Jyotiba Phule did in the 19th century what Amish Tripathi did in the 21st century. Both wrote mytho-fictions, but for very different reasons. Phule used his tale to expose power. Tripathi used his tale to restore confidence in power.
Jyotirao Govindrao Phule was a Mali, from a marginalised gardening and cultivating community classified as Shudra under the varna system. Educated by Christian missionaries, he wrote Gulamgiri in 1873, when colonial modernity and Brahmin reform movements were jointly reshaping Indian public life while leaving caste hierarchy largely intact. Amish Tripathi is an urban Brahmin, educated in IIM, with roots in Varanasi. He published the highly successful Shiva Trilogy beginning with The Immortals of Meluha in 2010, in the economic and cultural confidence of post-liberalisation India, when a resurgent Hindu nationalism was seeking civilisational validation in popular culture.
Phule wrote working with the intellectual tools available to 19th-century India. The Aryan invasion theory was widely accepted at that time by European Indologists, colonial administrators, and most educated Indians including upper-caste nationalists who used it to claim kinship with a superior Indo-European stock. The Harappan archeological sites had not yet been discovered; they would be excavated only in the 1920s. Phule knew nothing of that urban world.
Phule’s central move was to read the Dashavatara as a sequential military record of that conquest. Matsya, the fish avatar, was his example: not a divine miracle but the mocking nickname given by indigenous people to the first Aryan leader who arrived by sea. Each subsequent avatar encoded a further wave of territorial, military, cultural conquest. His most powerful illustration was King Bali, whom Brahmanic tradition remembers as a demon king rightfully subdued by Vamana, the dwarf. Phule reversed the verdict. Bali was a benevolent indigenous ruler, treacherously destroyed by a Brahmin invader through deception. The folk prayer still sung by local Marathi women, “May all troubles go and Bali’s kingdom come,” was in Phule’s reading, a trace of suppressed collective memory that the Puranic overlay had failed to erase. Mythology in this reading is not culture. It is a cover story. The folk custom is the testimony the cover story tried to suppress.
Today, equating Harappan civilisation with the Vedic world is a ferocious battle in social media, much like the Creationism-Evolution battle in American schools. The academic consensus, firmly based on ancient DNA evidence, comparative linguistics, and archaeozoology, holds that the Harappan cities had disappeared centuries before the Vedic pastoral tradition arose.
The single most embarrassing piece of evidence for anyone wishing to merge them is the horse. The Rigveda mentions ashva over 200 times; the Ashvins are horsemen gods; the ashvamedha is the supreme royal ritual. Horse remains and horse imagery are conspicuously absent from Harappan archaeological sites. And DNA evidence now shows horses were domesticated in Eurasia in 2200 BC and spread around the world only by 1500 BC.
Tripathi’s Meluha was written before horse-domestication related genetic evidence was published. He sidesteps the Harappa-Vedic issue not by addressing it but by fictionally dissolving it. The Indus Valley Civilisation is renamed Meluha, populated with Suryavanshis living along the sacred Saraswati, governed by Lord Ram’s laws, organised around Vedic dharma. Shiva enters this city from Tibet, on a horse, in 1900 BC, a date deliberately chosen as historians believe this is when the city civilisation drew to a close.
Phule, a Shudra writing in the 19th century without access to Harappan archaeology, worked from caste violence itself as his evidence, reasoning backwards from the existence of untouchability to the military conquest that must have produced it. Those communities forced into the most stigmatised labour were, in his framework, the last to have resisted Aryan conquest, reduced to degradation as punishment for resistance. He gave stigma an external origin and therefore a refutable one.
Tripathi, a Brahmin writing in the 21st century with full knowledge of that archaeology, constructs a fictional world designed to make its findings irrelevant. The Nagas, his deformed, excluded community, are eventually reintegrated through Shiva’s moral awakening, not through dismantling the civilisational order that produced their exclusion. The tradition corrects its own excess from within. The structure is preserved; cruelty is softened.
Phule’s Aryan invasion argument was not primarily a historiographical claim; it was a delegitimising move. If Brahmin scriptural authority is colonial authority, if the Vedas arrived with the conqueror, then that authority carries no deeper legitimacy than any other occupation. It can be refused.
Tripathi’s civilisational argument makes the opposite move: if Vedic dharma is autochthonous, if it was present before the Muslims and before the British, then it has a claim on the soil that supersedes all subsequent challenges. The tradition becomes inseparable from the land, and to question it becomes, by implication, to question belonging itself.
Phule’s work is insurgent literature that anticipates evidence from below. Tripathi’s 21st century civilisational literature evades it from above.
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