On April 11, on the birth anniversary of social reformer Jotirao Phule, Savitribai Phule Pune University republished a short volume by Shan...
On April 11, on the birth anniversary of social reformer Jotirao Phule, Savitribai Phule Pune University republished a short volume by Shantabai Raghunathrao Bankar that has come to be recognised as the first biography of Savitribai Phule – Jotirao’s wife and a reformer in her own right.
First published in 1939, Bankar’s Samajbhushan Savitribai Jotirao Phule Yanche Alpa Charitra (A Short Life Story of Our Society’s Ornament, Savitribai Phule) is important not only because of its subject but also because it reflects an endeavour to write a biography with only scant information available about the subject. By the time Bankar began to write this biography, its subject had already been dead for more than 30 years.
Savitribai Phule was a pioneer in the field of women’s education. Along with her husband Jotirao, she started the first Indian girl’s school in Pune in 1848. The couple opened three more schools for girls in Pune by 1851. Savitribai Phule was also a precocious poet and produced educational texts about caste discrimination. She ingeniously fused anti-caste activism with modern education.
But beyond this, there is an extreme paucity of detail about her. However, for Bankar, analysing the rapidly changing social milieu and merely documenting and reconstructing the aura...
