If one calculates the Brahmins and Baniyas who benefited from free education and healthcare at Christian institutions, funded by Western donors for mission charity, they would outnumber all other castes.

Written by : Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Published:23rd Oct, 2026 at 4:53 PM

The anti-Christian agenda of the RSS and BJP Government, by adopting various measures like the FCRA Bill, anti-conversion laws, and other forms of systemic attacks, is to ensure that the Dalit, Adivasi, and Shudra communities do not get education and global connectivity on par with the Brahmin, Bania, and other upper castes. 

The RSS and BJP assessment is that earlier only the Brahmin, Bania and other upper caste youth benefited from Christian education and health institutions, though built and run with the help of foreign money. But now they have their own private English-medium educational institutions and private hospitals. Even in earlier regimes headed by the Congress, they only benefited from the best Christian education and health institutions. The Christian institutions also ignored the role of the caste system in denying SC/ST/OBCs access to their top institutions, as they did not adopt any caste-based reservation policy.  

In the early modern period India did not have great non-Christian medical institutes like Christian Medical College and Hospital (CMCH, established in 1900) and St. Stephen’s College of Delhi, established in 1881. Even in the early days of Independence for best modern English-medium education and allopathic health treatment the upper castes depended on the Christian institutions.

Delhi University was established only in 1922. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi was established only in 1956. The rich upper castes depended on these world-class private Christian missionary institutions. They too were willing to serve them. Though they were collecting fees, it was never like the present upper caste owned private institutions. Even now there is a difference between the Christian and non-Christian fee structures in private education and health institutions. That was because they were/are subsidising the income from foreign donations through FCRA, and before FCRA was enacted, they were governed by the Indian tax laws. But the money was coming very much legally.

However, for a long time, the Indian Christians—particularly Catholics—served the same upper castes who became anti-Christian now, not the poor lower castes. Only in the recent past did they diversify their educational and health services. For example, colleges like St. Stephens and CMC Vellore did not implement reservation for SC/ST/OBCs. They only gave some seats to privileged Christians.

If only one could calculate the sheer number of Brahmins and Baniyas who studied in Christian institutions and got treatment in their hospitals, almost free of cost, they would outnumber any other caste persons. The point is that this was made possible because of foreign money coming to these institutions to subsidise education and health from Christian Western governments, churches, and individual families thinking that it is a mission charity to serve in a poor country like India. 

The conversion question 

Why are they saying only the poor get converted by force using FCRA-related money? The rich and privileged were also vulnerable to forced conversion in Christian schools, colleges, and hospitals. What would have happened if conversion were made a precondition to study in a Christian institution or get treated in our hospitals? 

Though Islam existed in India for about a thousand years, the rulers had maintained great fraternal relations with the Brahmin, Bania and other savarna Hindus. Though Muslim rulers did not give them great education or health science, more upper castes got converted to Islam. They embraced the caste system and did nothing to reform the social conditions in India. During this period, neither the rulers nor the Islamic clergy established any institutions to serve the populations who have come to be listed as Dalits/OBCs/Adivasis.

Without establishing any institutions that served outside the fold of their faith, the Hindu and Muslim ruling classes served only elites. Even as both collaborated to keep the caste system alive, they also created communal conflicts in competition with each other. As the ruling Hindus and Muslims played their deadly games, the food-producing Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis suffered illiteracy and poverty. In the latest stage of this ancient game, the RSS/BJP is preparing the ground for pushing the productive communities to primitive stages. Modern English education alone can help them to overcome their historical backwardness.

Empowered SC/ST/OBCs threaten RSS/BJP

Did Indian Christians create religious and communal conflict ever since Christianity became the source of Indian education and health science? Why this RSS/BJP animosity towards Indian Christianity? The main reason behind it is that over the last few decades, Christian institutions increasingly started educating the SC/ST/OBC communities too in their English-medium schools. 

The fear is that if the Christian institutions are allowed to educate Dalit, Adivasi and Shudra youth with some amount of subsidised fees, they will fight against the caste system, monopoly exploitation, and compete in all spaces, including media. Using this draconian FCRA law, the poor Dalit, Adivasi, and Shudra forces could be controlled.

As Abhijeet Dipke, Convenor of the Cockroach Janta Party, rightly said, these people are against the poor getting educated. In reality, RSS and BJP forces are against the Dalit, Adivasi, and Shudra (the poor) getting educated because they challenge the control of the Brahmin-Bania forces. They want to be more cautious after seeing Dipke’s own example of emerging as a leader of youth, being a Dalit himself. 

Christianity as cultural buffer

All the Christians in the world must know that before Christianity opened schools and hospitals, the majority productive communities—Shudras, Dalits, and Adivasis—were treated worse than cows. They worshipped cows but did not even touch the Dalits. 

