Phule’s Ghulamgiri and Shetkaricha Asud provides a glimpse of the idea of modernity he worked with. Phule’s contribution to the dalit movement and to the Indian national movement were deeply marked by his particular understanding of modernity which traversed the difficult and at times overlapping boundaries of caste, community and anti-colonialism. To arrive at an understanding of modernity in the ambivalent times of hope, opportunity, oppression and struggle was a profoundly political and progressive act and revisiting Phule’s narratives brings us to relook some of the contemporary debates around individual and group rights, community versus nation, and the class-caste overlap in the Indian context. Phule offered a careful yet strong critique of colonialism while meticulously deploying the ideas and tools of modernity which inevitably tied themselves to the history of colonialism in the subcontinent. Phule’s political project aimed at constituting dalits as political subjects, to which end, his contribution remains powerful and most consequential.