German Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) described Enlightenment as an individual’s “emergence from self-incurred immaturity” and gave the slogan “Sapere Aude” – dare to know[1]. When he talked about “self-incurred immaturity”, he meant that people often accept the rules, beliefs and commands of the powerful without questioning them. “Dare to know” was his rallying cry for the common man to think for themselves, use reason, challenge religious dogmas and the authority of the Church. In a Europe dominated by kings, priests and rigid traditions, these ideas were radical and subversive.
Yet, Kant’s theory had a flaw. That is because lack of personal freedom is not enough for reason to take root in society and usher in enlightenment. It demands collective action. Enlightenment means recognizing how power, whether it is feudal, capitalist or caste-based, keeps us passive and alienated.
For Kant, immaturity arose from laziness and cowardice, not from social deprivation or structural violence. The moral courage that enabled you to think without someone else telling you what to think was truly revolutionary in 18th-century Europe where obedience was a way of life. Stepping out of mental tutelage was like discovering that you were living in a cage all along. While Kant encouraged challenging authority and thinking independently, he also accepted and even upheld social hierarchies, including gender and class inequalities, that kept the majority in silence and submission. He conceptualized reason as the only faculty which individuals needed to muster the courage to revolt.
However, Kant did not ask which socio-economic conditions permit rationality to germinate. He considered the individual in isolation from their social and material existence, assuming a public that was already equipped with reason but not using it because of their laziness. Hence, Kant’s idea of enlightenment is not as universal as it seems. A truly universal idea must go beyond just encouraging individuals to think freely and must challenge the material and social structures involving feudal lords, priests, kings, class or caste divisions that keep the masses trapped in their “immaturity” through systemic inequality and exclusion. Clearly, what is needed is an idea that can link intellectual awakening with social revolution to break the chains of caste and class.
In societies that are unequal not incidentally but structurally, the issue is not simply “immaturity”, as Kant poses, but being deprived of a social environment that allows maturity. This is where Kant’s imagination falls short and Jotirao Phule intervenes.
Jotirao Phule was born in 19th-century colonial India. The vast majority was trapped in destitution and labour through caste obligations and debt and thus deliberately kept out of any intellectual pursuit. Brahmanism had institutionalized inequality. Hierarchy was not only a social but also a theological imposition. Caste-ridden Indian society had made compulsive deference a virtue and ignorance, a faith. It was in this landscape of enforced silence that Jotiba and Savitribai Phule emerged, not as philosophers of abstraction, but as rebels who understood that all struggles for the right to reason must start with a struggle for dignity (manuski). Jotiba and Savitribai stepped into the ring not as philosophers but as revolutionaries, convinced that both education (‘dare to learn’) and an ideological rupture with the dominant brahminical order were necessary conditions for building a rational society.
In 1848, the Phule couple did something unthinkable for their time. They opened schools for girls and Untouchables in Pune. Jotirao braved attempts on his life and Savitribai braved cow dung and mud flung at her, to free knowledge from the grip of a minority. This was a foundational act of rebellion against Brahmin monopoly of knowledge.
The establishment of the schools was an act of social resistance. It was clear to the Phules that the masses didn’t choose to remain ignorant (as Kant surmises); it was the weight of brahminical religious ideology that kept them so. In Gulamgiri (Slavery, 1873), he exposed the Hindu texts as tools of oppression. He said that Brahmins had invented caste for their own benefit. Democratization of education, for him, was the means to create the environment for reason to thrive so that the brahmanical scriptures stand exposed for what they are and thus usher in enlightenment. He appealed to the oppressed to end the Brahmin monopoly of knowledge.[2]
Kant’s “dare to know” thus becomes Phule’s “dare to fight to know”. But Phule went beyond that. He knew that the courage to reason isn’t something that can be mustered up but is forged in material relations – who owns the land, who guards knowledge and who sets the terms of language itself. Kant spoke of individuals freeing themselves by simply plucking up the courage; Phule spoke of subalterns freeing themselves through collective struggle. His enlightenment was neither solitary nor abstract, but a collective endeavour.
Savitribai carried forward that spirit of enlightenment in her poems. In Kavya Phule (1854), she wrote with gusto:
“Awake, arise, O you who are oppressed,
Cast off your shackles, seek knowledge, be wise.”[3]
Her words can be interpreted as echoing Kant’s “moral autonomy”, but her audience was not the bourgeois public but the historically muted masses – the labouring poor, the women and the Untouchables. Her words convey urgency and defiance.
Still, it would be unfair to dismiss Kant’s contribution in its totality. His emphasis on human dignity, autonomy and reason as morals anchors democracy. What he missed, however, was what underlay these ideas – the sociology of thought and the recognition that freedom of mind cannot exist without freedom from social hierarchy.
That is where Phule complements Kant. He does not negate reason; but he socializes it. He shows that enlightenment must move from philosophy to pedagogy, from text to classroom, from thought to organized struggle.
