Phule's ecology: Cultivating anti-caste natures

Introduction

In the 1880s, in the last decade of his life, Jotirao Phule gave a series of speeches in the western region of India now known as Maharashtra. By this point in his life, Phule (1827–1890) had built up a reputation as a force for revolutionary change in several interconnected realms, including education, religion, women's rights, anti-caste activism and agrarian reform. In his attempts to build a mass base for his recently-founded Satyashodhak Samaj (“Truth-seekers’ Organization”), he was drawn increasingly to rural areas, where he witnessed – and described in his speeches – the deteriorating condition of the peasantry. His hope was to collect his speeches and publish them as a book called Shetcaryacha Asud, or (in Phule's preferred translation of the Marathi original) Cultivator's Whipcord. Phule intended the book itself to function as a whip, defending the peasantry against their various tormentors – particularly, in Phule's view, British colonial and Brahman (priestly caste) government officials. While Phule's immediate audience was in western India, the spatial and temporal scope of his arguments are much more ambitious, laying the grounds for cultivating (in multiple senses of the word) a truly egalitarian social order. Phule's Whipcord thus contains the seeds of a far-reaching critique of hierarchical natures, including both their material and ideological production.

The first two chapters of Phule's book were serialized in Deen Bandhu, a newspaper run by Phule's friend, Satyashodhak Samaj colleague, and pioneering labor organizer Narayan Lokhande. However, much to Phule's frustration, Lokhande refused to publish the subsequent chapters, fearing that – given their biting criticism of the British colonial regime – their publication would provoke censorship or worse. The book was only published in full after Phule's death. A perusal of the book's later chapters justifies Lokhande's fears, as Phule launches into a wide-ranging critique of British empire and its myriad social, economic, spatial and (though he did not use the term) ecological effects. This can be seen in a remarkable passage from the book's third chapter:

Every year vast amounts of grain, cotton, leather and wool are exported to foreign countries, and because of their ignorance or their own rough nature, the white engineers and doctors and employees in sprawling municipalities like Mumbai have dumped large amounts of manure into the sea, and now… the fields lie barren. Oh, these foreign white engineers, in cahoots with white doctors, devise schemes to make money, and sell the goods manufactured by craftsmen from their own countries, waste unlimited amounts of local people's money, and then make sure that there are buildings named after them by their subordinate black bureaucrats. Later if all the local citizens are ruined along with these buildings, why should they care? (Phule, 1883: 298-299). ¹

This article, taking the above passage as a launching point, argues that Phule articulates a complex critique of colonial political economy and ecology. In several ways, Phule anticipates later Indian nationalist and Marxian critiques of empire, detailing how British rule left the Indian economy intentionally underdeveloped, an exporter of raw materials and importer of manufactured British goods. Further, Phule's attention to the ill effects of colonial agricultural policies (“the fields lie barren”) resonates with Marxian concerns regarding the metabolic rifts wrought by capitalist industrialization and urbanization (cf. Foster, 2000).

Yet Phule's critique is distinctive in its attention to the “subordinate black bureaucrats” – that is, the predominantly Brahman functionaries who filled the lower rungs of officialdom in the western regions of British India. For Phule, colonial natures were always doubled, and any movement for egalitarian natures had to contend with the complex intertwining of systems of domination. Phule, and the larger anti-caste tradition he helped to inaugurate, recognized that British rule was just one form of colonialism, one that became parasitic on existing hierarchies of rule in India – mostly notable the caste system, which formed its own kind of “precolonial colonialism” (Pollock, 1993: 96). This goes beyond a simplistic portrayal of the “indigenous” elites in a colonial society as straightforward comprador capitalists. The upper castes and classes were shaped by the colonial encounter, but they also played a key role in shaping British actions in – and understandings of – India, including their ideological and material uses of nature.

Despite the prescience and distinctiveness of Phule's political-economic analysis, and the potential ecological insights of his approach, Phule's thought has found little purchase in scholarly literature on political ecology and cognate fields of study. In contrast, Marxian thought has permeated these fields. That is, Marx has served as a universal or global thinker, whereas Phule, if he is discussed at all, is confined to his particularity. Such asymmetries and occlusions in knowledge production have long been a topic of critique in postcolonial literature (Chakrabarty, 2008; Said, 1995); however, as explored further in the next section, this literature – at least in the Indian context – has often excluded considerations of internal hierarchies such as caste. This is unfortunate, because the anti-caste movement itself has significant insight into the unevenness of knowledge production, including its own marginalization – the production, in Gopal Guru's (2012) memorable phrase, of “theoretical Brahmans and empirical Shudras” (10). ²

This article does not seek to dismiss the contributions of Marxian thought to political ecology, or simply replace it wholesale with Phuleite thought, but rather to reiterate the point that all knowledge is situated (Haraway, 1988). Marx saw something in the dawning industrial capitalist world order that still resonates with contemporary readers, despite all the particularities that marked his time and his writing. Phule remains relevant for similar reasons and speaks to political-ecological conditions we still face, including the stubborn persistence of the peasantry; the continued need to guard against invocations of a quasi-eternal balance of nature; and the layering and strange amalgamation of various ideological and material tools of dominance.

This paper, then, is a close reading of Phule as political-ecological figure, one who is at once grounded in the realities of his own immediate geography and politics, and who, in his thinking, crosses spatial and temporal divides with a bold insouciance. The paper conducts this reading in part through a comparison with Marx and Marxian political-ecological thought. This is carried out in the spirit of “relational comparison,” as elaborated by geographer Gillian Hart (2018). Recognizing the dangers of comparison – especially those modes in which the lagging South can only be a pale imitation of the modern North – Hart (2018) nevertheless employs a sense of comparison that focuses on how geographical regions, including blocs like global North and South, “are constituted in relation to one another through power-laden practices in… multiple, interconnected arenas” (374-375). While Hart's emphasis is geographical, this article posits that “relational comparison” can be a fruitful way of putting theorists like Phule and Marx into conversation. As contemporaries located at opposite ends of the British Empire (Marx in its imperial core in London, though himself in exile; Phule in British India, the ‘crown jewel’ of the empire), these two thinkers were grappling with a set of interconnected political-economic, and political-ecological, processes.

