BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 136 of 144

Correct — A, a b c 2 1 3, that is a-2, b-1, c-3. Take the three pairings one at a time. The Servants of India Society (a) was founded at Pune on 12 June 1905 by Gopal Krishna Gokhale (2), who left the Deccan Education Society to start it; its members took a vow of poverty and of lifelong service and were meant, in Gokhale's phrase, to be trained as national missionaries working for India's political and social advance by strictly constitutional means. It is a Maharashtrian, twentieth-century, liberal-constitutionalist body, and V. S. Srinivasa Sastri led it after Gokhale's death in 1915. The Tattwabodhini Sabha (b) was founded at Calcutta in 1839 by Debendranath Tagore (1), eldest son of Dwarkanath Tagore and father of Rabindranath; it worked to propagate Rammohun Roy's rational, Vedantic reading of Hinduism, published the influential Tattwabodhini Patrika from 1843, and was dissolved back into the Brahmo Samaj by Debendranath himself in 1859. The Atmiya Sabha (c) was the earliest of the three — a philosophical discussion circle started by Ram Mohan Roy (3) at Calcutta in 1815 for debate on religious and social questions, which became defunct in 1823 and whose line of descent runs through the Brahmo Sabha of 1828 to the Brahmo Samaj. So a-2, b-1, c-3, which is exactly the code printed in option (a). Two structural points are worth noticing on a question of this shape. First, all four options assign c-3, so the Atmiya Sabha pairing is a free gift and the question actually reduces to two binary decisions on a and b. Second, List-I has three entries against List-II's four, so one name — Keshab Chandra Sen (4) — is deliberately spare, and the three-digit codes in the options are the paper's own design rather than a misprint. Nothing here is broken; the extra name exists only to be attachable to whichever pairing the candidate is least sure of.

• (b)a b c 2 4 3 — Gets the Servants of India Society right and then hands the Tattwabodhini Sabha to Keshab Chandra Sen. The chronology alone refuses it: the Sabha was founded in 1839, when Sen was one year old — he was born in 1838 — and he joined the Brahmo Samaj only in 1857, two years before Debendranath dissolved the Tattwabodhini Sabha back into it in 1859. Sen's own foundations came later and were separate: the breakaway Bharatvarshiya Brahmo Samaj after the split of 1866, the Indian Reform Association of 1870 and the Church of the New Dispensation. This is the option that punishes a candidate who knows the Brahmo family of institutions as a single blur rather than as a sequence with dates.
• (c)a b c 1 2 3 — The transposition error — it simply swaps items 1 and 2, giving the Servants of India Society to Debendranath Tagore and the Tattwabodhini Sabha to Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Both halves are impossible on dates and on geography. The Tattwabodhini Sabha was founded at Calcutta in 1839, twenty-seven years before Gokhale was born in 1866; and Debendranath Tagore died on 19 January 1905, five months before the Servants of India Society was founded at Pune on 12 June that year. Beyond the arithmetic, the two belong to different worlds: a Bengal religious-reform society of the 1830s against a Maharashtrian association of full-time political workers founded seventy years later.
• (d)a b c 1 4 3 — The weakest of the four, because it gets both contested pairings wrong and scores only on the c-3 that every option gives away. It repeats the Servants of India Society error of option (c) — assigning Gokhale's 1905 Pune society to Debendranath Tagore, who was dead before it was founded — and the Tattwabodhini error of option (b), assigning an 1839 society to Keshab Chandra Sen, born in 1838. It is the option a candidate lands on by choosing a code at random once the two names in the middle have blurred together.

The three bodies in List-I mark three different stages of Indian associational life, and BPSC's match-lists reward candidates who can place a society in its stage rather than merely attach a name to it. The first stage is the discussion circle: the Atmiya Sabha of 1815 was a room of friends in Calcutta arguing about monotheism and idolatry, with no membership rolls and no programme, and it lapsed in 1823 — but from it Ram Mohan Roy went on to the Brahmo Sabha of 1828, which became the Brahmo Samaj and gave nineteenth-century Bengal its reforming vocabulary. The second stage is the organised propagating society: the Tattwabodhini Sabha of 1839 had a journal, the Tattwabodhini Patrika from 1843, a school and a body of workers, and it existed to spread a doctrine, which is why Debendranath Tagore could fold it back into the Brahmo Samaj in 1859 once the two had converged. The third stage, and a different tradition altogether, is the cadre organisation for public work: Gokhale's Servants of India Society of 1905 recruited men who gave up ordinary careers, accepted a small allowance and pledged their lives to political and social service through constitutional channels. Keshab Chandra Sen, the spare name, belongs to the second stage and to the Brahmo story specifically — he entered the Samaj in 1857, split from Debendranath in 1866, and lost his own following in 1878 over the child marriage of his daughter.

