Phule’s Big Mistake–Trusting the West

Atharva Shintre

In her article titled ‘Phule& Censorship’ published in the Frontier Vol 57, No. 46, May 11-17, 2025, Kalpana Pandey talks about how the film Phule’s release has been delayed and censored due to pressure from various Brahmin groups1. She raises serious concerns regarding the fairness of the film certification process. She highlights how the filmmakers of Phule assert of the film’s historical fidelity.

However, some key historical points have been totally neglected by the filmmakers of Phule.

Phule was on a mission to end the tyranny of Brahmins by educating the oppressed people of the lower caste. Phule had attended a missionary school while growing up. At the age of 21, he visited a missionary girls’ school in Ahmednagar, which inspired him to open a girls’ school in Pune. The high caste Brahmins resisted the Phule couple’s efforts to spread education.

In his book Slavery, Phule described the British government as civilised.

However, Phule did not know that the main source of British wealth, prior to colonialism, was slavery. Famous Englishmen such as Isaac Newton had invested heavily in the African slave trade. Phule also did not know that the British had manufactured several genocidal famines in Bengal throughout their reign–starting from Hastings, just like the later Bengal famine during World War II that had Indian casualties outnumbering those of the Jewish holocaust. Apparently, Phule, educated by the missionaries, was completely unaware of these heinous crimes; hence, he placed the great British civilisation upon a pedestal.

The missionaries and the British were hostile to the Brahmins, who rebelled and prevented conversions. Phule’s mission to spread church/colonial education suited their politics, for it creates loyal and obedient servants, ready to serve and defend their masters.

Phule also dedicates his book Slavery to The Good People of The United States for their Sublime Disinterested and Self-Sacrificing Devotion in the cause of Negro Slavery.

Phule’s Christian missionary teachers withheld from him important information regarding slavery–that it had religious origins sanctioned and encouraged by the church. The doctrine of Christian discovery was announced through a series of famous papal bulls (fatwas), especially the bull Romanus Pontifexin 1455. This doctrine obligated Christians to kill and enslave all non-Christians and become owners of “discovered” lands. Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas in this sense was followed by the biggest religious genocide in human history–a 100 million people killed. This genocidal doctrine of discovery was approved by the US Supreme Court in a judgement which stands to this very day.

To profit from these vast “discovered” lands, the American Christians kidnapped Blacks from Africa, jam-packed them into unhygienic ships–many died en route–enslaved those who survived the journey, flogged them, and worked them to their deaths. “Whipped Peter”, an escaped slave, had suffered terrible floggings from his plantation overseer.

However, Europe had also exported its “troublesome” poor, a “smart” move to anticipate and prevent revolts such as the French Revolution. The poor in America could not get proper wages because slavery depressed their wages. Naturally, when large numbers of Black slaves converted to Christianity out of sheer desperation, these exported poor raised a call for the abolition of slavery.

To counter this, the church invented another excuse: the so-called curse of Ham as described in the book–Bible Defence of Slavery. This was an absurd superstition that Noah’s son Ham saw him lying naked in a drunken stupor, for which reason God punished him and all his black progeny. Later, Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant invented secular excuses for slavery by denying creativity to Blacks using false history; Gobineau denigrated Blacks as an inferior race using “skull-science”, which was used as scientific proof to support the religious demand for slavery

Phule was unaware of this Bible and pseudo-scientific defence of slavery; he thought emancipation was a matter of principles, as the dedication shows.

Actually, after the American War of Independence, the exported poor from European in America acquired some political power and started resisting slavery to get higher wages for themselves, which ultimately led to the American Civil War.

While running for the senate, Abraham Lincoln had explicitly said he was against abolishing slavery. But when the Civil War seemed to be lost for the North, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a last resort. This freed slaves from the South, and repealed the act of punishing fugitive slaves, so they all ran away to the North–many (like “Whipped” Peter) even joined the army to fight the South. This mass exodus of slaves ruined the prosperous farmers in the South who relied on their slaves to tend to their farms when they were warring. Hence, the South succumbed and the North won the Civil War.

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Vol 57, No. 52, June 22 - 28, 2025