The following section explores the relative neglect of caste in political ecology and the potential relevance of Phule for political ecology. It then returns to the question of comparing Marxian and Phuleite perspectives on (anti)colonial natures, and situates Phule and Marx in time and space before turning to the Phule's multi-pronged critique of colonial natures. This critique is elaborated in three sections, each of which puts Phule's thought into conversation with heterodox Marxian writings. These sections analyze, first, Phule's critique of Brahman-British impacts on the rural landscape, most obviously on agriculture but also on forestry and pastoralism; second, Phule's situating of rural change within a set of global rural-urban transformations; and finally, Phule's exploration of the ideologies that simultaneously support and obscure these processes.

Phule targeted not only the intertwining of British and Brahman rule, but also the interconnection of material and ideological expressions of power. Regarding the latter, Pollock (1993, 100) notes that “the preexistence of a shared ideological base among [Indian] and colonial elites may have been one contributing factor to the effectiveness with which England consolidated and maintained its rule in India.” This is prefigured by Phule's (1873: 153) potent metaphor: that the British “viewed the world through Brahman spectacles.” One aspect of this ideological base, this article seeks to show, is an attitude to nature that serves to mystify grounded knowledge of human-nonhuman relations. Phule's demystifying emphasis on cultivation has continuing relevance for present-day political ecologies, both in India and globally.

From political ecology of caste to anti-caste political ecologies

In her recent and timely call for a “political ecology of caste and the city”, Ranganathan (2022: 136) notes that “the caste-splintered city has… received scant attention in critical urban scholarship” since the “postcolonial theory utilized by [largely upper-caste] scholars in the West tends to ignore or silence internal differentiation and ongoing forms of coloniality based on caste and tribe.” Ranganathan highlights the irony that some forms of postcolonial theory can actually occlude forms of coloniality, especially seemingly “local” ones. While Ranganathan's focus is on a specifically urban political ecology, her argument could extend to political ecology more broadly. That is, caste is largely absent both as an empirical category and as an epistemic or philosophical one – “as a problem for thought.” ³

This can be seen in the very beginnings of political ecology. One of the field's seminal texts, Blaikie and Brookfield's (1987) edited collection Soil Degradation and Society, features an article entitled “A caste study of common property resources in India” (Jodha, 1987). Despite caste's central role in shaping agrarian relations, it is mentioned only glancingly in this article; its “case study” approach uses precisely the (implicitly Eurocentric) diffusionist logic that Hart (2018) rejects in favor of relational comparison. Such an approach sees India as merely an iteration of a Western-driven global process, in this case, the deterioration of common property resources. Though the article briefly mentions that the so-called “commons” have historically been controlled by landlords, it does not dwell on the caste basis of commons, and particularly, Dalit exclusion from the commons (cf. Chakravarty-Kaul, 1996; Guru, 1997). The study thus elides the specificity and historical context of changing land-use patterns in India; it also obscures a more generalizable argument about the way that categories like the “commons” – often associated with a traditional, more “balanced” relationship with nature – may hide within them significant levels of internal differentiation and exclusion.

The pattern set by this article is followed in urban political ecology (UPE) literature as well (see, for instance, Truelove, 2011). Further, until very recently, even political ecology works that did take up caste more centrally (e.g., Nightingale, 2011) have analyzed caste through various Western theoretical lenses, rarely taking up the insights of the anti-caste tradition itself. One explanation for this is that political ecology, institutionally, remains ensconced in its “Anglo-American citadel” (cf. Kim et al., 2012: 31). Theories exported from here may fit awkwardly with the actual conditions they are analyzing. But Ranganathan's intervention suggests that this explanation is incomplete; the erasure of caste depends not just on Western blindness but also on upper-caste complicity.

Phule was one of the earliest and most prescient critics of the way that Western and Indian ideologies and practices of hierarchy dovetailed, including in their production of highly inegalitarian conceptions and productions of nature. Ranganathan (2022) and Reddy (2021), in their anti-caste political ecologies, highlight the theoretical contributions of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, the anti-caste philosopher and political leader who arrived on the scene a generation after Phule and played a central role in shaping the anti-caste movement on an all-India, and indeed global, level. Ambedkar (1954, 505) famously described himself as a “devotee” of Phule, and returning to Phule is a promising entry point for constructing anti-colonial political ecologies that are grounded in anti-caste thought.

Even today, Phule's seminal contributions to modern anti-caste, feminist and agrarian movements have been marginalized in mainstream scholarship. But his legacy has been kept alive by an unbroken tradition of anti-caste scholarship and activism, in both Marathi and English. One manifestation of this was a series of Marathi-language booklets published on the 100^th anniversary of Phule's death, which reflects the broad range of Phule's intellectual contributions. Bharat Patankar's (1991: 49) contribution to the centennial series highlights, amongst other things, Phule's relevance for contemporary environmental movements, while Ashok Chausalkar's (1990) contribution emphasizes the prescience of his critique of colonial agricultural policies.

However, commenting two decades later, the playwright, translator and Phule scholar G. P. Deshpande (2009: 60) still maintained that relatively “little been written on [Phule's] understanding of agriculture”; given the centrality of the peasant to Phule's thought, there is a strong “case for studying Phule's work on agriculture more seriously and extensively.” Since Deshpande made this case, there have been additional efforts to draw ecological insights from Phule's work; for instance, Mukul Sharma's (2017) pathbreaking Caste and Nature, which explores the neglect of anti-caste thought in environmental scholarship and movements, contains a short section on Phule. Yet, as Kumar (2022) notes, such efforts have only sketched out the barest outline of a potential Phuleite theory of nature.