The first secular schools in the subcontinent were opened by Christian and colonial establishments where anybody could study irrespective of their caste, gender or religion. This stress on imparting mass education was a direct consequence of the period of enlightenment in Europe and impelled Christian missionaries to establish printing presses, scientific institutions, schools, colleges and hospitals. This secular Christian education helped Muslims and Brahmins to modernise themselves. Rajaramohan Roy and Sir Sayyad Hammed are outstanding examples of such modernisation. These institutions here and in England helped many freedom fighters to understand the world through the lens of secular democracy.  

Until the British established the Department of Public Instruction in 1855 and opened the gates of mass education, Hindus and Muslims ran institutions that were exclusively for elites of their own communities in Urdu and in regional languages. The ancestors Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis were not allowed to read and write till the British, by all means, with a Christian communion arrived in India. Indeed, it is only with these radical changes that the first generation of educated social and political reformers emerged from our communities.

Without caring for Brahminic values of human untouchability and the indignity of labour, they opened schools, though very few, for all Indians. Because of that, through the policy of education for all, a great couple, Jyothiba Phule and his wife, Savitribai, the first Shudras, got basic school education. They became the first slave liberators in the mid-19th century. This is the kind of secular educational path RSS is uncomfortable with. These kinds of changes are not acceptable in the Brahmanic tradition.

Now the RSS and BJP want to close down all those educational institutions and health centres, like early hospitals, including the Christian Medical College Hospital, Vellore, over a period of time with a carefully crafted legal system.

Through education and health, in fact, the Christian institutions helped more upper castes than the Dalit, Adivasi, and Shudra till recent years. Opening such public institutions for SC/ST/OBCs is slowly creating an awakening in them.

The new FCRA laws do not affect the Muslim public institutions much because they do not have any significant educational or health institutions that were established with foreign money. Importantly, they rarely have secular institutions which provide services to all communities.

These laws will not touch the Hindu institutions either. In any case, they mainly serve the upper castes by charging huge payments. There is no charity help in Ambani or Adani schools or in universities like Ashoka or any other such private universities. In Hindu private hospitals, there is no charity-based cheap treatment for the poor. But the Christian institutions did that earlier and continue to do so. This seems to be the RSS/BJP combine’s main concern, particularly in the education sector.

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a Political Theorist, Social Activist and writer. His latest books are A Shudra Life – Autobiography and Harappa – God’s City of Civilisation. Views expressed are the author’s own.

Neither Ayodhya named in the Ramayana nor Dwaraka named in the Mahabharata have proven excavational evidence of having been ancient cities. My novel, on the other hand, draws on the world’s oldest city – Harappa – that existed around 3000 BCE in the Sindhu river basin, as proven by excavations and DNA studies, writes Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd October 15, 2026

My just-released novel Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation, published by Unbound Script, New Delhi, with magnificent illustrations by Priti Gulati Cox is an unusual experiment in the literary history of India. Critic Satya Sagar described it as a counter myth and product of courageous imagination. We have in the guise of history only purely mythical Brahminic Sanskrit literature, texts starting with Rigveda followed by Ramayana, Mahabharataand so on. There is no historical source of production, animal economy and collective culture and even what they call civilization. Ramayana and Mahabharata were woven around characters of Brahmin and Kshatriya heroes, ascetics and some women.

My novel, on the other hand, draws on the world’s oldest city – Harappa – that existed around 3000 BCE in the Sindhu river basin. Excavations, DNA studies, reading and rereading of archaeological artefacts by scholars from India and abroad have proved that there was a city with this name and it had a civilizational, cultural and economic strength that was unmatched globally at the time.

India as a nation today can be proud of its civilizational roots in Harappa. The protagonist of my novel is Harappa as the one who builds the world’s greatest city of his time, with the assistance of his wife Maisamma after Harappa himself domesticates the buffalo. Maisamma builds the world’s first water tank. They gradually transform Jambhu Dwipa, a village named after Harappa’s father into a massive city Harappa. He becomes the first king of that city state. The story goes on till some foreigners arrive.

Harappa was the ancient historical city, not Ayodhya

Harappa was the first major global city. In many aspects it was different from the ancient cities of Egypt, Israel, Greece and Rome. Harappa had many special civilizational strengths that other ancient cities did not. From houses built with bricks and sustainable wood to canals, the connection with the present Indian village and town with agrarian life is apparent.

Harappa laid the foundation for the advancement of knowledge of humans and has left behind information about their living environment, animal economy, productivity, science, engineering almost 1500 years before Aryan (Brahmin, Kshatriya and Bania) migration or invasion took place. It was much later that the rest of the world reached that level of civilizational advancement.

