Why is a Bahujan writer questioning the legacy of Fatima Sheikh, an associate of Savitribai Phule?

Government media advisor and writer-activist Dilip Mandal has sparked a controversy by claiming this week that Fatima Sheikh, a Muslim woman who is considered to have been a close colleague and friend of 19th-century women’s education pioneer Savitribai Phule, was not a historical figure but a “fabricated character” that he had created.

In a post on X on January 9, which is marked as Fatima Sheikh’s birthday, Mandal wrote on X, “The truth is that “Fatima Sheikh” never existed; she is not a historical figure. Not a real person.”

In 2019, Mandal had written an article in The Print that had been headlined, “Why Indian history has forgotten Fatima Sheikh but remembers Savitribai Phule.” After the controversy erupted, the publication retracted the article and said it is investigating the matter.

Sheikh’s association with Savitribai Phule – who, along with her husband, Jotiba, played a key role in the anti-caste movement – is often held up as an example of the historical relationship between Muslims and Dalits.

Mandal went on to claim that interest in Fatima Sheikh had vanished in 2022 after he “abandoned” her story. “It is my mistake that, during a particular phase, I created this name out of nothing – essentially from thin air,” he wrote. “I did that knowingly.”

Mandal, a Bahujan activist and journalist who has written extensively on caste and politics, was appointed as the media advisor to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting last August.

Scholars and activists say that though historical evidence is scant, there is enough proof that a person named Fatima existed and worked alongside the Phules. Jotiba Phule founded the Satyashodak Samaj, or “Truth-Seeking Society”, in Maharashtra in 1873 to challenge caste oppression and educate women and Dalits.

Fatima Sheikh is even mentioned in government publications. For instance, in a biography of Phule published by The Maharashtra Bureau for Literature and Culture in 1998, there is a description of the methods Savitribai Phule and Sheikh used to teach children from underprivileged communities at a time when learning was the exclusive domain of Brahmins.

Mandal’s attempt to invalidate Fatima Sheikh is part of a broader political trend to undermine solidarity between Dalits and Muslims and erase the contribution of Muslims to Indian history, political observers say.

Fatima Sheikh in history

Shradda Kumbhojkar, a professor of history at Savitribai Phule Pune University, said that “Fatima” is mentioned in a letter Savitribai Phule wrote to Jotirao Phule in 1856. The letter was reproduced in a volume by the Maharashtra State Bureau for Literature and Culture, she said.

“While Savitribai is writing to Jotirao from her maternal village, she expresses reassurance that ‘Fatima must be shouldering the hardships in my absence but she is not a person who would complain,’” said Kumbhojkar.

Beyond this letter, Kumbhojkar said, there is little historical evidence about Fatima.

Similarly, Oxford historian Rosalind O’Hanlon, who has extensively researched caste in 19th-century Maharashtra and the life of Jotirao Phule, writes that Fatima Sheikh is an “elusive figure” since no material she may have written has survived. In an article published in January 2022, O’Hanlon refers to a black-and-white photograph of Savitribai and Fatima sitting side by side that she dates back to the 1850s based on its appearance and print.

O’Hanlon writes that Fatima was the sister of Mian Usman Sheikh, a close friend of Jotirao and a resident of Ganjpeth in Pune. O’Hanlon also points to a third, older female figure behind the two, “dressed in a traditional white khimar hijab”, suggesting that woman might be a member of the Sheikh family.

The photograph may have been taken when the Phules, ostracised for their efforts to educate Dalit and girls from marginal castes, lived with the Sheikh family, O’Hanlon writes.

In an email message to Scroll, O’Hanlon said that the photograph of Savitribai and Fatima Sheikh may well have been thoughtfully posed to suggest the idea that a unity of educational purpose was more important than religious divisions.

“The little girl on the left, sitting at Fatima’s feet, wears a bindi on her forehead, suggesting that she comes from a Hindu family,” she wrote. “The little girl on the right, at Savitribai’s feet, has no such forehead mark, and looks to be wearing a child’s version of the khimar hijab. We cannot know for certain, but the positioning of the figures suggests this kind of message.”

Though Dilip Mandal claims the photograph is a recent creation, scholar Bapurao Ghungargaonkar said that the image can be traced back to Mazoor, a periodical published from 1925, edited by a man named DS Zhodge.

It is a copy of a negative.

Ghungargaonkar, a doctoral scholar at Savitribai Phule Pune University, is researching the reformist Satyashodhak movement and the articles, pamphlets and books about it.

Mazoor editor Zhodge was a member of the Satyashodhak movement, Ghungargaonkar said. His wife, Phulwantabai Zhodge, had authored a biography of Savitribai Phule in 1966, titled Sadhvi Savitribai Phule.

The photograph is also referenced in a collection of Savitribai Phule’s writings, letters and lectures titled Savitribai Phule-Samagra Vangmay in 1988, edited by Dr MG Mali, Ghungargaonkar said. Here, Mali identifies Fatima by the surname “Sheikh”.

Mali writes in the book that he obtained a copy of the negative from DS Zhodge, who got it from Eknath Govandi Palkar, a member of the Satyashodhak Samaj and a biographer of Jotirao Phule.