Phule as historical materialist?

Such a theory could be productively put into conversation with “Marx's Ecology.” This includes the book of the same name, by John Bellamy Foster (2000), as well as the various Marxian themes that animate much of political ecology, from attention to the political-economic bases of soil degradation (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987), to the concept of metabolism, so central to UPE theorizing (Heynen, 2014; Swyngedouw, 1996). In staging such a conversation, this article is hardly the first attempt to pair Marx and Phule. Phule – who combines a heady critique of Brahman ideology with exacting attention to the material realities of everyday life, especially peasant life – has often been invoked by scholars and activists seeking to address the fissures between anti-caste and Marxist movements. G. P. Deshpande (2002) for instance, makes this comparison quite explicitly, portraying Phule and Marx as revolutionaries who wanted “a total smashing up of the entire oppressive structure” (20-21).

However, despite such comparisons, including Patil's (2018: 101) assertion that Phule introduces a kind of “historical materialism” to Indian thinking, Phule's overall body of work sits uneasily with mechanically or literally materialistic interpretations of Marxism. This is clear in the oft-quoted opening lines of Shetkaryacha Asud, which appear to give primacy to knowledge and the world of ideas (the superstructure, one might say): “Without knowledge, intelligence was lost, without intelligence morality was lost and without morality was lost all dynamism! Without dynamism money was lost and without money the Shudras sank.” (Phule, 1883: 257).

Patankar (1991: 41-2) has tried to situate this aspect of Phule's thought by implicitly questioning the utility of the base-superstructure metaphor, which has contributed to an overly simplistic class versus caste debate. Instead, Patankar suggests a dialectic interplay of knowledge systems and material production:

Each is the effect of the other, each enriches the other, each is dependent on the other…. If we look at [Phule's] overall writing and practices, it is correct that he seems to give the most importance to knowledge. But along with this, he consistently conceptualizes knowledge as inextricably intertwined with all kinds of change (including social change and changes in production practices) …. In the Indian context, the Shudra-Atishudra men and women who take part in actual production work were strictly prohibited from entering the crucial field of knowledge. It is necessary to see the emphasis that comes in [Phule's] theorizing in the backdrop of this stark reality.

Crucially, for Gramsci (1918: 78), knowledge is not to be found in “‘natural’ concepts like… heredity… and an intangible, definitive ‘order’”, but rather, in an attunement to the specificities of social groups, material conditions and ideological forces in particular historical conjunctures. This is underscored in his call for “absolute ‘historicism’… and earthliness of thought” (Gramsci, 1971: 465). Gramsci's own thought focused on the specificities of Italy, and especially its southern region; Ahmad (1993: 34) suggests that such an attunement can be brought to the Indian situation, where it is not Catholicism and nostalgia for the Roman Empire that undergird hegemonic beliefs, but rather, the reactionary yearning for “Brahmanical classicism.” Phule was perhaps the first, and certainly one of the most incisive, modern critics of this ideology and its material instantiations.

This intertwining of the material and the symbolic, of representation practices and material practices, is also at the heart of Swyngedouw's (1996) early explorations of urban political ecology. Bringing questions of political ecology to the Marx-Phule dialogue suggests striking convergences (and divergences) in their thought, especially regarding the material and representational aspects of imperial forestry and soil degradation under capitalism. Phule and Marx were voracious readers and ever-evolving theorists of both their own “local” politics and a newly-emerging international order led by the twin forces of industrial capitalism and colonialism. They were both products of, and active shapers of, the historical and geographical landscapes they inhabited. Briefly delving into these landscapes, then, is necessary not just as context, but as a key part of analyzing the “earthliness” of their thought, as their particular locations spurred their exploration of capitalist and colonial natures.

Provincial politics and global empires

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Phule and his Satyashodak colleagues in Pune, and Marx and Engels in London (at least for their later writings), were striving to make sense of a rapidly changing world. Both sets of observers were closely following new scientific discoveries (both were inspired by Darwin) and global political developments (both were very sympathetic to the Union cause in the U.S. Civil War). Though there were many commonalities in their outlooks and interests, Phule and Marx also bore the unmistakable marks of the cities and regions in which they lived.

Phule was born in Pune in 1827, just nine years after the British Empire had defeated the Maratha Empire and taken power in this region. At the time of its defeat, the Maratha Empire was controlled by the Peshwas, Brahman political leaders who began as advisors to Maratha kings but became de facto rulers. This political shift was accompanied by a spatial shift over the course of several generations, as the Maratha capital moved from the forbidding hilltop Raigad Fort – where the Marathas practiced a kind of guerilla warfare in outmaneuvering the Mughal Empire – to Pune. This shift had social corollaries as well, as Pune transformed from a small town to a city made in the Peshwa's (highly Brahmanical, caste-segregated) image (see Kosambi, 1989).

The Peshwa legacy was still strong when Phule was born. Phule's family was from the Mali caste, whose traditional profession was horticulture and gardening. O’Hanlon (1985: 249–251) notes that several people from the Mali caste, including Phule, took leading roles in budding social movements in and around Pune precisely because their profession involved considerable traffic between rural areas (where fruits, flowers, etc. were grown) and urban ones (where their biggest markets were).

During this time, Pune was quickly becoming an important city for the British, as they expanded their military presence and established Pune as the monsoon capital of Bombay Presidency. Alongside, and sometimes in tension with these state-building activities, Christian missionaries conducted a wide variety of religious and social activities, including the establishment of various educational institutions. Phule himself attended a school run by the Free Church of Scotland. As O’Hanlon (1985: 107) has emphasized, the importance of this education was both the exposure it gave Phule to liberal and radical Western thought, and, perhaps even more crucially, the socially heterogeneous group of students whom Phule befriended, which became an incubator for increasingly radical critiques of caste-ridden society.