In contrast, the town we know of as Ayodhya, the capital of Dasharatha, the father of Rama – now what the Hindutvawadis call Rama Rajya – seems to be a city of much later period. It seems that most of the so-called ancient cities and other locations that bear names from the texts of Ramayanaor Mahabharata were named after those names first appeared in those texts. Harappa, on the other hand, is the oldest historical name of a place. I am of the opinion that the city could have been named after its builder, Harappa. The practice of naming villages and cities after people has been a historical practice in India. My belief has been reinforced by the fact that there are hundreds of such names that end with the suffix “appa” in South India. Harappan troops who migrated to the south may have taken these names with them.

Ayodhya and Dwaraka

Neither Ayodhya named in the Ramayana nor Dwaraka named in the Mahabharata have proven excavational evidence of having been ancient cities. Some excavations were done in Ayodhya after a court order in the context of the Babri Masjid dispute and a report was prepared by the Archaeological Survey of India saying that there are some relics of ancient constructions in that place dating to 700-300 BCE. However, it did not have strong evidence in terms of artefacts. Not much evidence was found about Ayodhya’s economy, animals, technology and so on. Even if we go by that report, Ayodhya came into existence much later than Harappa. Obviously it was built almost 800 to 1000 years after the Aryan Brahmin migration took place. There has not been a single scholarly study on those findings from the Ayodhya excavation unlike in the case of Harappa. The descriptions of the characters, their dress codes, the palaces they lived in, the ornaments they used and the chariots they rode in Ramayana give the impression that they were very modern. How did those kings and their women get such clothes and ornaments? If that was an ancient civilizational life, how could they use such dresses, ornaments, houses and vehicles? Of course, their idea of Krita Yuga is very recent and imaginary with absolutely no evidence. Both Ramayana and Mahabharata are novels written with purely imagined figures. The Indian Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis should not trust any book written by Brahmin/Ksatriya/Vaisya writers because they wrote only about themselves. They never even recognized the existence of the productive forces of India – Shudra/Dalit/Adivasis – let alone their antecedence. This is where my novel Harappa becomes very important for the future generations of India. Even the Brahmin Brahmin/Bania/Ksatriya youth have to realize that the Sanskrit literature, which did not deal with the lives and contribution of productive masses, has no value for the nation. The Indian youth have to reconstruct the Indian past from the Harappa city civilization onwards to acquire a respectable stature in the global knowledge systems. Reading mere Brahmin/Ksatriya life as ancient parampara of the nation will lead to a clash of cultures among Indian castes. Unity among all castes becomes possible only when you go to the casteless society of Harappan times.

The true story of an ancient civilization and its people lies in Harappa, not in Ayodhya or Dwaraka.An illustration in ‘Harappa’ by Priti Gulati Cox; and an illustration of Ram’s return to Ayodhya by Balasaheb Pant Pratinidhi in Ramchandra Madhwa Mahishi’s ‘Chitra Ramayana’ (1916) [Source: Wikipedia)

My novel

Harappa: God’s City of Civilisationshows the evolutionary process of human society, economy, relations between humans and animals, technology and science in India’s antiquity. The book Ramayana, on the other hand, does not show the kind of animal economy the Ayodhya kingdom had starting with the rule of Dasharatha. Even a work of fiction will have to show the nature of agriculture, animals, artisan production and usage of technology in those times. The Ramayana only deals with the Ksatriya royalty and Brahmin ascetics. How did society survive without food producers at that time? Who were producing food, supplying meat and milk products to Ksatriya rulers and Brahmin ascetics? Naturally when there were Ksatriya kings and Brahmin ascetics, there would have been Shudra food producers, based on the varna-based division. In that social system, Ksatriya kings and Brahmin ascetics never got involved in food production. A story of ancient India would have to show ancient values, lifestyles, artefacts, technology. If a narrative claims to be ancient, yet features lifestyles and technologies that are more recent, the writer’s maturity will be called to question. Even a novel has to be located within a time frame. If Ramayana was written by a person called Valmiki the text has to give an indication of the time frame in which lived and the social, economic, cultural environment that existed in those times. The Ramayana does not tell us anything about the lives of the people who sustained that society. My novel tells about the masses who built this nation’s early civilization from which India of today evolved. 

Harappa shows the ancient evolutionary character of society that was learning things gradually and collectively. The production process is a collective labour process. So is war. The Ramayana tells about how Vanaras helped Rama in the war against Ravana. That was a collective effort. In fact food production, house construction, making productive tools and weapons for war need a more organized long-term collective effort. The Ramayanadoes not tell anything about that fundamental process in Ayodhya or the life in nearby villages.

Any spiritual or social text will have to deal with masses of that time. They may be slaves or masters. But Ramayana and Mahabharata dealt only with the Ksatriyas and Brahmins who constituted the ruling class and the religious heads. Such books do not reflect India and the Indian people. When Ksatriya rulers are projected as gods and goddesses the very idea of religion itself gets distorted. Once the idea of God is caste-centred, that divine agency remains completely alienated from the productive masses on whom humanity depends for survival. My novel runs contrary to the narrative in the Ramayana and Mahabharata and is set hundreds of years before even their fictional time frame of Krita Yuga and Dwapara Yuga.  

