Phule’s Gulamgiri: Turning Puranic memory on its head

Jotirao Phule’s engagement with the past is rooted in his political subject-position, wherein he was trying to bridge the abject status of the sudradi-atisudras of his time with events in a distant past, which he designated as the source-events of their current condition. Armed with concrete evidence from peasant oral traditions and customs, Phule delineated a normative inversion of the Puranic corpus so as to recalibrate the past with the present. His conscious effort to mould the perceptions of the past to beget a new future was in no small measure a result of the new literate present he was experiencing. It was print literacy that not only made Phule aware of a pre-Aryan past but also made it imaginable for him. Phule’s relation to the past is not straightforward or linear. There was not only a brahmanical past to be exorcised and cordoned off from the present, but also an absent past of Bali that was to be repossessed and rendered present. There was a known, visible past to be rejected and forgotten, and a buried, unacknowledged past to be salvaged and remembered. Thus, for Phule, there was a past within a past. This article describes the relation between the unacknowledged past and the lived present that Phule attempted to re-establish for the sudradi-atisudras.