Due to his appreciation of the educational opportunities that arose during British rule, Phule has been questioned – by his contemporary adversaries, but also even by those in the present day who are sympathetic to his cause (Chausalkar, 1990; Deshpande, 2009) – for being insufficiently critical of British colonialism. But such a critique underplays Phule's evolving positions on the British and his nuanced analysis of colonialism as a phenomenon that extends beyond the British. Phule's initial engagements in social reform were largely in the fields of education and religion, two areas historically dominated by Brahmans. After completing his own education, Phule, along with his wife, the ground-breaking educator Savitribai Phule, established schools for girls and for so-called “Untouchables,” unprecedented in the region. In these efforts, he generally found support (both moral and financial) from European donors, as well as from the British government. At the same time, these very educational activities exposed Phule to the way that Brahmans had attained key positions in the British colonial Education Department and led him to critique British rule precisely for its acquiescence to, and complicity with, continuing Brahmanical dominance.

This critique in the realm of education was increasingly complemented by a political-economic critique, advancing a similar logic to show how British-Brahman dominance was leaving the average peasant increasingly immiserated. Scholars (Chausalkar, 1990; O’Hanlon, 1985) have noted a marked turn towards the figure of the peasant in Phule's later writings, though this did not imply a turn away from caste: for Phule, the cultivating masses and the oppressed castes were one and the same. This turn in Phule's thought led to his sharpest attack on British rule, including its role in furthering a rural-urban divide, and opened lines of critique that continue to animate anti-caste thought today.

Just as Phule's evolving views on colonial natures were shaped by the city and the region in which he lived, so too were Marx's. As Avineri (2019: 8) has outlined, in the region of Rhineland, where Marx was born, there was “a deep feeling of alienation and consequent political radicalization among members of the Jewish intelligentsia” in the early nineteenth century. This, Avineri argues, was due to the region's recent history: the emancipation of Jews when the region was annexed to the French Republic, and the subsequent rolling back of this emancipation when the region came under the control of the Prussian Empire. Though Marx's relationship to Judaism was complex (both his parents converted to Christianity under pressure from the state), Avineri argues that this historical context was crucial to Marx's political evolution. And, like Phule, Marx began to develop his political ideas when he found some escape from the immediate conservatism of his surroundings through education – in Marx's case, Berlin University, where he fell in with the Young Hegelians.

Back in Rhineland after his studies, Marx became the editor for the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung. Here, Marx (1842) wrote about Rhineland's parliamentary debates on new forest laws that categorized customary peasant rights, especially the right to collect dead and fallen wood, as “theft,” as large landholders sought increasingly tight control over their landholdings. As Foster (2000: 66) observes in Marx's Ecology, it was the question of poor peasants’ access to forest resources that propelled Marx's thought away from pure philosophy to “really earthly matters,” including political economy, but also, more literally, matters of nature and the earth. Marx inveighed against the injustice of these laws, but, Foster suggests, was at that time unable to pinpoint the processes that underlay these new laws, which led him into the study of political economy proper.

Marx's time at Rheinische Zeitung was short-lived, as the paper was shut down by Prussian authorities due its perceived radicalism amidst conservative retrenchment. After this, Marx worked as a journalist, writer, and organizer in a series of cities from which he was quickly exiled. A scholarly article cataloging his activities of this time describes Marx as a “provincial politician” (Felix, 1982). He finally found some stability in exile in London, where he lived out the final years of his life, at the heart of the empire had its tentacles in so many places across the globe, including Phule's Pune. Here he produced his mature works on political economy and – Foster (2000) would argue – ecology, including the notion of the metabolic rift.

However, if Phule and Marx – especially at the ends of their respective lives – were grappling with similar issues, it is highly unlikely that they were aware of each other's work. This is revealing of the politics and flows of knowledge production at that time. As Phule himself was well aware, elite groups (including, but not limited to Brahmans) exerted their dominance in part by controlling knowledge production and by, as Ambedkar (1948: 242) would later say, condemning work they disliked to “a conspiracy of silence.” Although, through his encounter with missionaries and other reformers, Phule was able to access the works of earlier generations of European and American radicals like Thomas Paine, the work of revolutionary socialists like Marx did not reach India until much later, after the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Third International. Similarly, though Marx closely followed political and economic developments in India, he relied mostly on European sources. Further, while he became increasingly sympathetic to Indian revolts against British rule, he could not have seen – in the way Phule did – the ways the incipient nationalist movement obscured its own elite caste and class position and claimed to speak for all Indians, thus sidelining voices like Phule who argued that full independence could not be achieved unless internal hierarchies of caste and gender were abolished.

In later generations, a conversation could finally take place between the inheritors of the legacies of Marx and Phule. In Maharashtra, however, the dialogue between anti-caste and anti-capitalist streams of thought has not been an easy one. For a complex set of historical, personal and ideological reasons, which it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore, there was a major rift between Ambedkar and his anti-caste movement, and the Marxist movement led by the Communist Party of India. Various scholar-activists (Omvedt, 1994; Patil, 2018; Teltumbde, 2018) have explored the reasons for this rift and have proposed various means of mending it, including through Phule's thought. Placing ecological politics front and center, channeled through the works of Phule and Marx, offers another opportunity to take this conversation forward.

Setting fire to imperial land relations: Phule's agro-ecology

Writings on Phule's ecological sensibilities generally center on his agrarianism. Indeed, Phule's writings on agriculture are the most obvious entry into his proto-environmental thought, which is, in turn, inextricably linked to his analysis of caste relations, pastoralism, forest policy and much more. This is presented most clearly in Shetkaryacha Asud, or Cultivator's Whipcord. While shetkari is most often translated in English as either “farmer” or “peasant,” Phule's choice of the term “cultivator” emphasizes both the agency and the productive role of peasants. It is their labor, skill and embodied knowledge that sustains society.

