5th October 2025 marks the 209th Indian English Day
The Phule-Ambedkar Centre for Philosophy and English Training (PACPET), Tellapur, Hyderabad, will celebrate the 209th Indian English Day by declaring Savitribai Phule as the Mother of Indian English at the PACPET campus on 4th October 2026. Indian English Day falls on Monday, the 5th, but we are celebrating it on Sunday due to the availability of the participants.
The celebration of this day is to pressure the hypocritical Indian rulers in Delhi that they cannot continue with two modes of school education in India—English for the rich in private schools and regional-language education for the poor in government schools. For the last twelve years, the BJP/RSS government in Delhi has widened the gap between government and private education by allowing monopoly companies and foreign educational institutions to set up private schools, colleges and universities offering education in English for payment, while starving government educational institutions by all means.
The central and BJP-ruled state governments constantly push for de-Anglicising school, college and university education run by the government.
In Chatron Ki Goonj meetings, Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly heard students studying in government institutions explain how their opportunities in regional-language education are almost nil. The standards in government institutions are falling year by year as the governments do not recruit teachers or improve infrastructure. Regional-language textbooks are substandard compared to English-medium standards in the private sector.
This is a deliberate drive of the RSS/BJP to collapse the government education system so that the total education system can be sold to private businesses. That will automatically lead to the isolation of the masses who cannot afford private education.
Why Savitribai, and not any other woman of her time, should be the Mother of Indian English
Savitribai was the first woman to take a bold stand and write a poem about how the English language liberates oppressed lower-caste women and men more than regional-language education in India. The Phules lived just after the British ended the Peshwa Brahminic barbaric Raj in Maharashtra.
Mother English
In 1854, Savitribai published her poetry book Kavya Phule. The poem “Mother English” was part of it and was the most striking of all the other poems in the book because of the way in which she Indianised the English language 172 years ago. She was the first English-speaking woman willing to write in that language, even though she had no formal education. I do not think any other Brahmin/Bania woman was allowed to learn reading and writing in English during Savitribai’s time.
The poem was written in Marathi and later translated into English (Gail Omvedt).
Rule of Peshwa is gone
Mother English has come.
Forlorn and dark our hopelessness
Ominous fears of heaven and abyss.
In such a dismal time of ours
Come Mother English, this is your hour.
Throw off the yoke of redundant belief
Break open the door, walk out in relief.
Learn to read and write, O my dear one
Opportune times! Mother English has come.
Manu’s ways are evil and mean
Poor and depressed we have all been.
They’ve cheated, befooled, looted us all
They’ve gone with English Mother’s footfall.
Brahman’s rule is now in ashes
Under the English whips and lashes.
It is all for the good of the poor
Manu’s dead at English Mother’s door.
Knowledge is a poor man’s refuge and shade
It’s akin to comfort mother made.
In English rule we’ve found our joy
Bad days gone, Mother English abhay!
English is the inheritance of no
Persian, Brahman, Yemeni or Hun.
We have true Indian blood in our veins
Cry out aloud! And shout! Mother English is OUT!
Go, Get Education
Be self-reliant, be industrious
Work-gather wisdom and riches.
All gets lost without knowledge
We become animals without wisdom.
Sit idle no more, go, get education
End misery of the oppressed and forsaken.
You’ve got a golden chance to learn
So learn and break the chains of caste.
Throw away the Brahmin’s scriptures fast.
Background of the poem
Though Ambedkar later wrote volumes in English, including the Constitution of India, and burnt Manusmriti, the book of Brahminical oppressive laws, as the father of the new knowledge and constitutional democracy, he too did not make such a brave statement on the role of the English language as a liberator of SC/ST/Shudra/OBCs. Though he tried to fight to declare English as the national language, he could not succeed. However, the Brahminical forces in the Constituent Assembly agreed to declare English as the Indian administrative language and Hindi as the national language. The RSS/BJP regime is trying to use that to de-Anglicise education in the government sector, gradually moving towards undoing that constitutional guarantee that English will be the administrative language.
Savitribai’s designation of the English language as “Mother English” was earth-shaking. From the state of Peshwa Brahminism and living amidst the most conservative Brahmin nationalists in Poona, who were opposing all the reforms that the Phules were fighting for, she wrote that poem and worked for the spread of the English language along with Mahatma Phule. The Brahminical upper-caste conspiracy of denying Sanskrit education to Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis from their Vedic period onwards continued to keep the agrarian and artisanal productive Indians illiterate and controlled and exploited them for millennia. Even the Muslim rulers obeyed the Brahmins by not allowing the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi masses to learn the Persian language, leave alone Sanskrit.
We have no idea why they did not learn even reading and writing in Pali, which was a Buddhist language. Of course, Buddhist monasteries were influenced by Brahmanism in later years, and they never tried to open large numbers of schools in India.
In modern times, though the British opened the doors of education to the Shudras and Dalits, the Brahmins controlled the British education system with an iron grip. Tilak, M.K. Gandhi, and many other Brahmin-Bania Congress leaders opposed the Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis learning English during the British period too. Gandhi went on preaching for regional-language education. The Phules, from the 1840s onwards, fought against Brahmin control. Even the Bengali and Tamil Brahmins did not allow the productive castes to learn English.
Savitribai’s declaration of English as Mother and her clarion call for Shudra/Dalit/Adivasi women and men to educate themselves and learn English is a major breakthrough in the history of the English language in India.
PACPET’s ideology
PACPET has by now trained about 750 girls and 750 boys (as the admission policy is 50-50, with separate exclusive girls’ Data Science training)—i.e., 1,500 rural youth from all over India—to speak, read and write in English over a period of four and a half years. All of them read Savitribai, Phule, Ambedkar and my writings as part of the syllabus.
Savitribai is special to the Centre. There is a hidden expression in Savitribai’s “Mother English” poem that English should become the mother tongue of all Indians irrespective of caste, class and gender. In Poona, Rahul Gandhi attacked Manudharma, and the BJP/RSS leaders reacted that he was trying to oppose Sanatana Dharma of Manu. Look at what Savitri said about Manu in her poem: “Manu’s dead at English Mother’s door.” Her message has to be taken to every door in India in order to liberate our women and men from casteism and patriarchy.
By declaring Savitribai as the Mother of Indian English, PACPET throws a challenge to the RSS/BJP forces that they cannot stop the spread of English education in Indian government schools and its use as an administrative language. English is the only language that exists in every state’s school books, whatever their regional language may be. Even the most remote tribal children, whose so-called mother tongue is confined to a small group, know some English. Whether one is an Urdu-speaking Muslim boy or girl or a Gurmukhi-speaking Sikh, English is a common language between all of them. Such a presence of English among all youth enabled PACPET to train youth from about 20 states, whose mother tongues are totally different. They communicate among themselves only in English. English strengthened nationalism among them all. Hindi cannot do that now or in the future.
In Telangana and AP, English has become the medium of teaching in all government schools. Though pro-Hindutva forces like Venkaiah Naidu, Justice N.V. Ramana, and Jayaprakash Narayana tried to convince A.P. CM Chandrababu Naidu and Telangana CM Revanth Reddy to discontinue English-medium education in government schools, they did not succeed.
Celebrating Indian English Day every 5 October, adorned by a beautiful portrait of the Mother of Indian English—Savitribai Phule—the Phule-Ambedkar Centre for Philosophy and English Training wants to immortalise Savitribai’s heroic declaration in 1854 that English is the Indian mother.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest books are A Shudra Life—Autobiography and Harappa God’s City of Civilization (a novel).
https://countercurrents.org/subtopics/kancha-ilaiah-shepherd/
