Jyotirao Phule was born on 11 April 1827. Two centuries later, when I read his life and work, I do not see only a social reformer. I see an economic framework—someone who identified problems with surgical precision and solved them by building institutions.
He saw the condition of women and lower-caste people not merely as a social problem. He saw an excluded population whose productive potential was being systematically blocked—through denial of education and a segregated labour market. His response was to build schools and counter-institutions that broke barriers of caste, gender, and knowledge simultaneously. That is why, even after two hundred years, he is worth reading not just as a reformer but as a thinker whose instincts were, fundamentally, economic.
The World He Inherited
When Phule was born, female literacy in India stood below 0.2 per cent. For Dalit and Shudra women, it was nearly zero. In the Bombay Presidency in 1851, only about three per cent of girls attended any school. No school in India existed specifically for Dalit girls.
An economy where half the population cannot read, cannot own property, cannot move freely, cannot accumulate skills—that is not just an injustice. It is a catastrophic waste of human capital. Eighty per cent of people lived on subsistence farming. In such an economy, female literacy had no perceived value and therefore no returns. Women had no property rights, so no bank would lend to them. There was no economic or social incentive to invest in female education. It was a vicious cycle—a low-level equilibrium trap.
The Turning Point
In 1841, defying every social expectation for a boy of the Mali caste, Jyotirao entered the Scottish Mission High School in Pune. There he encountered Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Paine wrote about European aristocracy—kings and inherited privilege. Phule read it and translated it. What Paine said about noble birth, Phule said about caste birth. The logic was identical. The injustice was identical.
He also drew from the American abolition movement. What abolitionists said about Black bondage, he said about Dalit bondage. That became the dedication of his book Gulamgiri (Slavery) in 1873.
Then came the incident that broke the camel's back. In 1848, Phule attended a Brahmin wedding. The family turned on him, rebuked him, told him he did not belong in that procession. It was his tipping point. The logic was identical. The injustice was identical. The remedy had to be identical.
He walked away. Within months, he opened India's first school for girls. The humiliation showed him the system. His response was not rage—it was constructive and transformational.
Three Mechanisms of Exclusion
In Gulamgiri, Phule diagnosed three things that created the exclusion trap.
First, epistemic exclusion. A credentialing system—Sanskrit attached to priestly literacy—functioned as a barrier to entry. His solution: secular, vernacular, universal education. What we would now call a knowledge commons.
Second, economic enslavement. Caste was not divine order. It was a system invented by those who benefited from it, to extract labour and surplus from those who did not. His word for it was slavery, and he used it deliberately.
Third—and here he was far ahead of his time—the gendered double burden. Most reformers of his era were preoccupied with women's position within the family. Phule saw it as a social and economic problem.
Caste as an Economic Institution
Look at the caste system from an economist's perspective. You find a set of rules designed to concentrate productive resources in the hands of a few, and to make that concentration self-sustaining. Brahmin priests held a monopoly on literacy—especially Sanskrit—and through that, on religious texts, accounting, and administrative knowledge. An absolute monopoly in the technical economic sense: access restricted, rents extracted, outsiders penalised for entering the market.
The Varna system assigned occupations by birth. Regardless of intelligence, creativity or capability, your work was fixed the day you were born. We cannot calculate the full economic cost of this misallocation, but by any measure it would be enormous.
At the very bottom were lower-caste women. They bore caste exclusion and gender exclusion simultaneously. They were not counted as economic actors at all. Zero property. Zero voice. Zero legal standing.
Phule looked at this system and did not see religion. He saw a monopoly market. And he built a school for girls—breaking the monopoly and the low-level equilibrium trap. He also hired two female teachers: Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh, creating pathways for women workers.
There was no market for this. No family saw an immediate return. The social penalty was brutal—ostracism, physical harassment. Savitribai walked to school each morning while people threw cow dung and stones at her. She carried a spare sari to change into when she arrived. Yet she came every morning.