Though he had found success as a contractor in the city of Pune, Phule retained a keen interest in – and an encyclopedic knowledge of – agricultural and horticultural practices, techniques and challenges. As Chausalkar (1990) notes, several of Phule's recommendations in Cultivator's Whipcord are for technical improvements for farming, many of which are quite prescient. These include building check-dams for water conservation; increasing the amount of water the government supplies to farmers; and allowing local farmers to manage and improve their own water supply systems.

Phule's emphasis on water infrastructure for farming is further highlighted in a short booklet he wrote in 1885, called Ishara, or Warning. Like Whipcord, Warning is a polemic against those who – either ideologically or materially – act against the interests of peasants. Here, he states, if the cultivator “has water, he has everything; if he doesn’t have water, he loses everything” (Phule, 1885: 362). But he emphasizes that water must be actively channeled through canals, pipes and other irrigation systems; otherwise, irregular rainfall can lead to impoverishment, and the subsequent out-migration of peasants in search of other work – or else resorting to “begging door to door” (Phule, 1885: 362).

What is striking about Phule's agrarianism, from the perspective of contemporary environmental thought, is how actively interventionist it is, with repeated pleas for the colonial government to invest heavily in irrigation infrastructure. This is far from the nostalgia for a precolonial harmony of nature that implicitly or explicitly undergirds much environmental thinking in India, explored at greater length below (see Sharma, 2017). As the anti-caste activist and Phule scholar Gail Omvedt (1999) has argued, environmental movements against dams in contemporary India – though they give lip service to “alternative development” – are largely articulated in a language of romantic refusal, divorced from the material realities and needs of those who work the land.

This is what Patankar (1991: 49), transporting Phule's ecological thought to the present day, seeks to capture when he mocks superficial celebrations of Earth Day, noting that such celebrations “have no concern” with the “role of working people, women and Dalits” in mediating the relationship between human and nonhuman nature. As Phule (1885) writes in Ishara, the transformation of rocky barren land into a fertile paradise requires both abundant water and “man's labor” (362). This, in turn, resonates with Marx's (1976: 283) foundational musings on labor as a dialectical “process by which man… regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature… [H]e acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.”

From such a perspective – whether Phuleite or Marxian – any invocation of an eternal balance of nature is highly suspect, obscuring historical change and the role of socio-political systems in shaping the natural world. In Ishara, Phule (1885: 363) recognizes that passively relying on nature – in the form of rain-fed agriculture – will harm farmers, as the inevitable drought will give “Brahmin and Marwari moneylenders” the chance to gives loans with “sweet talk” but an underlying intention to extract more and more money from the peasantry. Irrigation, for Phule, becomes a means for peasants to avoid relations of indebtedness to (inevitably upper-caste) usurers.

Phule's agrarian vision, then, combined an attunement to the realities of rural ecologies with a sharp critique of British and Brahman elite and their clear disregard for these realities. In Cultivator's Whipcord, one of his most prescient proposals is his recognition that the “essence” or “pith” of “leaves, grass, flowers, dead insects and animals” is needlessly “washed away by the rain” pouring down from the hills, so it should be channeled by means of small dams and fed back into the soil – what today we would call composting. He then suggests that the “black and white” army personnel and “useless” police can be employed in building such dams, adding that they “will get into the habit of working hard in the open air and will become strong and disease-free” (Phule, 1883: 308). Deshpande (2002: 13), ever the Marxist interpreter of Phule, takes this suggestion literally, even going so far as to compare it to Mao's People's Liberation Army. But this disregards the “ironic peasant language” (cf Patankar, 1991: 46) Phule peppers throughout this passage; after all, Phule was well aware that the army and the police were colonizing forces.

Such a repressive state apparatus, Phule recognized, was needed precisely because of the unpopularity and exploitative nature of British policies – including, crucially, imperial forestry policies. Phule was critical of the Forest Department's insistence on considering grazing land as “forest,” and thus in denying peasants their customary rights of collecting firewood and fodder from these lands. Phule (1883: 308) does not mince words, calling for the abolition of the Forest Department in the final recommendations of the book: “the government should return all the grazing land of the villages that it has turned into ‘forest’ and give it freely with only a strict law that wood should not be cut for selling but for fuel for cooking… and so make a ceremonial fire of the tyrannical Forest Department.”

This is, in essence, a critique of imperial enclosure of the commons, as well as its increasing commodification to feed imperial commercial interests. It shares similarities to Marx's (1842) critique, in the Rheinische Zeitung, of new laws that ended peasant's customary rights to collect firewood and other forest products. Tellingly, the critique is both material and ideological, suggesting how new ideologies of private property obscure existing relations with the land. As Nichols (2021: xxiv) notes, Marx's articles suggest a concern with “how hegemonic modes of narrating injury and redress structure… struggles” around “enclosure, appropriation, and theft.” As explored in more detail below, Phule too was critically concerned with both British and Brahman ideologies of nature and space, and their obfuscatory tendencies.

The differences between Phule and Marx, however, are also telling. In Marx's case, he was critiquing a supposedly neutral state for siding with landlords, who wanted absolute control of their private property; in Phule's case, the colonial state itself became the property holder. In the colonies, that is, the ostensible division between state and market (which Marx already recognizes as a bourgeois fiction in the metropole) is totally collapsed, as the state itself takes over vast tracts of land for its own enrichment.

Phule's analysis also challenges some aspects of Marx's account of primitive accumulation in Capital, where he returns to the question of enclosing the commons. Here, Marx (1976) turns from Rhineland to England, which – he argues – embodies the “classic form” of primitive accumulation, the basis of which is “the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil” (876). This in turn creates the “free and rightless proletariat” (895), divorced from the means of production, forced to sell its labor to growing urban industry. Yet it is fair to ask how much this “classic form” is applicable globally. The peasantry, famously, has persisted in much of the world, despite the deep penetration of capitalist relations (Bernstein, 2001). In India even today a plurality of the population is categorized as “petty commodity producers” – peasants in the countryside, a variety of professions in the city – rather than classically proletariat (Gopalakrishnan, 2008). This is the reality Phule captured in his day, with peasants not completely expropriated, but rather increasingly in thrall to the British tax collector and the upper-caste moneylender, retaining some small piece of land but temporarily migrating in bad times to cobble together a livelihood.

