Savitribai Phule

Savitribai Phule (3 January 1831 – 10 March 1897) was a Marathi educator, poet, and anti-caste social reformer born in Naigaon, Satara District, Maharashtra, into a Mali-community family. Married to Jyotirao Phule at age nine and illiterate at the time of her marriage, she was educated by her husband and by activist Sagunabai Kshirsagar before completing formal teacher training at the American missionary Cynthia Farrar's institution in Ahmednagar and at the Normal School in Pune — becoming India's first professionally trained female teacher and headmistress.

In January 1848, Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule, together with Sagunabai Kshirsagar, opened the first school for girls started by Indians, at Bhidewada, Pune, with six students. Defying violent harassment — stones and cattle dung hurled at her on her walk to school — she carried a second sari to change into on arrival. By 1851 they operated three schools in Pune serving approximately 150 female students; over her career she was involved in establishing 18 schools in total. In 1852 she founded the Mahila Seva Mandal for women's rights awareness and was named best teacher in the Bombay Presidency. She established the Balhatya Pratibandhak Griha, a home for the prevention of infanticide for pregnant widows, in 1863. In 1873 she co-founded the Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of Truth Seekers) alongside Jyotirao, leading its women's wing; after Jyotirao's death in 1890 she continued to lead the organization. In 1897 she organized plague relief in Pune, personally nursing the sick, and died on 10 March 1897 after contracting bubonic plague in the course of this work.

As a literary figure, Savitribai Phule published "Kavya Phule" in 1854 — a collection of 41 poems constituting the first book-length verse publication by an Indian woman in the nineteenth century, and among the earliest modern poetry collections by any author in British India. Published before any work by Jyotirao Phule, it drew on vernacular Marathi forms — abhang, ovi, anushtubh, dindi — while adopting modern prosody to address individual rights and social transformation. Scholar Gayathri Prabhu, writing in "A Genre of Her Own: Life Narratives and Feminist Literary Beginnings in Modern India" (Bloomsbury, 2025), characterizes the collection's dominant quality as a "commitment to justice" and its politics as a "distinct brand of socio-cultural radicalism" that unified the categories of stree-shudra-atishudra — women, backward classes, and Dalits — alongside adivasis and Muslims. Her most widely cited poem, "Go, Get Education," positions knowledge as the primary weapon against caste oppression. Her second collection, "Bavan Kashi Subodh Ratnakar," appeared in 1892.

Political scientist Bidyut Chakrabarty has characterized Savitribai as "the sole female reformer of 19th-century India to explore the interplay of patriarchy with caste." Dalit writer and critic Anita Bharti, who has published extensively on her poetry, calls her "the backbone of the Dalit feminist movement and an ideal for the Indian feminist movement as a whole." Scholars Shailaja Paik and Braj Ranjan Mani have argued that she "assigned agency to the personhood of women" through her combined practice of education reform and anti-caste activism. The University of Pune was renamed Savitribai Phule Pune University in 2015 in her honor.