The Fruit of Sin and Tears: Phule, Marx and caste-colonial urbanization

Keywords: anti-caste thought; political ecology; Jotirao Phule
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

In the recent resurgence of anti-caste scholarship, including the subset of that scholarship focused on space and nature, the figure of Ambedkar has understandably taken a central place. Relatively less attention has been given to Jotirao Phule, Ambedkar’s predecessor in Maharashtrian anti-caste thought. Nonetheless, scholars writing in both English and Marathi have noted the proto-ecological sensibilities in Phule’s writings, and especially his relevance for farmers’ movements. While Phule, in both the style and content of his writing, aligned himself with the rural peasant, he also had strong ties with the urban, living his entire life in Pune, and gathering significant support for his movement from Bombay. My presentation seeks to explore this seeming tension in Phule’s thought, and to suggest that, rather than a purely peasant-oriented or rural theorist, Phule was, rather, an incisive dissector of the rural-urban in the doubly-colonial context of British colonialism and Brahmanism. This was a context in which agriculture itself was being ‘urbanized,’ in the Lefebvrian sense. The presentation also explores the striking similarities in the contemporaneous reflections of Marx and Phule regarding the ill effects of capitalist agriculture on soil fertility and on the wellbeing of the cultivator. Yet, there were also striking differences in their thought, as they observed and wrote from opposite ends of the British empire, Marx at the metropole of London, Phule at the colonized periphery. Phule’s vision allowed him to see how capital entered a caste-entrenched terrain, an entry that left its spatial mark in caste-colonial patterns of urbanization.