Marx seemed aware of such dynamics. In an early draft of Capital, he refers to the case of peasants in India under British rule; the peasant “is his own employer, and his mode of production is the traditional one” (qtd. in Skillman, 2013: 490) and yet, since a usurer advances the money the peasant needs to plant cotton, the surplus value produced by the peasant is appropriated by usurer capital. More recently, scholars (Banaji, 2010; Harootunian, 2015) have developed extensive elaborations of the Marxian notion of the “formal subsumption” of labor by capital, which, amongst other things, captures the ambiguous class position of the peasantry under capitalism, which persists to the present day.

Yet as Skillman (2013) has argued, Marx, as he worked through successive drafts of Capital, started to minimize his historical account (where he gives more emphasis to the concept of formal subsumption) because of its inconsistencies with his labor theory of value, which has as its basis the notion that properly capitalist profits must come from the exploitation of “free” wage laborers. Skillman argues that this minimization drained Marx's argument of much of its historical and empirical richness, and thus its applicability to actual political-economic dynamics. A return to Phule can bring renewed focus to the trajectories of formal subsumption in India, which both depend on and transform caste relations (in this context, see also Rao, 2018 and Vendell, 2014).

Sin and tears: The moral bankruptcy of the colonial rural-urban

Phule's attention to the shifting fortunes of the peasant brought his analysis beyond the bounds of the agrarian, towards a critique of India's increasing enmeshment in a global, British-dominated system of urbanization and industrialization. Phule repeatedly ties peasant indebtedness and general immiseration to the increasing production of cheap machine-made goods in Britain, which were then imported to India duty-free, thus undercutting the market for Indian goods. This was linked to the increasing export of raw materials from India, whose prices fluctuated with the world market. In such a situation, peasants were often at the mercy of local moneylenders, and risked losing land to these lenders when they could not repay their debts.

Phule was writing in the wake of the 1875 Deccan Riots, an uprising of indebted peasants against moneylenders in Pune and neighboring districts (see Charlesworth, 1972). Fearing that the riots could spiral into larger unrest, British officials introduced the Agricultural Relief Act of 1879, which – amongst other things – limited the amount of interest local moneylenders could charge. However, as O’Hanlon (1985: 271) notes, Phule was skeptical of these reforms, arguing that “the British government had little justification for its attack on the interest charged by a few poor village moneylenders, while imposing a huge rate of interest on the Indian debt.” That is, in Phule's view, the rioters of 1875 were only attacking the proximate cause of their distress. The government's response failed to address its root causes, a situation which, Phule (1883: 288) threatened, would lead to “terrible consequences” for the British government.

Phule articulated these root causes in both economic and moral terms: the basis of the empire was ill-gotten wealth. Phule cites the British journalist Henry Mead, who wrote a book analyzing the causes of the great 1857 uprising in India against British rule. In Mead's words, as quoted by Phule (1873: 154), the income of the empire is derived “not from luxuries, but from the poorest necessities. It is the product of sin and tears.” For Phule (1873: 154), this means that “the greater portions of the revenues of the Indian Empire are derived from the [cultivator's] labor – from the sweat of his brow. The higher and richer classes contribute little or nothing to the State exchequer.”

Within this overall analysis of British empire, Phule situates specific dynamics of rural-urban change. In one cutting passage, he contrasts the increasing financial burdens on the farmer with the rising wealth of major cities:

A new and tremendous expense… has been imposed on the ignorant farmer… This is the excise that the municipality imposes when the farmer brings his vegetables and produce into the city to sell. Sometimes when the farmer brings a cartload of produce, he has to sell it to the treacherous middlemen, who buy it at arbitrary prices, then he has to pay the excise and… return home to his children empty-handed. Listen! In the city of Pune alone, the income of the municipality is now nearly equal to that of the princely state of Sangli. And the income of ten or twelve princely states can’t even equal that of the enormous municipality of Mumbai (Phule, 1883: 285).

The critique of patterns of colonial urbanization – its excesses and the dangerous imbalance between city and village – becomes even stronger in the passage cited in this article's introduction. Here, Phule's analysis of the condition of the Indian peasantry is tied to a critique of the soil degradation under imperial agriculture pressures and the waste produced by urbanization. This passage is also remarkable in the close connection it draws between the barrenness of fields in rural areas and the dumping of manure into the sea in Mumbai. Though he does not specify it, Phule is likely referring to both human and animal waste, and is pointing to problems that plagued not just India, but many regions of the world as capitalist agricultural practices and industrial urban centers grew in tandem: namely, the cycle that ensured soil fertility was disrupted, as intensifying demands on the soil left little time for regeneration, and traditional sources of fertilizer – that is, human and animal manure – were increasingly wasted in growing urban areas.

Compare Phule's analysis of soil fertility and urban waste to the following passage, from a similar time but a markedly different location:

When one observes how here in the city of London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes what colossal works are necessary in order to prevent this manure from poisoning the whole of [the city], then the utopian proposal to abolish the antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis.

What makes Phule's analysis unique is his insistence that the rift of British colonialism cannot be seen in isolation; rather, it must be put into the context of much longer imperial histories. Or, to return to the passage quoted in the introduction, colonial rule in India is composed of both “black and white bureaucrats.” While Phule certainly sensed a rift growing between town and country, he also emphasized the continuities of Brahman rule, which came with its own ideology and material practices of nature and space.

As Moore (2017) has noted in his appreciative critique of Foster, it is perhaps more compelling to speak of “metabolic shifts” rather than “metabolic rifts,” as the latter implies too sharp a separation between human and nature, in an almost Cartesian vein. Moore's critique can be transposed from a philosophical to a historical register: if the transition to capitalism involved a certain shift in the metabolism between human and non-human nature, what was the shift from? That is, which metabolisms had established themselves prior to capitalism? And how complete is the shift away from them? Here, Phule's critique of Brahmanism is instructive, as it suggests that previous colonialisms too had their own alienating effect, which do not disappear with the introduction of new colonial systems of rule.

