- Lived:
- 11 April 1827 – 28 November 1890 · Pune — born, schooled, married, mobbed, honoured and buried within a few miles of the same flower gardens
- Field:
- social reform and political thought — founder of the modern anti-caste movement, pioneer of girls' and "untouchable" education, Marathi writer
- The Big Idea:
- Caste is not divine order but slavery — a man-made system for extracting labour and obedience — and its cure is not charity from above but education from below, with every intermediary between a human being and knowledge, God or dignity fired from the job.
- In their words:
- "Without knowledge, intellect was lost; without intellect, morality was lost; without morality, all momentum was lost; without momentum, money was lost; without money, the śūdras sank — all this misery came from the lack of knowledge." (Shetkaryāchā Āsūḍ, 1883; our rendering of his famous Marathi chain-verse)
- If you remember one thing:
- In 1848 a twenty-one-year-old gardener's son taught his teenage wife to read, opened a school for girls nobody else would teach, and was thrown out of his father's house for it — and forty years later a public assembly named him Mahatma, before anyone had given that title to Gandhi.