be a step towards eventually realizing an egalitarian society.

Paine reiterated the objective of the state as the realization of the common good (Paine 1792/1995: 585). Among the different kinds of government (i.e., monarchy, aristocracy and oligarchy), he argued that there was a tendency to tax the poor and enable the rich to become richer and more powerful. Hence, Paine strongly endorsed the idea of representative democracy, or Republican government. Phule applied the same logic to the Indian social system and argued that it exploited the shudraatishudras and satisfied the interests of the Brahmins through cleverly written scriptures and mythological tales. The lives of the shudraatishudras and women were meant to fulfill the various needs of the powerful Brahmins in society. According to Phule, the caste system was a brahminical conspiracy to keep the shudraatishudras in perpetual slavery.

Just as Phule found in hereditary social status the root cause of the misery in India, Paine directed against the hereditary monarchy the critique of the problems in the western society, especially in Great Britain. He saluted the French Revolution as the French nation revolted against the despotic principles of government. He lashed out against heredity principle saying that "the idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureat" (Paine 1791/1995: 479). In a stronger tone, Paine argued that hereditary succession and hereditary rights could make no part of government, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary (Paine 1791/1995: 511).

Phule assessed the contemporary Indian society where the Brahmins took advantage of the coming of the British rule, acquired modern education and went on to dominate the scene in higher education, government service as well as social institutions. He argued that the poor peasantry paid the major part of the taxes and the government spent on the facilities for higher education that only the elite classes could take advantage of. In the description Phule formulated for the Hunter Commission on deciding the Education Policy for India, he made it quite clear that even though the farmers were contributing the most to the exchequer in the form of taxes, their education had been ignored. When the Brahmin social reformers demanded the facilities for higher education, he argued that the spread of education among the shudraatishudra masses across the country should be the priority. He didn't trust the percolation theory of the social reformers. The connection he made with the paid taxes and facilities received was definitely a modern way of articulating demands and grievances, holding the government accountable.

5.2. The right to revolt

A result of the Glorious Revolution, the creed of Revolutionary Liberalism in England was rekindled through the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. The question whether people have the right to revolt against oppressive government that undermined human dignity and curtailed the rights of the people was answered affirmatively by Paine in his Rights of Man. According to Paine, the right to resist the corrupt government was central to the notion of responsible government. Because Paine rooted himself in the natural law tradition, he accepted the view that morality operated through the conjunction of conscience and reason (Claeys 1989: 93). The conclusion followed that the laws of the State could not run counter to this natural law and, if they did, then the Lockean freedom to revolt would lay very much with the people.

In the context of 19th century India, Phule was witnessing massive transformation, coming face to face with the bureaucratic colonial rule and acquiring the modernity of the West through British education and government. A social as well as a political revolution were in the offing and social reformism came from the elite social reformers introspecting about the reasons for the colonial conquest of India by the British and the political reformers and arguing for waging a movement to win back independence. In this context, Phule faced a dilemma. The question was whether to rally around the forces of the Indian National Congress (established in 1885) and strengthen the cause of national freedom struggle, or carry on the task of social revolution aimed at ending the social inequality sanctified by religion. In his characteristic style, he questioned whether the Indian National Congress was truly ?national', given its largely upper caste and upper class composition. He pertinently questioned about how many shudraatishudras, women and farmers, were members of the Congress. After thinking on the issues at hand, Phule concluded that the British would eventually have to go and then the Brahmins would take over, considering their ability of running the governmental machinery due to their current experience in government under the British rule. As a consequence, he felt that the slavery of his Shudraatishudra brethren would continue in the future, as they were ill-equipped with education and experience of running the modem bureaucratic governmental machinery. They needed to be empowered to take their just place in independent India. Consequently, he took a social revolutionary position in order to first rectify the inequitable social and religious situation in India and, therefore, stood for a total social transformation in India towards the values of human freedom and equality. Having taken this position on the colonial question, Phule chose to revolt against the socio-religious system in India that had curtailed the fundamental freedoms of the masses for centuries.

The moderate social reformers believed in the rationality of man as a part of the beliefs they accepted from the ethos of European Enlightenment. But rationality of man as an individual could not convince them about the rationality of the collectivity. They also posited a chronology in the process of enlightenment. They believed that the individual got enlightened before the society. As a result, the emphasis was laid on the education and orientation of the individual, making their outlook elitist. Phule never took an elitist stand. In fact, his life's mission was to democratize the Indian society. He believed that there was something called collective wisdom. It only needed to be brought out through the process of education. His radicalism lies in the advocacy of education for all. Its monopoly by any society group may prove detrimental to the emergence of an egalitarian social order.16

In any case, a major aspect of Phule's social revolutionary activism involved the search for a common identity for all Indians that would be the basis of the establishment of freedom for all and equality of all. Phule contended that Indians could not realize nationhood without becoming one people. In his views, socio-religious equality was the precondition for the realization of modernity and democracy in India.

