PATRIOTISM WITHOUT PEOPLE 17 A visionary sometimes arrives ahead of his time, and finds himself unable to mobilise a sufficient social force to ensure the perpetuation of his ideas in thought and action. Phule's history is clearly of this category. Even while coping with the disabilities imposed by an ascriptive caste order, he managed to remain one step ahead of the more orthodox thinkers among his contemporaries. His first major effort at interpretation of Indian tradition, Ghulamgiri, was published two years prior to Dayanand Saraswati's Saiyarth Prakash. His principal vehicle of social intervention—the Satya Shodak Samaj (or Society of Truth Seekers)—was founded in 1867, four years prior to Dayanand's Arya Samaj. The two main reformist organisations that existed at the time were the Bombay-based Prarthana Samaj and the Calcutta-based Brahmo Samaj. Phule was in bitter disagreement with both. He in fact went so far as to denounce their entire reformist programmes as a thinly disguised effort to sanctify the 'political designs' hatched by 'Brahmin brains', and to propagate the reactionary tenets of the Vedas and the Bhagavad Gita. Finally, well over two decades before Tilak and Lajpat Rai began their celebration of Aryan virility, Phule had exposed the entire doctrine of the Aryan conquest as the ideological prop of an oppressive social order.34 Unerringly sensing the political potential of traditional cultural symbols, Phule deployed the theory of Aryan conquest with great polemical advantage. The alternative interpretation of Indian scriptures perhaps began with Phule. And in the pantheon of subaltern heroes, Phule's choice fell upon King Ball—the asura king who was banished from his kingdom by the trickery of Vaman, an incarnation of Vishnu, and an agent of the devas. Phule's discovery of Indian tradition followed a course diametrically opposed to that of the Hindu nationalists. The word 'Hindu' occurs but rarely in Phule's discourse, and the word 'Aryan'—so critical to the greater vehicle of Hinduism—only with a load of negative connotations. In Ghulamgiri, Phule fired his first salvo against the incipient efforts then to reinterpet Indian history in terms of the glories of Aryan civilisation. The Aryans, he said, 'appear to have been a race imbued with very high notions of self, extremely cunning, arrogant and bigoted'. The self-important epithets they used with reference to themselves, he continued, 'confirm us in our opinion of their primitive character, which they have preserved up to the present time, with perhaps, little change for the better'.35 In contrast, the aborigines of India seemed, in Phule's reading, to have been 'a hardy and brave people', who put up a 'determined front' to the Aryan 'interlopers' before their final subjugation. From the many customs that had been handed down through the times, Phule concluded that the struggle between the two must have been a hard one. The distinct identities of the Shudra and the Aryan however, did