Not Identity but Reciprocity: Reading Dharma in Jotibā Phule

The article establishes Jotibā Phule’s Sārwajanik Satya Dharma Pustak as an inter-textual commentary by recovering an inter-textual context to be able to unpack his conception of dharma. It reads the development of Jotibā’s ‘ Satyadharma ’ as a theoretical response to the three dominant registers of dharma read as restorative, replacing and reformative. In raising such challenges, the article shows that Jotibā inaugurates a particular strand of non-Brahmin way of thinking that seeks reasoning from within the immanent world. A world which is not desacralized but where values are present for us to develop a reciprocal and incipient egalitarian human sociality—thereby arguing for human sociality itself as a generative site of norms and of dharma.