The First Teacher

Every morning, a young woman stepped out of her house in Pune with a bundle under her arm. Inside it was a second sari.

As she walked through the streets towards the school, people were waiting for her. Some shouted insults. Some threw mud, rotten eggs and cow dung. Now and then, someone threw a stone.

She did not shout back. When she reached the school, she changed into the clean sari, put the dirty one aside, and began the day's lessons. Then, in the evening, she walked home and did it all again the next day.

Her name was Savitribai Phule, and she was teaching girls to read.

A girl who could not read

Savitribai was born on 3 January 1831 in Naigaon, a village in the Satara district of what is now Maharashtra. Her family were farmers. Like almost every girl in India at that time, she was never sent to school.

When she was about nine years old, she was married to Jyotirao Phule, who was about thirteen. Child marriage was common then. But Jyotirao was an unusual young man. He had been to school himself, and he believed, passionately, that education was the key to freeing people from poverty and from the cruel rules of caste.

So he began to teach his young wife at home. Savitribai learned quickly. Later she also trained as a teacher, which was almost unheard of for a woman in her time.

The school at Bhide Wada

In those days, girls were not educated. Many people believed that a girl who learned to read would bring bad luck on her family. For people from the castes then treated as "untouchable", schooling of any kind was almost impossible.

In 1848, Jyotirao and Savitribai opened a school for girls in Bhide Wada, a house in Pune. It was one of the first schools for girls in India run by Indians. Savitribai, still only about seventeen, became its teacher. She is often remembered as India's first woman teacher.

That was when the mud and stones began. Many people in the city were furious. They said she was breaking religion and tradition, and they tried to frighten her into giving up.

She did not give up. She carried her spare sari, and she kept going.

Friends in hard times

The pressure grew. In 1849, Jyotirao's father, under heavy pressure from the community, told the couple to stop their work or leave his house. They left.

They were given shelter by a friend, Usman Sheikh. His sister, Fatima Sheikh, joined Savitribai in her work and trained as a teacher too. Fatima is remembered today as one of the first Muslim women teachers in India. Together, the two women went from house to house, persuading parents to send their daughters to school.

Within a few years, the Phules and their supporters were running several schools in and around Pune, for girls and for children from the most oppressed castes. Their teaching was practical and lively. They wanted children to think and ask questions, not only to memorise.

In 1852, the British government's education department publicly recognised their work, and Jyotirao and Savitribai were honoured in Pune for it.

More than a teacher

Savitribai's courage went far beyond the classroom.

She was a poet. In 1854 she published a collection of poems in Marathi, called Kavya Phule, which encouraged people, especially those kept down by caste, to seek knowledge and stand up for themselves.

She and Jyotirao saw how cruelly young widows were treated. Many were shut away, and some, in desperation, abandoned their babies. So in 1863 they opened a home where widows could give birth safely and in secret, and where their children would be cared for. The Phules had no children of their own, so they adopted a baby born to a widow. They named him Yashwant, and raised him as their son. He grew up to become a doctor.

When people from the lowest castes were refused water from public wells, the Phules opened the water tank at their own home to everyone.

After Jyotirao died in 1890, Savitribai carried on their work, leading the reform society they had founded together, the Satyashodhak Samaj.

The last walk

In 1897, bubonic plague swept through Pune. Thousands fell ill. Savitribai, now in her sixties, worked with her son Yashwant at a clinic he had set up on the edge of the city to care for the sick.

The story is told that she heard about a sick boy in a nearby village and went to fetch him herself, carrying him to the clinic on her back. She caught the plague, and she died on 10 March 1897.

She had spent her whole life walking towards people others turned away from.

Today, millions of girls in India go to school. It is easy to forget that someone had to go first, and that she was pelted with mud for it.

Savitribai Phule's birthday, 3 January, is celebrated in Maharashtra as a day for girls' education, and the university in Pune now bears her name. She is remembered as the young teacher who carried a spare sari, and never once turned back.

Want to read more?

A Forgotten Liberator, edited by Braj Ranjan Mani and Pamela Sardar, collects essays about her life along with translations of her poems and letters. Rosalind O'Hanlon's Caste, Conflict and Ideology tells the wider story of the Phules' movement.