Jotirao Phule and the Ideology of Social Revolution in India

It is one of the tragic dilemmas of the colonial situation that the national revolution and the social revolution in a colonial society tend to develop apart from one another, Jyotirao Phule represented a very different set of interests and a very different outlook on India from all the upper caste elite thinkers of the so-called Indian Renaissance who have dominated the awareness of both Indian and foreign intellectuals. The elite expressed an ideology of what may be described as the "national revolution"; it was the nationalism of a class combining bourgeois and high caste traditions. Phule represented the ideology of the social revolution in its earliest form, with a peasant and anti-caste outlook.