Caste and Race in India c12.68

c12.68

Movements against caste of a more militant nature were not slow to arise. In 1873 Jyotirao Phooley of Poona, though a man of Mali caste and of comparatively little education, started an association of members called the Satyashodhak Samaj with the purpose of asserting the worth of man irrespective of caste. The breadth of his vision and the extent of his reforming activities led him to proclaim in his books and to carry out in his practice a revolt against the tyranny of the caste-system. He exhorted the non-Brahmin castes not to engage any Brahmin priest to conduct their marriage ritual, which he tried to reduce to a very simple procedure. He had perceived the necessity of educating the class of people to whom his appeal was directed, and had started primary schools both for boys and girls of the non-Brahmin castes as early as 1848. The catholicity of his mind is further proved by the fact that Phooley started in 1851 a primary school for the so-called untouchables in Poona, the very centre of orthodoxy, where, only fifty years before that, persons of these castes could not even move about during the best part of the day.