Reclassifying the universe: Phule's critique of Brahmanism

If Phule's critique of British colonialism focused on the economic effects of British policy on both the peasant and the urban-rural continuum, it was equally concerned with the ways the British continued to prop up – and even strengthen – Brahmanical dominance. For Phule, this dominance came in large part from the Brahmanical stranglehold on knowledge production, including, most (in)famously, their closely-guarded access to Sanskrit religious texts, but also extending to their role as state advisers and as writers of history. Through these varied secular and sacred roles, Brahmans were, in Phule's view, able to disseminate a vision of time and space that justified caste hierarchy and kept it locked in place.

For the Brahmans, Phule suggests, the caste order is literally encoded into the origins of the world, and it permeates the universe. Phule (1873: 168-9) dramatizes this by mocking one of the origin stories of caste, in which the four overarching caste groups or varnas were born from different parts of Brahma, the creator of the world, with the Brahmans emerging from the head (representing learning and knowledge) and the Shudras from the feet (representing servitude). Phule's puncturing of this myth is profane. He asks how the world-creator could have so many wombs, and whether he has multiple menstrual cycles, and thus must follow the Brahmanical practice of secluding himself multiple times a month. This graphic literalness is meant to show the absurdity of the cosmology that undergirds caste ideology. ⁴

Phule critiques the Brahma creation myth precisely because it projects onto the cosmos what is clearly a human-made, impermanent social order. This critique is also echoed in more recent analyses of the Vedas, including Smith's (1994) argument that varna thinking is quite literally a tool for “classifying the universe.” In this logic, varna makes up the fundamental building blocks, not just of society, but of all space and nature, as Smith details, including flora, fauna, space and the deities.

Phule's response to such a worldview is to emphasize that these timeless myths and supposedly permanent classifications obscure a “buried history of real, situated relations” (Vendell, 2014: 56). Recognizing that the Brahmanical worldview was all-compassing, producing a view of space and time that emphasized permanence and the eternal, Phule sought to counter it with an equally all-compassing, but highly dynamic, worldview, from metaphysics to the politics of the everyday.

This is evident in the opening to the third chapter of Shetcaryacha Asud. Drawing on the discoveries of modern astronomy, Phule (1883: 276) begins the chapter with a description of the vast, ethereal space of the universe, in which solar systems are created and destroyed through “the joining and separating of various elements.” He then immediately – and quite abruptly – transitions to a human scale, and the coming together of parents to produce a baby. He insists that “various children of one mother and father are born with different qualities,” and hence, characteristics like “courage and cowardliness are not hereditary but are dependent on a person's nature and social environment.”

His assertion that human characteristics are not hereditary is, most immediately, a rebuttal of the logic of caste, whose power depends on it being accepted as an inevitable product of heredity (see Jaaware, 2019: 66-67). But it also allows him to construct a dynamic, at times playful account of world history, from the egalitarianism and innocence of early human society to the rise and fall of empires. Here, with typical irony, both drawing on and inverting European scholarly conventions, Phule (1883: 283) recounts how the Romans “civilized” the barbaric English people, who initially were a fringe group on the edge of Empire. With this, he undercuts the seeming inevitability of British rule in India, while also suggesting that constant change – not Brahmanical permanence – is the key to understanding the world. This emphasis suggests the beginnings of an anti-caste conception of ecology, one that goes beyond traditionalist notions of a balanced whole that has produced Brahmanically-inclined environmental thought in India.

As Sharma (2017) has argued, the mainstream environmental movement in India has absorbed concepts of harmony and organicism that implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) justify caste as a balanced division of labor, or even as a highly-evolved set of ecological niches. Breaking out of one's prescribed caste role is tantamount to disrupting the idyllic balance of nature. Phule's concept of people and the land is quite different. Instead of seeing caste as a divinely or naturally ordained order, in which each caste grouping performs important, interrelated functions, he argues such myths of order obscure the fact that upper castes, and particularly the Brahmans, are parasitic on those who actually have a lived, grounded experience of cultivating the land.

As Jaaware (2019) argues, anti-caste critique often uses a hard-headed empiricism, based on cultivators’ knowledge of the land, to puncture Brahmanical notions of cosmology that erase precisely this knowledge. This kind of anti-caste empiricism, argues Jaaware, is not naïve or positivistic; rather, it is grounded in the realities and materialities of touch, prohibitions on which form the basis of caste separation. Jaaware (2019: 50) points to the lyrics a folk song recorded by a communist trade union, sung by cultivators who were generally considered “untouchable” by the upper castes: “We broke our backs tilling your land, and you ate of the grain; how come you did not ask then what our caste was?”

In Shetcaryacha Asud, Phule emphasizes the Brahmanical mystification of their relationship with nature. He notes that Brahman teachers are tasked with educating peasants in rural schools even though they don’t know how to properly hold a plough (Phule, 1883: 295), and later turns to the theme of manure and waste, mocking Brahman ritual practices: “today's Brahmans consider the urine of cows – the same cows who eat the farmers’ shit – to be holy, and purify themselves” by drinking it (Phule, 1883: 304).

It is significant that Phule's two mentions of manure in Shetcaryacha Asud target the British and the Brahmans, respectively. In the first quote, given in the introduction, Phule suggests it is “misunderstanding” or a “rough nature” that leads British officials to dump massive amounts of manure into the ocean, even as fields go barren; in the second quote, Phule points to the irony of “pure” Brahmans drinking cow urine, even as cows are eating human feces which has been used as manure in the fields. While the ideologies of British colonial capitalism, and of Brahmanism, are distinct, each serves to mystify grounded relationships between humans and nature – for the British, at the altar of capitalist production, for the Brahmans, at the altar of ritualized hierarchy. This doubled mystification of human-nonhuman metabolisms (to put it in Marxist terms) entails a disregard for the land and for those whose livelihoods most directly depend on it.