5.3. Universality of rights

The importance of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man lay in expounding upon the rights belonging to the individual as a human being, written with the confidence that the ideas therein apply to the entire humankind. The Rights of Man was attractive because of Paine's invocation of the rights of all, rather than narrow British liberties (Claeys 1989: 90). It proved to be remarkable for its universalism echoed in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, as well as in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man. It also put forward universal principles and values. Paine broadened the understanding of the notion of rights by emphasizing a deeply Christian - especially Quaker - and cosmopolitan view of rights language. Mankind could now be understood as belonging to one universal fraternal community where all possessed equal rights and duties which upheld the fundamental dignity of each (Claeys 1989: 91). Thus, Paine's conception of rights paved the way for the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The idea of reciprocal rights and duties of individuals is an inference of this notion of universal rights. By way of extending the logic of the natural law tradition, Paine condemned slavery as contrary to the plain dictates of natural rights and conscience.

In Phule's conception, rights become meaningful only when they are universal and freely enjoyed by all. In a hierarchical society, rights belong only to select few elites; they are merely privileges and instruments of oppression of the weak by the powerful. Hence, Phule criticized the Brahminical socio-religious order and argued for an egalitarian society enthused with the spirit of justice, equality and reason. Therefore, he wanted to extend all the men's rights to women as well. He understood the centrality of women's dual oppression in the context of the Varna-caste system and in the gendered context. In his attack on the Brahminical order for condemning the shudraatishudras and the women in slavery for centuries, he identified the need for empowering women as an essential precondition of the emancipation of the entire society. Education was the first step towards achieving this goal. Women should be equipped to play their rightful role in society. In the entire project of starting schools for girls, the focus was on the right to education that would enable women to live a life of dignity. Phule attributed ignorance and servitude of the shudraatishudras to lack of education.

6. Conclusion

Both Paine and Phule were essentially revolutionaries. Both wanted to radically alter the unjust foundations on which their respective societies were based. The historical context was of major transformations and upheavals happening across the world. While Paine was an active witness to two of the world's greatest revolutions against autocratic rule, Phule was involved in the transition to modernity of a traditional society ripped with colonialism. While Paine belonged to a modest non-aristocratic background, Phule came from a lower Shudra caste. Their disadvantaged status in their respective societies gave them a vantage point from where they could afford to be radically critical of the existing order. Both wrote for the common people and sought to democratize not only their societies, but also the politics and the discourse about it (Vincent 2005). Both they were more or less self-taught, as they did not get a chance to study in universities. Both were passionate about their respective causes and studied in depth to articulate their ideas. Both were actively involved in the political discourses of their times.

Both grappled with roughly the same issues. They questioned the norms of their societies and rebelled against the established order. They were harbingers of new ideas and values and passionately propagated them through polemical debates. They opposed the conservatives in their respective societies and waged pamphlet wars with them. Both faced denigration from their conservative opponents about the grammatical errors in their writing. Both they also faced attempts on their lives as well as tremendous adulation. While Paine was tried for sedition in the country of his birth and imprisoned for treason and almost guillotined in France, Phule never got recognition in his own lifetime as a thinker. Only halfway through the 20th century, the recognition of his contribution to Indian renaissance and his radicalism as a social revolutionary thinker have become notorious. Not only is he viewed as the foremost ideologue of the emancipation of the weakest in the socio-religious system of the Hindus, but also he is considered an organic intellectual who could truly conceptualize and lead the movement for the emancipation of the oppressed. In order to understand the contemporary social reality in its entirety, Phule tried to build a system of ideas, taking into account the past and present realities of his time. He identified and theorized the most important questions of his time - religion, the varna system, ritualism, language, literature, the British rule, mythology, the gender question, the conditions of production in agriculture, the lot of the peasantry (Deshpande 2002: 18-20). Phule's analysis of the Indian society from the perspectives of varna-caste, class and gender is considered to be one of the most holistic understandings of the same (More 2007: 260).

While Paine has been hailed as the propagandist of the revolutionary creed of liberalism in the western world, Phule is considered to be the first social revolutionary in modern India. Dr. B R Ambedkar, the architect of the independent Indian constitution, hailed Phule as one of his preceptors along with Buddha and Kabir (Keer 1974: vii). The Constitution of India with its express guarantee of Fundamental Rights and other human rights is testimony to the enduring impact of the ideas of Phule on the efforts of shaping a modern democratic nation. The Constitution of independent India, drafted by Dr. Ambedkar, was adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1949.

Footnote

The four-fold organization of Hindu society comprised Brahmins as priests at the top, the Kshatriyas as soldier- administrators/ kings, the Vaishyas as traders and the Shudras as peasants and artisans at the bottom of the hierarchy.

14 The four Vedas were believed to be the revealed literature of the Aiyan Hindus. They are the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda, held to be sacred.

15 Brahminism holds that the Brahmins are ritually the purest and hence on the top of the hierarchy of the four vamas.

Footnote

16 I am grateful to Late Prof. Yashwant Sumant for his remarks on this topic.

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