19th century visionary leader Jotirao Phule’s actions and writings address questions of dignity and access to resources for marginalized people, including Dalit and women. His critical thought exposed cultural and social appearances of caste hegemony and aimed at annihilating caste and bringing in gender equality. His insights and works generated the non-brahmanical discourse that has ideologically sustained counter culture till date. The play Satyashodhak written in Marathi by Prof. G P Deshpande (1992) presents some events and stages of Phule’s life and thought to introduce his non-brahmanical politics. It was recently rejuvenated (2012) by director Atul Pethe as a project for political education of Pune Municipal sanitation workers largely belonging to the (formerly untouchable) Scheduled Castes. Accordingly, they were cast as actors in the performance, except in lead roles. Their marginalized social status and absence of any previous engagement with theatre justified their participation as the unique selling point of the play. Recalling Phule’s understanding of caste and brahmanism, and his ways of emancipating politics, the critical readings of the performance identified a theatrical attempt to reinstate cultural hegemony and reinterpret Phule in subtle Brahmanical ways. It is to be noted that the subsequent debate that developed in Marathi intelligentsia chose to address questions of appropriateness of the critique in polarized manner over theatrical politics. Examining advertised qualifications of the performance, I intend to understand entanglement of reassertion of caste hegemony and theatrical conventions in this paper. I use the idea of stratification to show implications of theatrically powerful but historically unwarranted Brahmin friendliness of non-brahmanical discourse vis-à-vis current identity politics. My method is to dissect layers of meaning generated by social actions, theatrical visuals and published documents which support my conclusion that the theatrical equals the political.