Usman Sheikh and his sister Fatima Sheikh gave the Phules shelter when their own family expelled them for educating Dalit children. Fatima, already literate, trained alongside Savitribai and went on to teach at all five schools the Phules eventually opened. She became India's first Muslim woman teacher.
By 1851–52, around 150 to 200 girls were enrolled across three schools in Pune.
What Phule did is what economists call solving a coordination failure. When there was no school, no family invested in girls' education because there was no return. He created the school—which created the supply of trained teachers—and thus created the return to girls' education.
The night school he opened alongside the girls' school was just as significant. He understood that you cannot ask a working person to choose between earning and learning. So he removed the choice.
The Economic Frameworks That Came Later
Three bodies of economic theory help explain why Phule's act was so important—and why it worked. In each case, the theory arrived a century or more after his actions.
Human Capital Theory: Theodore Schultz argued in 1961 that education is an investment, not consumption. Gary Becker formalised it in 1964. Phule was practising it in 1848. He chose arithmetic, natural science, and history in his curriculum—not religious instruction. Productive knowledge that skilled people for employment. His testimony to the Hunter Commission in 1882 argued explicitly that the state must fund girls' education because private returns are insufficient to induce household investment. That is a textbook market failure argument.
Institutional Economics: Douglass North, Nobel laureate 1993, showed that economic performance depends on informal norms and regulations. Caste was India's dominant informal institution—enforced by ritual, social pressure, and exclusion, not by police. In September 1873, Phule built a counter-institution: the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth-Seeking Society). Where the old system required priests, the new one banned them. Where the old demanded caste endogamy, the new welcomed all. Where the old treated women as property, the new made them full members.
Capabilities Approach: Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom (1999) argued that development is not GDP—it is what people can do and be. Martha Nussbaum listed central human capabilities. Phule's campaign against child marriage secured the capability to live a normal lifespan. The infanticide home he opened in 1863 addressed bodily health and integrity. His schools focused on senses, imagination, thought. His campaign against forced head-shaving of widows was about experiencing grief without humiliation. The Satyashodhak Samaj offered practical reason—a space to think and question. Marriages without priests allowed control over one's own life. He built institutions that delivered these capabilities.
The Unfinished Revolution: India 2026
Two hundred years after Phule's birth, look at the statistics he tried to change.
- Female literacy: approximately 65 per cent versus 82 per cent for men.
- Female labour force participation rate: 37 per cent. Male: 79 per cent. That 42-point gap is structural exclusion, not a preference gap.
- Earnings: women earn roughly 77 paise for every rupee earned by men for the same work (ILO, 2024).
- Global ranking: India ranks 129th out of 146 countries on the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index (2024).
The chains Phule identified are not fully broken.
Conclusion
The phrase that comes to mind is économiste avant la lettre—an economist before the fact. Not that Phule belongs to economics, but that his way of thinking and building anticipated it. He identified factors that lead to market failure. He diagnosed institutional causes. He designed interventions that attacked supply-side and demand-side barriers at once, generating positive externalities. He built counter-institutions. He submitted formal policy arguments to the colonial state.
And he proved, with Savitribai walking to school each morning through everything thrown at her, that the first mover pays the highest cost. But without the first mover, there is no movement.
"Do not let the chains of caste and gender imprison the minds of women. Educate them—and you educate the nation."
Two hundred years on, we honour him not by celebrating a completed revolution but by acknowledging how much of his work we have yet to finish.
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Prof (Dr) Tulika Tripathi is at the Central University of Gujarat, Vadodara. This feature draws on her academic reading of Phule's life and work, with sources including Phule's original writings (Gulamgiri, 1873; Hunter Commission testimony, 1882) and modern economic frameworks (Becker, Sen, North, Acemoglu & Robinson). This is a slightly modified version of Prof Tripathi's lecture in Gandhinagar, organised jointly by the Department of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India, and the Central University of Gujarat (Vadodara), under the aegis of its Dr. Ambedkar Center of Excellence (DACE)
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