Biographical film 'Phule' points to the path forward. It draws from the past not to glorify it, but to indict it. It demands historical accountability and uses memory as a form of activism.
Published May 10, 2025 | 12:00 PM ⚊ Updated May 10, 2025 | 12:00 PM
In Phule, the story is not one of victimhood, but of agency. Savitribai is not a footnote in Jyotiba’s life. She is a co-conspirator, educator, and revolutionary in her own right.
Synopsis: Films like ‘The Kashmir Files’ and ‘The Kerala Story’ are less about history and more about feeding the frenzy of Hindutva nationalism through selective memory and manufactured hate. ‘Phule’ stands in radical contrast. It does not use history as a backdrop for jingoism but as a battlefield of conscience.
“Do not worry… Meanwhile, a strange thing happened here,” writes Savitribai Phule to her husband, Jyotiba, on 29 August 1868, recounting the story of a Brahmin boy and an ‘untouchable’ girl whose lives she saved from casteist mob violence.
The letter is not just a document but a firebrand, an assertion of radical love, and a defiance of social order. This moment where caste, gender, love, and power intersect violently and yet are interrupted by moral courage forms a powerful thematic root for Phule, a Hindi-language biographical film based on the lives of Jyotirao Phule and Savitri Phule.
Director Ananth Mahadevan’s Phule, starring Pratik Gandhi and Patralekhaa, takes this spirit and runs with it. Not just to narrate the biopic of two 19th-century social reformers, but to remind a wounded nation of what it has forgotten and whom it has deliberately erased.
The film builds a metaphorical bridge from the past into our present, still haunted by the same caste violence, misogyny, and moral hypocrisy.
This is not nostalgia. As Raoul Peck reminds us, “History is not the past. It is the present.” And Phule insists we confront that present through the mirror of the Phules’ relentless resistance.
Cinema has always had a problem with its memory. For decades, Indian films have glorified upper-caste valour, romanticised hierarchical traditions, and cast Dalits only as victims or villains, rarely as visionaries.
Anant Mahadevan.
Phule smashes that mold with dignity. It belongs to a new wave of films that director Pa. Ranjith says is necessary to “deconstruct the existing grammar of Indian cinema, which is predominantly casteist.”
In Phule, the story is not one of victimhood, but of agency. Savitribai is not a footnote in Jyotiba’s life. She is a co-conspirator, educator, and revolutionary in her own right. When she opens India’s first school for girls, the camera doesn’t just show chalk on slates; it captures spit landing on her sari, stones hitting her spine, and her spine refusing to bend.
This, as bell hooks calls it, is “counter-memory,” which is a conscious refusal to let the master’s narrative dominate collective imagination.
It is Dalit cinema’s greatest offering: not diversity, but disruption. Phule is not a representation for representation’s sake. It’s a cinematic act of anti-caste assertion.
Most mainstream Indian historicals today are a theatrical performance of political amnesia.
Pratik Gandhi.
Films like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story are less about history and more about feeding the frenzy of Hindutva nationalism through selective memory and manufactured hate. Phule stands in radical contrast. It does not use history as a backdrop for jingoism but as a battlefield of conscience.
The film rejects spectacle in favour of substance. Classrooms are not polished havens of enlightenment. They are dark, cramped, and constantly under siege.
Pratik Gandhi as Jyotiba carries the poise of conviction without melodrama. Patralekhaa delivers one of her most moving performances yet, embodying Savitribai with a rare blend of vulnerability and volcanic resolve.
As Ken Loach puts it, “Historical filmmaking must act as a bridge between past and present, where empathy fuels understanding and memory becomes activism.” Phule is precisely that bridge which is sturdy, unpolished, and necessary.
The young couple in Savitribai’s 1868 letter is reincarnated in the victims of today’s honour killings, in interfaith couples hounded by “love jihad” vigilantes, and in Dalit students pushed to the edge by casteist academic systems. Every time a girl is killed for loving the ‘wrong’ boy, this letter bleeds anew.
Patralekhaa.
Phule forces viewers to reflect on what it means to love and live against the grain in a society that rewards conformity and punishes difference.
The Phules didn’t just oppose caste, they reimagined education, labour, gender roles, and marriage itself as sites of revolution. The film rightly portrays their politics as comprehensive and intersectional.
We see Savitribai teaching widows, Jyotiba organising farmers, and both of them writing furiously against Brahmin hegemony.
This is why telling their story is a political act today. In an India where textbook histories are being rewritten to erase anti-caste icons and glorify upper-caste heroes, Phule is more than a film, it is resistance celluloid.
In an era where algorithms decide visibility and nationalism dictates taste, the question “Whose story gets told?” has never been more urgent.
As Anurag Kashyap said, “The politics of cinema is not just in the story, but in whose story gets told and how.”
Today, OTT platforms and theatrical releases are flooded with tales of royal warriors, saffron-clad monks, and masculine revenge, which are stitched together with the thread of majoritarian fantasy.
Phule disrupts this with truth. Not just the truth of historical fact, but the truth of historical feeling.
The despair, rage, and hope of communities long silenced. The film reminds us that to remember the Phules is to remember everything dominant India wants to forget: caste, oppression, and the subaltern struggle for dignity.
Pa. Ranjith has often said, “Cinema must be a tool for Dalit assertion. It must reclaim space. not just to speak, but to shout, to dream.” Phule answers that call. It doesn’t just document, it dreams. And in dreaming, it dares.
Indian cinema must confront a critical choice: Will it continue to serve state-sponsored myth-making, or will it become a site of memory, struggle, and radical love?
Phule points to the path forward. It draws from the past not to glorify it, but to indict it. It demands historical accountability and uses memory as a form of activism. It reclaims that narrative for Savitribai, for Jyotiba, for the many
who died unsung in India’s brutal caste wars.
The revolution, Phule reminds us, began in a classroom. With slates and broken benches. With letters and laws. With a woman who wiped spit off her face and kept teaching. That revolution is far from over.
In George Orwell’s prophetic words, “In times of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Phule does exactly that. It tells the truth of a past India wants to whitewash. It tells the truth of a present India wants to ignore. And it tells it not with resignation but with roaring, luminous defiance.
Watching Phule is not passive consumption, it is participation. It is a refusal to forget. It is an insistence on justice. It is, above all, a cinematic lesson in what it means to love radically, teach fearlessly, and remember rightly.
Let us not wait for mainstream cinema to find its conscience. Let us turn instead to films like Phule, where the margins speak, the centre listens, and history is not a costume, but a call.
(Edited by Majnu Babu).