Domestication of animals and birds

So far no social science book or a work of fiction has dealt with the process of how human beings could domesticate sheep, goats and more importantly one of the most ferocious wild animals, the water buffalo. Nobody has given an account even of when and how the chicken was domesticated. Domestication of animals and birds was a scientific process and involved studying the psychology of animals and birds. My novel deals with this struggle of Harappa, his father Jambhav and his mother Sindh to domesticate the buffalo, sheep, goat and chicken. While Jambhav domesticated sheep and goat, Harappa himself domesticated buffalo. His mother’s efforts to domesticate chicken and how she laid the foundations of the milk and curd (yogurt) economy has been graphically explained. Generally, writers presume that these animals were around to be used by humans. But before they were domesticated humans had to hunt and eat. After animal domestication, human lifestyle underwent a sea change as the meat and milk economy became the home and village economy. Without the domestication of animals and birds, humans could not have sedentary village economies and without such economies no city could have come into existence. Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation is a creative depiction of this process. ‘Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation’, by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd; Unbound Script, Delhi; Hardcover, 80 pages, Rs 399

How I realized that Harappa was a man’s name

Most villages and cities in India even today are named after the man or woman who played a key role in settling that village or city. It is a known fact that cities and towns are the result of expansion of villages. In ancient and medieval times, cities were never planned and built like Chandigarh in modern India. Nowhere in the world were cities a one-time building project. A city is formed by the continuous expansion of a village.

There are a number of names in South India that end with “appa”. There are also godheads like Ayyappa, Beerappa, Ramappa and so on. The Ayyappa temple of Kerala is well known. Beerappa is the god of the shepherd communities across South India, more pronouncedly in Maharashtra among the Dhangar community and among the Kuruma/Kuruba communities in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. A Beerappa temple can be seen in every village where these caste communities live. The Ramappa temple is located in north Telangana, near the town of Mulugu.

There are hundreds of personal and family names suffixed with “appa” in South India – Bangarappa, Veerappa, Mallappa and so on, apart from those are named after deities like Ayyappa, Beerappa and Ramappa. There are several villages with names that end with the word “Appa”. It is this socio-anthropological cultural environment of South India that got me thinking that Harappa would have been the name of a man in ancient India, after whom the historical city was named.

The process of writing this novel began with a sociological understanding of this similarity in names as well as the discovery by archaeologists and historians that Harappa shared many similarities with South India – people’s skin colour, their agricultural tools, housing patterns and so on.

The name Harappa does not figure in any Aryan Sanskrit books or names of people of Aryan heritage even today.

A village settles and advances only when there is a well developed animal economy, agriculture and artisanal craftsmanship. The people can develop all kinds of tools in the village only when there is a reliable supply of food available and they don’t have to hunt and fish everyday for survival.

In my novel the village Jambhu Dwipa comes into existence with the domestication of sheep, goat, chicken, dog by Harappa’s father Jambhav and mother Sindh. Jambhav’s father and mother were Mahisha and Pocha. Mahisha and Pocha were the first known couple who lived depending on nature and under trees and caves, but from Jambhav and Sindh onwards animal and chicken domestication paved the way for artisanship and the settling of a village. That was great advancement.

The idea of God

The idea of God has been presented in the book as a process of new thinking and imagination. The people of Jumbhu Dwipa were also forming new ideas about life.

The idea of God was abstract at the beginning. Then some people wanted to introduce idol worship. However, Harappa strongly opposes the idea of projecting humans as gods and goddesses. But in the process, Harappa becomes the king of the city state. Then another person, Adidevudu, claims that he has some speculative, foreseeing powers and predicts aliens arriving and destroying his city state. Harappa begins to take him seriously. Adidevudu thus became the first human being to be accepted as equivalent to God.

My view is that those indigenous (Mulavasi) people of India, by the time they built the city of Harappa and that great civilization, had a well developed idea of God in two contending forms – abstract God and human God. Over a period of time the idea of human God took the form of an idol. Adidevudu represents that divine cultural stream.

This novel is in fact going to establish that mythological books like Ramayanaand Mahabharata were written to bring society under the complete control of Brahmin writers and priests with the assistance of Ksatriya rulers. Both these castes became anti-production and gradually turned against productive science, technology and advancement. Those adults and children who read Harappa: God’s City of Civilisation will realize that India’s ancient roots lie in Harappa.

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About The Author

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, author and activist. He has been a professor of Political Science at Osmania University, Hyderabad and director of the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad. He is the author of ‘Why I Am Not a Hindu’, ‘Buffalo Nationalism’ and ‘Post-Hindu India’ 

in Life/Philosophy

by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd

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/