Savitribai Phule: One of India's First Women Teachers

Recognised by Nkuzify as Patron Teacher of the Year.

World Teachers' Day
Happy Teachers' Day from all of us at Nkuzify.

Every morning on the road to her school in Pune, men waited to throw cow dung, mud and stones at her.

She kept walking. A school for girls in 1848 was radical enough, and she was its teacher.

Her name was Savitribai Phule, and she is remembered as India's first female teacher.

A teacher before she was a headmistress

She was born on 3 January 1831 in Maharashtra. With the support of her husband, Jyotirao Phule, she completed her own teacher training first, and then began teaching girls in the Maharwada area of Pune alongside Sagunabai Kshirsagar. She did not open a school until she had learned how to teach in one.

The school at Bhide Wada

In January 1848 the Phules and Sagunabai opened a school in the house of Tatyasaheb Bhide, known as Bhide Wada, in Pune. It began with nine girls and grew to about twenty-five. The lessons included mathematics, science and social studies, which was a serious curriculum for girls at that time.

The idea spread. By the end of 1851 the Phules were running three schools in Pune, and between 1848 and 1852 they opened eighteen schools for girls in Maharashtra. Historians describe Bhide Wada as one of the first schools for girls founded and run by Indians, and it is often called the first.

Teaching the girls nobody wanted taught

Her classrooms took in girls from the castes that the old order kept out of school, including Mahar and Mang girls. That meant she was challenging two barriers at once. She worked beside Fatima Sheikh, who became one of India's first Muslim women teachers, and she kept going while people threw eggs, tomatoes and stones at her on the way to class. A teacher who returns to the road after that is saying that the lesson is worth more than the insult.

A poet, a reformer, a nurse

She wrote as well as taught. At twenty-three she published her first poems, Kavya Phule, in 1854. She opened a home for the prevention of infanticide, supported widow remarriage, and led the Satyashodhak Samaj after her husband died.

In 1897 plague struck Maharashtra, and she set up a clinic to care for patients. She caught the disease while carrying a sick child to hospital, and she died on 10 March 1897. She taught until the end, and the last lesson was how to care for a stranger. In 2015 the University of Pune was renamed Savitribai Phule Pune University in her honour.

Why Nkuzify celebrates her

Phule teaches us that a teacher's work does not stop at the school gate. She trained first, then opened the door for girls who had been shut out, and she stayed through insults and an epidemic. That is the kind of teaching Nkuzify wants to celebrate.

Read more in Global Patrons of Teaching, or make a free Thank You card for your own teacher.