“This is how that photo came into circulation,” said Ghungargaonkar. “It is not manufactured or fake.”

However, Ghungargaonkar says that Fatima has been mistakenly identified in the image. He said that she is the woman in white in the back, not the figure who is seated next to Savitribai Phule.

Over time, members of the Satyashodhak Samaj assigned dates to mark the birthdays of Savitribai Phule on January 3 and Fatima on January 9 to create a counter-narrative to what they perceive is Brahmanical cultural hegemony, Ghungargaonkar said.

“That may be wrong but to say that this figure [Fatima] did not exist is incorrect,” he said.

Dalit-Muslim unity

Kumbhojkar, the historian at Savitribai Phule Pune University, said that the idea behind questioning Fatima Sheikh’s existence “is to negate multicultural participation of various sects” in the Satyashodhak movement.

Savitribai Phule headed the women’s wing of the Satyashodhak movement that focused on women’s education and social rights. Kumbhojkar said there is evidence that Muslim reformists had participated in the movement.

Harish Wankhede, political analyst in Maharashtra, claimed that Mandal’s post was an attempt to further the Hindutva agenda to consolidate a lower-caste identity under its umbrella and foster anti-Muslim sentiment among Dalits.

Mandal, he said, is trying to suggest that Dalit and Bahujan reformists worked separately from Muslims reformists, “which of course is not true”.

“In Maharashtra, those who understand Dalit-Muslim-Bahujan movement, Fatima Sheikh is a very popular name within the social and intellectual circle,” Wankhede said.

Mandal’s assertion that he had “created this name out of nothing – essentially from thin air”, implying that he did this in his article in The Print in 2019, is curious. In the retracted article, which is available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, he provided a hyperlink to an article in The Print published in September 2018 by journalist Vandana Menon headlined, “Fatima Sheikh: The woman who reshaped Indian education with Savitribai Phule.”

Menon’s article was also briefly withheld by The Print but is now accessible online again. “After consulting multiple scholars and reviewing decades-old written records, we found several references to Fatima Sheikh scattered throughout history,” says a note by the publication. “We have published these accounts and the perspectives of Marathi, Muslim, and feminist scholars here.”

On January 10, within a day of receiving backlash by historians over his social media post questioning the existence of Sheikh, Mandal changed tack a little. He agreed that Sheikh had existed but expressed scepticism about her role in the Satyashodak movement.

The same day, criticising a post on X by the Aam Aadmi Party commemorating the birth anniversaries of Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh, Mandal praised Savitribai Phule’s contribution to reforming “Hindu” society by countering caste discrimination and educating girls. He demanded to know what Fatima Sheikh had similarly done for Muslims.

Mandal also claimed that Wikipedia had blocked edits to an article on Fatima Sheikh. According to Mandal, a user going by the handle “Starlordnikhil” had tried to make edits that claimed there was no “Muslim/Islamic” involvement in the efforts of the Phules to educate women and Dalits. Fatima Sheikh, the user is said to have claimed, was invented by “authoritarian left wing hegemony to defame and undervalue Hinduism, especially OBC people”. Mandal claimed that Wikipedia blocked the user and deleted the edit.

Mandal’s posts reflect an attempt to co-opt the Phules as “Hindu” icons while sidestepping their strident anti-caste philosophy, observers say.

Dalit leader Prakash Ambedkar, who leads the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi which uses Dalit-Muslim solidarity as an electoral plank, criticised Mandal, though without naming him. Ambedkar said that “so-called intellectuals” of the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were trying to “propagate Islamophobia and form a Vedic Hindu nation”.

Erasing Muslims

Shamsuddin Tamboli, president of the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal, founded in 1970 to work on the same principles advocated by the Phules, said that despite Maharashtra government publications mentioning Sheikh, “malicious attempts are being made to erase her from history”.

“Sheikh gave shelter to Savitri Phule and Jotiba Phule when they were evicted from their house,” Tamboli said. “She helped them set up a school in Pune.”

He said that this reflected an attempt to marginalise and even erase the role Muslims have played in Indian history. “What is being done to Sheikh’s name is part of this larger conspiracy against the community to take away their contributions to the society,” he said.

Ghungargaonkar noted that the narrative about Fatima Sheikh challenges the perception that Muslim women in the 19th century were uneducated and kept in seclusion by their families.

“The idea that a Muslim woman worked with Savitribai Phule feels incomprehensible [to Hindutva supporters],” he said.

O’Hanlon, in her email to Scroll, pointed out that while there is no way asserting that Fatima Sheikh was India’s “first” Muslim woman teacher, she remains a remarkable icon for her time.

“We do know for certain that Fatima was remarkably early as a Muslim woman teacher, and part of an extraordinary educational initiative that called for great courage and foresight,” she said. “This is actually what we celebrate, rather than worrying about who came ‘first’ in this year or that, which is in any case all but impossible to know.”

Ghungargaonkar said that members of the Satyashodhak Samaj and narratives by other progressives may have tried to bolster the image of Fatima but the fact of her existence is undeniable. “...Whether she is ‘Sheikh’ or someone else, that’s another debate,” said Ghungargaonkar. “She can’t be denied or erased from history.”