Introduction

The basic elements of Phule's analysis of Brahman power had changed little during the decade and a half that followed the writing of The Third Eye. While the argument of the corruption of Brahman officials in the British administration was a relatively easy one to convey to a popular audience, however, the rejection of the religious authority of Brahman priests was a much more difficult matter. The crucial practical point at which a potential follower would have to make such a rejection came in the performance of the numerous rituals which convention demanded of the pious Hindu. The necessity of a Brahman priest for the performance of any ceremonial act of importance would have appeared to a potential follower as a sacred and unalterable reality of religious life. The very extremism of Phule's anti-Brahman polemic from the late 1860s may be explained in part in the need for a degree of emotional conviction which would match that with which older beliefs had been held. His attempt to evoke this kind of response focused on the portrayal of the figure of ‘the Brahman’ as a unique assemblage of all imaginable social and moral evils. As in The Third Eye, the idea of a tightly controlled conspiracy underlay much of his description. The different areas of Brahman activity – in the religious and economic life of the village, in the new local and provincial political institutions, in the religious reform societies and the social reform movement amongst Brahmans – were but varying manifestations of an essentially unitary force.