Such a reading of Brahmanism – as an ideology of (amongst other things) nature and space that obscures real, situated relationships – also puts Phule back in conversation with a more heterodox Marx. For instance, Marx, in his later readings (see Anderson, 2010: 206), became convinced that “Brahmins and their treatises on law” were responsible for the breakdown of communal property in ancient India. Anderson (2010) notes, “Marx saw all of this not in terms of Indian alterity, but in connection to Western societies, as he delved into the medieval Catholic Church's appropriation of property, albeit in a different manner than the Brahmins” (206). Such a global, comparative perspective is one that Phule himself cultivated, and one that a Phuleite perspective can bring to the present moment as well.

Towards a Phuleite future

Phule was, throughout his life, keenly aware that he was writing for multiple audiences, particularly the oppressed castes whose liberation he sought and the British officials whose policies he wished to influence. Addressing the latter, he wrote an English-language introduction to the otherwise Marathi-language text Gulamgiri (Slavery), a book that explicitly compares Brahman domination to chattel slavery in the United States. His outlook was thus at once attuned to the particularities of Brahmanism and the universality of systems of hierarchy. So too, in the present day, Phule's outlook has particular relevance for India, especially as it witnesses a resurgent farmer's movement, as well as globally, as the issue of doubled colonialisms remains quite relevant even in an era of the supposed post-colony.

In the 1980s, new farmers’ movements exploded onto the political scene across India, including the Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, led by Sharad Joshi, a self-proclaimed follower of Phule. Such movements prompted considerable debate. Gail Omvedt and her colleague Chetna Galla (1987) defended the movement against its Marxist critics (Balagopal, 1987; Ray and Jha, 1987), who averred that the Sanghatana articulated the ideology of the “provincial propertied classes,” and was hence out of touch with the truly revolutionary class: that is, the proletariat. Omvedt and Galla argued that this was an inadequate analysis, especially in the Indian situation, where the peasantry stubbornly refused to disappear, and where economic exploitation took place through other mechanisms, alongside the classic Marxist account of exploitation via wage labor (see also Omvedt, 1998, especially chapter 5).

These debates largely remained unresolved, as the wave of farmers’ movements eventually subsided. But such movements returned with surprising energy in recent years. There was significant organizing in 2018, and then protests exploded in 2020, in response to three neoliberal farm laws introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The unprecedented success of the 2020-2021 farmers’ movement in forcing the Modi government to repeal the farm laws suggests the potency of such movements. It also invites a Phuleite analysis of capitalism that brings attention to factors like terms of trade, state policy and repression, the intricacies of agricultural pricing, and a host of other issues that authors like Omvedt (1994) and Bahl (2021) put into conversation with a range of heterodox Marxist analyses of the state and commercial capitalism. Further, a Phuleite analysis of the present agrarian crisis would take forward the ecological seeds of Phule's critique of doubled colonialisms. As Aditya Nigam (2020) notes in his reflections on the farmers’ movement, there is a dawning recognition of the ecological perils of the current agrarian system, which has pitted the land and the peasantry (coming largely from the middle and so-called “low” castes) against the state, local capital (largely controlled by merchant castes) and international capital.

As this analysis suggests, a Phuleite view would also see capitalism not as a self-contained system, but one that depends on doubled oppressions. Patankar (1991: 13) notes, “it is inevitable that ‘class struggle’ in India will take caste terms, because caste is the historical system of exploitation in India; any fight against the state and capital will equally be a fight against Brahminism.” This has clear resonances with the insights of the Black Radical Tradition, including Robinson's (2000: 2) assertion that the tendency of capitalism is “not to homogenize but to differentiate – to exaggerate regional, subcultural and dialectical difference into ‘racial’ ones.” The theme of the double thus highlights Phule's relevance as a global thinker, who can be situated amongst other thinkers who moved between particularity and generality in outlining their egalitarian visions.

One such thinker is W.E.B. Du Bois, as Chandler's (2021) recent writings make clear. Chandler (2021: 9) reworks Kant's elaboration of parallax to suggest that no view (of capitalism, of empire) can be singular, that Du Bois’ “sense of double consciousness” is indicative of a much deeper epistemic truth. Chandler emphasizes that Du Bois proceeds by way of example – in his case the African American – to arrive at a global frame, one formulated along (multiple, intersecting) color lines. This includes Du Bois’ recognition that labor power is not unmarked, but always has a “color” (Chandler, 2021: 40). Transposing this into a Phuleite lens, one could argue that labor power always has a caste, and not just in India (see also, Jaaware, 2019: 9).

Chandler's line of thought also suggests that a different “example,” a different set of parallaxes, would yield both extremely specific and more generalizable insights. For Phule, Brahmanism was both an ideology specific to the Indian subcontinent, and a form of thralldom that could compare to slavery in other parts of the world. As Phule suggests, the myths and nostalgia of Brahmanism obscure and mystify actual human-nonhuman relations, in ways that dovetailed with emerging capitalist-colonial mystifications.

A recognition of the multiplicity of colonial natures, and the way they are enforced by hegemonic systems of knowledge production, is of great relevance globally as increasingly predatory forms of capitalism have intertwined with deeply reactionary yearnings for past glory. Phule's ecology suggests an alternative, grounded in the everyday realities of cultivating – cultivating not just the land, but an ethics and a system of knowledge production that is open to all. In one of his poems, Phule (qtd. in Patankar, 1991: 40) avers that the upper castes have hidden away knowledge for too long. The time has come, he writes, to bring it out into the open fields.

Highlights

Jotirao Phule articulates a complex critique of colonial political economy/ecology, anticipating later Marxist critiques of imperial forestry and agriculture