The Third Eye, Opens Again: Phule's Forgotten Play Speaks Powerfully to Our Times. The dramatized reading of Trutya Ratna (The Third Eye), Jyotirao Govindrao Phule's remarkable 1855 anti-caste play, directed by Dr. Sharmistha Saha, receives an insightful review by Gourab Ghosh, highlighting its relevance and urgent political resonance.  

The dramatized reading of Trutya Ratna (The Third Eye), Jyotirao Govindrao Phule's remarkable 1855 anti-caste play, directed by Dr. Sharmistha Saha at Studio Tamasha on 19 July, proved to be more than a theatrical revival; it was a political and intellectual intervention that reminded audiences that the questions Phule posed nearly 170 years ago continue to haunt contemporary India.

In an age where superstition still finds fertile ground in claims of divine miracles, from frozen ice inside a refrigerator to Dalit girls facing brutal caste-based violence, The Third Eye feels uncannily contemporary. Rather than appearing as an archival curiosity, Phule's text reads like a fierce commentary on twenty-first-century India.

Recovering a Lost Masterpiece

Trutya Ratna, despite being among the earliest modern Marathi plays, remained virtually forgotten for nearly 150 years. Its recent English translation by Rohini Mokashi-Punekar has finally made the work accessible to wider audiences. The rediscovery also owes much to the pioneering scholarship of sociologist and feminist thinker Sharmila Rege, whose influential 2010 essay interpreted Phule's "third eye" as a metaphor for education within a Phule-Ambedkarite feminist pedagogy.

Born into the Mali caste, Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890) received an education through Scottish missionaries that exposed him to Enlightenment ideas and radical thinkers such as Thomas Paine. Inspired equally by Paine, the Buddha, and Kabir, Phule emerged as one of India's earliest and most uncompromising critics of caste, religious orthodoxy, and social inequality. Through pamphlets, poetry, essays, and plays, he challenged Brahmanical dominance and envisioned education as the foundation of social and gender equality.

Performances That Illuminate the Text

The Third Eye stands as perhaps his most theatrical articulation of this vision. The play exposes how caste oppression operates through everyday practices of religious authority and social ignorance. Joy Sengupta and Padma Damodaran delivered compelling performances as the manipulative Joshi Brahmin couple who exploit the illiteracy and vulnerability of lower-caste communities to maintain their caste hierarchy. Their performances captured not only the hypocrisy of religious authority but also the mechanisms through which caste reproduces itself.

Opposing this entrenched hierarchy is the figure of the missionary, played by Arpit Shashwat. Rather than functioning merely as a colonial presence, the missionary becomes a dramatic device through which Phule questions religious dogmatism and opens the possibility of rational inquiry and education. The conflict is therefore not simply between religions but between knowledge and ignorance, reason and blind faith.

Priyanka Charan, as the Vidushak, was memorable, her sharp wit and satirical commentary animating the reading with energy and humour. The musical accompaniment by Dhammrakshit Randive, a noted Dalit singer rooted in the tradition of Dalit Jalsa, enriched the performance with the cultural memory and political resonance of the long traditions of Dalit-Bahujan resistance.

Context Beyond the Performance

The post-performance discussion further enriched the evening. Playwright Ramu Ramanathan situated Phule's work within broader nineteenth-century global intellectual movements and reminded audiences that the Dalit Jalsa tradition itself emerged from Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj (Society of Truth Seekers), founded to unite and empower Shudras through education and cultural expression.

Ramanathan argued persuasively that The Third Eye is not merely an anti-caste text; it is fundamentally a play about education as the force capable of dismantling caste, patriarchy, and economic exploitation.

Education as Liberation

In her concluding remarks, Dr. Sharmistha Saha reflected on the conspicuous absence of Phule from mainstream histories of Indian theatre. Echoing Professor Y. S. Alone's idea of "protected ignorance," she suggested that modern Indian theatre has systematically overlooked anti-caste thinkers like Phule despite their foundational contribution to India's intellectual modernity.

At a moment when students across India continue to demand accountability over examination failures, paper leaks, and the erosion of public education, The Third Eye holds both a reminder and a promise: "education is the key to freedom."