Work this question by its structure before you work it by its content. Every one of the four codes reads c-3, so Ram Mohan Roy and the Atmiya Sabha are conceded by the paper itself and are worth no attention. What remains is a two-step decision. Step one: is the Servants of India Society item 2 or item 1? Gokhale founded it — the society is his single most famous creation, and Gandhi called him his political guru — so it is 2, and that eliminates options (c) and (d) together. Step two: with only (a) and (b) left, the Tattwabodhini Sabha must go to Debendranath Tagore or to Keshab Chandra Sen, and the discriminating fact is a date: 1839, which is before Sen's public life had begun. That single date decides the question. If dates are the weak point, an alternative discriminator is province and idiom — two of the three societies are Bengali and religious, one is Marathi and political, and the only Marathi name in List-II is Gokhale's. Do not be unsettled by the fourth unused name or by the three-digit codes; a match-list with a spare item is a standard BPSC device, and the spare item is always the name whose real associations lie outside List-I.

• Servants of India Society: founded at Pune on 12 June 1905 by Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915), who left the Deccan Education Society to start it; members took vows of poverty and lifelong service and worked by strictly constitutional means, and V. S. Srinivasa Sastri led the society after Gokhale's death
• Tattwabodhini Sabha: founded at Calcutta in 1839 by Debendranath Tagore (15 May 1817 - 19 January 1905); it published the Tattwabodhini Patrika from 1843 and was dissolved back into the Brahmo Samaj by Debendranath in 1859
• Atmiya Sabha: a philosophical discussion circle started by Ram Mohan Roy at Calcutta in 1815 and defunct by 1823; its line of descent runs to the Brahmo Sabha of 1828 and thence to the Brahmo Samaj
• Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-1884), the unused fourth name, joined the Brahmo Samaj in 1857 and set up the breakaway Bharatvarshiya Brahmo Samaj in 1866 while Debendranath Tagore kept the older body; he also founded the Indian Reform Association in 1870 and the Church of the New Dispensation, and lost his following in 1878 over his daughter's underage marriage
• The Brahmo Samaj rejected idolatry and the need for a priestly class, and — unlike the Arya Samaj — rejected the infallibility of the Vedas; that last contrast is the one most often tested
• Chronology to hold as a block: Atmiya Sabha 1815, Brahmo Sabha 1828, Tattwabodhini Sabha 1839, Brahmo split 1866, Sadharan Brahmo Samaj 1878, Servants of India Society 1905
• Debendranath Tagore died on 19 January 1905 and the Servants of India Society was founded on 12 June 1905 — five months apart, which by itself rules out options (c) and (d)

• Assuming a match-list is misprinted because List-II has one more entry than List-I. A spare name is a standard device, and the codes carry only as many digits as List-I has items
• Blurring Debendranath Tagore and Keshab Chandra Sen into one 'Brahmo leader'. They led opposite sides of the 1866 split, and Sen was an infant when the Tattwabodhini Sabha was founded
• Attributing the Brahmo Samaj's beliefs to the Arya Samaj or the reverse. The Brahmo Samaj rejected the infallibility of the Vedas; the Arya Samaj was built on it

BPSC's favourite form in this area is exactly this one — a short match-list of societies against founders, often with one spare name in List-II, testing flat recall and nothing else, and the Commission also runs the inverse form, a 'which pair is NOT correctly matched' item on the same cast of reformers. UPSC has largely abandoned the bare founder pairing. It asks instead what a body actually believed (2012, on whether the Brahmo Samaj held the Vedas infallible), which of several similarly named bodies a given reformer really established (2016, on Keshab Chandra Sen and the Calcutta Unitarian Committee), or who its distinguished members were (1997, on the Servants of India Society), so the same names have to be carried with their doctrines and their people attached, not only with their dates.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Servants of India Society was founded in 1905 at which city?

  • (a)Bombay
  • (b)Pune
  • (c)Calcutta
  • (d)Madras

  Answer(b) Pune — founded on 12 June 1905 by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who left the Deccan Education Society to start it; its members took vows of poverty and lifelong service to the country.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Atmiya Sabha, started by Ram Mohan Roy in 1815, was the forerunner of which of the following?

  • (a)Arya Samaj
  • (b)Brahmo Sabha
  • (c)Prarthana Samaj
  • (d)Satyashodhak Samaj

  Answer(b) Brahmo Sabha — Ram Mohan Roy founded it in 1828 and it became the Brahmo Samaj. The Arya Samaj (1875) was Dayananda Saraswati's, the Prarthana Samaj (1867) was Bombay's, and the Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) was Jyotirao Phule's.