Why Phule’s ‘Trutiya Ratna’ strikes a chord with student protests, 150 years on

To read ‘Trutiya Ratna’ today, more than 150 years after it was penned, is to realise the play’s dialectics about education resonate with the student

MUMBAI: We recently gathered at Studio Tamasha for a reading of Jyotiba Phule’s ‘Trutiya Ratna’ (The Third Eye or The Third Jewel). This play penned 150 years ago has been translated into English by Rohini Mokashi-Punekar and published by Orient BlackSwan. The reading, directed by Sharmishta Saha, celebrated the work (and words) of Phule, the 19th-century social reformer from Pune.

Why Phule’s ‘Trutiya Ratna’ strikes a chord with student protests, 150 years on

To read ‘Trutiya Ratna’ today, more than 150 years after it was penned, is to realise the play’s dialectics about education resonate with the student protests in the capital and across the country this week. The argument remains the same: whose education is it anyway? It’s not just about the arguments over what constitutes a “valid” curriculum or who is leaking the exam paper. Phule is asking a fundamental question. “A hymn in a very old book said Brahmins came from the mouth and Shudras came from the feet.” When Phule reads this, he is asking, who exactly was doing the measuring.

The politics of the play celebrates literacy for all. This includes every single girl child who is born in the country. It is not easy now. It was not easy then. Phule opened a school for girls in 1848 and, with that single, radical act, invited the fury of the orthodox theologians. Phule married a woman, taught her to read, and she became India’s first woman teacher. People threw stones at her on her way to class. Savitrabai kept walking. The stones eventually got tired.

There is a mantra from Phule’s life that seems to resonate in this climate of campus activism: “Don’t argue with theology. Instead, open a school (preferably a school with a library).” It is a call that today’s student protesters might do well to heed. Phule didn’t spend his energy trying to renovate a house built to keep him out; he built a new structure entirely. Before the Revolt of 1857, Brahmins, the Peshwas, and bhadraloks reigned supreme. Post 1857, the commoners and a new artisanal class started to play a role in the development of social order. And as the Phules saw it, the emancipation of the old order.

And yet, the questions Phule raised remain embedded in the bedrock. In ‘Trutiya Ratna’, he used dialogue as a vehicle for his reform project, asserting that the modernist project of colonial India was essentially a “dialogue project”. This, plus Phule’s brilliance lay in his conceptual masterstrokes, his invention of the category “Shudra-Ati-Shudra,” a union of the labouring and oppressed classes that defied the compartmentalisation of caste. He trained his wife, Savitribai, to teach, ensuring that the rebellion was not just a solo act but a generational one. Together, the Phules epitomised the low caste protest in 19th-century Western India. They introduced peasantry (and even barbers) as a class. Phule was the first Indian to introduce peasantry as a class in his writing.

What makes ‘Trutiya Ratna’ so relevant in 2026 is, the withholding of literacy has simply changed its uniform. The priest in Phule’s play does not need violence. He merely needs to ensure that the poor farmer cannot be admitted to a school. This has been the complaint of a great many young people occupying quadrangles and college gates and protest sites across the country, arguing not about scripture but about fee structures, seat quotas, and the fine print of scholarship disbursements that seem designed and drafted by a global Shetji-Bhatji.

It is worth pausing on the specific villain that Phule chose. He is part of the Sethji-Bhatt Ji clan. Phule did not write a play in which the farmer is cheated by a foreign army, a famine, or bad weather. He doesn’t let the audience off the hook. He makes the audience (especially, a savarna audience) very uncomfortable. He wrote a play in which the farmer is cheated by his own priest, a man of his own society, operating within the bounds of custom and law, using nothing but the farmer’s illiteracy as his instrument. Phule’s argument is: the most durable forms of exploitation rarely need to break any rules. They only need one party in the transaction to be unable to read the rules that already exist.

As a new youth movement has been born in the country, it is worth noting that after Phule died in 1891, his allies began to splinter along the very sub-caste lines he had hoped his movement might dissolve. And five years after his death, his own Satyashodhak Samaj voted to exclude the Dalits he had spent his life training as writers and organisers. This part of the Phule story resists inspirational treatment. Also, it is a cautionary tale to students (and political parties in West Bengal and Maharashtra) who are planning their next demonstration: movements do not stay pure just because they had a good founder. They require continual, unglamorous maintenance, of exactly the kind Phule performed by training Gopal Baba Walangkar to write and speak, quietly, without expectation of a statue.

Which brings us, finally, to the statues. In 1924, Pune’s municipality erected statues of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar. Meanwhile a proposal to do the same for Phule met fierce resistance from the same Brahmin orthodoxy the two statues commemorated. A young writer named Dinkarrao Jawalkar responded with a pamphlet so incendiary it earned him a defamation suit and a jail sentence. A young lawyer named BR Ambedkar, fresh off his own doctoral work, took the case on appeal and won it.

No statue of Phule went up in Pune that year. It has been installed in other places and other forms. The delay is the lesson, or one of them: recognition, like literacy, is rarely given freely to those who most transformed the terms on which it is granted. It has to be fought for. And as Phule taught us, no fight is complete without grassroots activism.

As I shuffled out after listening to the play, two things were clear -- the prescience of Jyotirao Phule and how a play which many have dismissed as a relic needs to be a part of the syllabus of the textbook about Indian democracy.

Ramu Ramanathan is a Mumbai-based journalist, playwright and poet.