Phule may have never read Kant, but Dr B.R. Ambedkar surely did. Ambedkar inherited from Phule more than a call to revolt, he inherited a way to study knowledge itself, to see who claims knowledge, who is denied knowledge and how knowledge quietly sustains power. Ambedkar shaped that understanding into a way of judging ideas by their potential to liberate people. His work, especially ‘Annihilation of Caste’ (1936), transforms Kant’s abstract reason into a revolutionary ethic grounded in equality. “Equality may be a fiction,” Ambedkar wrote, “but nonetheless one must accept it as the governing principle of society”.[4]
Dr Ambedkar realized what Phule had said – that society can’t even dream of enlightenment when people are born unequal. He turned Kant’s moral “ought” into a constitutional demand. Kant spoke of reason as if it were already within everyone’s reach. Ambedkar knew it wasn’t; he tried to bring it closer, brick by brick, through democratization of knowledge, through social justice, and through the courage to question. Dr Ambedkar carried forward the struggle that Jotiba and Savitribai started. The Phule couple weren’t mere reformers. They tried to build a society in which knowledge was not a privilege contingent on the caste one was born into. For them, teaching was not charity, it was a political act, a quiet defiance against the monopoly of the few “haves” over the majority “have nots”.
In this synthesis, we find three elements of liberation: Kant’s moral courage, the Phules’ social awakening, and Ambedkar’s political realization. Kant says, “Think for yourself.” Phule says, “Learn to think as equals.” Ambedkar says, “Build socio-political institutions that guarantee that equality.” He believed that justice is not an idea, it needs a structure – something that stands even when people don’t.
These insights from yesterday are of relevance today. The Indian public discourse has fallen prey to the ideological nexus of Brahmanism and capitalism. The space for reason is shrinking. The textbooks and the print media praise the oppressor and discard reason, yielding to blind faith and hyper-nationalism. The voice of religion is again instilling fear. As it was in the Phules’ time, submission has become a virtue.
The Enlightenment’s old enemies are back in a different guise, not as monarchs or priests, but as rulers backed by corporate monopolies, with the media serving as their propaganda wing, creating a common sense which is against the common people. The outcome is a pre-enlightenment scenario, albeit a sophisticated and socially engineered one, in which the act of thinking is entirely outsourced and faith is produced and marketed like any other commodity to build a common sense. Neo-fascist forces are on the rise and atrocities against minorities and marginalized communities are becoming more common. Georg Lukács once wrote that “unreason is the product of fascism”[5]. This is not just a philosophical statement but a warning, because fascism doesn’t merely silence dissent but destroys the very capacity to reason, making individuals prone to submission rather than rationality.
In today’s India, irrationality has become deep-rooted. In Haryana, Dalit IPS officer Y. Puran Kumar ended his life after enduring years of caste humiliation and institutional harassment. Here was a man who served the law, yet was denied the dignity the law promised him. In Delhi, even the Chief Justice of India B. R. Gavai was attacked inside the Supreme Court by a lawyer shouting “Sanatan ka apman nahi sahenge”. In Uttar Pradesh, Dalit IAS officer Rinku Singh Rahi, celebrated for his honesty, had to perform sit-ups to pacify protesting lawyers, a public spectacle that turned integrity into humiliation, and in Madhya Pradesh’s Damoh district, a Shudra (OBC) man, Purushottam Kushwaha, was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water as punishment for a social media joke. When this corrosive venom of caste tyranny and religious fanaticism deeply embedded in the minds of oppressors, erupts into violence against the nation’s highest institutions, rationality is not merely injured but violently torn apart. This is what neo-fascism looks like: it doesn’t arrive in uniforms or parades but infuses quietly into institutions, then into our thoughts, habits, and the language of faith and nation.
With our country being pushed back into irrational devotion and despotic certainties, remembering this lineage of Kant, the Phule couple, and Babasaheb is not academic nostalgia but a political necessity. The modern defence of Enlightenment does not mean resurrecting its old catchwords but recovering its moral heart – the courage to question, dissent and stand beside those who are being silenced, for reason was never neutral or an individualist virtue but always an act of rebellion, a weapon of the oppressed. As Phule taught and Ambedkar lived, the struggle for reason remains the struggle for human dignity itself, so enlightenment must return – not to the European salons where it began, but to our classrooms, villages, ghettos and movements.
References
[1] Kant, Immanuel. (1784). ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’ (English Translation). Accessed at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/#Enl
[2] Phule, Jotirao (1873). Gulamgiri (Slavery, English translation). Accessed at
https://thesatyashodhak.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Jotirao-Phule-Slavery-Government-of-Maharashtra-1991.pdf
[3] Lata, Kanak (2024). ‘Savitribai Phule: Desh ki Pehli Adhyapika ka Jiwan Sangharsh’. Vam Prakashan, Delhi (verse translated from Hindi by Mihir)
[4] Ambedkar, B.R. (1936), ‘The Annihilation of Caste’. Accessed at https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/readings/aoc_print_2004.pdf
[5] Lukács, Gyorgy. (1952). ‘The Destruction of Reason’. Accessed at
https://criticaltheoryinberlin.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/lukacs-the-destruction-of-reason-preface.pdf
(Edited by Amrish Herdenia/Anil)
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