Consider his skewering of the creation myth about the four castes being born from Lord Brahma’s mouth, arms, groin and legs (did Brahma menstruate in all four places, he asked sarcastically), or his irreverent deconstructions of the Vishnu avatars. He was quite the abrasive, first-strike radical, definitely not above expressing strident views if it helped make a larger point about social hypocrisy. These depictions can be mildly discomfiting even to readers who unconditionally denounce casteism (I admit to being briefly taken aback when I first saw them, and a friend who flipped through the book thought some of the content was extreme), but subtlety is beside the point here: this book is based largely on Phule’s polemical tract Gulamgiri ( Slavery), which was an attack not just on the caste system but on the very foundations of the Brahmin way of life. One of them – shamelessly usurping the peasants’ hard-earned money – is depicted with bags of loot and a bank robber’s eye-mask. The drawings show decadent, hoodlum-like Brahmins (“Pass the Gangajal, will you,” one says to another, crudely probing his ear with his finger) lording it over the “lower castes”. The words and the imagery evoke the lawless American Old West, preparing the ground for the advent of Phule as a Wyatt Earp-like figure who will help clean things up. 1840s Poona, the text tells us, was “ a hellhole of a town. Early in A Gardener in the Wasteland, a new graphic novel based on the work of the 19th century social reformer Jotiba Phule, there is a deliberately provocative panel about caste discrimination.
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