Who among the following was popularly known as 'Lokahitwadi'?

Correct: A, Gopal Hari Deshmukh. Lokahitwadi was not a title conferred on him but a pen-name he chose: lokhit means the public good in Marathi, and he began signing his reform writings with it at the age of twenty-five, in the Marathi weekly Prabhakar. Within about two years he had written more than a hundred such pieces, collected and remembered as the Shatapatre, the hundred letters. Their subjects are the standard programme of nineteenth-century western Indian reform: the emancipation of women, opposition to child marriage, dowry and polygamy, and an attack on caste privilege, including the claim of Brahmin superiority made from within a Brahmin household. The pen-name stuck so completely that he is better known by it than by his given name.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)
  Mahadev Govind Ranade: The other great Maharashtrian reformer of the period, but with different associations: the Prarthana Samaj, the Widow Marriage Association, the Indian National Social Conference and the beginnings of Indian economic nationalism.
• (c)
  Gopal Krishna Gokhale: A generation later, and a political rather than a social-reform figure in the first instance. Gokhale founded the Servants of India Society in 1905, led the moderates in the Congress, and was Gandhi's acknowledged political guide.
• (d)
  Jyotiba Phule: Also a Maharashtrian reformer of the same century, but he wrote as himself and is remembered for the Satyashodhak Samaj, for Gulamgiri, and for schools for girls and for the lower castes: the anti-caste tradition rather than the reformist-Brahmin one.

Nineteenth-century Maharashtra produced two distinct reform currents. One worked from within upper-caste society and pressed for reform of custom: Gopal Hari Deshmukh, the Prarthana Samaj of Ranade and R.G. Bhandarkar, the Widow Remarriage Association, and the Deccan Education Society. The other attacked the caste order itself from outside it: Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj, and later Shahu Maharaj and Ambedkar. Deshmukh belongs to the first, but his Shatapatre are unusually sharp on caste for a writer of the 1840s, which is why he sits at the point where the two currents meet.

Key facts

• Gopal Hari Deshmukh wrote under the pen-name Lokahitwadi, from the Marathi lokhit, the public good.
• He began writing his reform articles at the age of twenty-five in the Marathi weekly Prabhakar, producing over a hundred within about two years.
• The collection is known in Marathi literature as Lokhitawadinchi Shatapatre, the hundred letters of Lokahitwadi.
• His subjects included women's emancipation and opposition to child marriage, dowry, polygamy and caste discrimination.
• He lived from 1823 to 1892 and was a contemporary of the early Prarthana Samaj generation in western India.

Common traps

• Assuming Lokahitwadi and Lokmanya are the same kind of name for the same person; Lokmanya is Tilak.
• Attaching the Shatapatre to Ranade because both were Marathi reformers of western India.
• Reading a Brahmin reformer's critique of caste as anti-caste politics in Phule's sense; the two traditions differ in who is speaking and to whom.

• practice, not a real PYQ

  The 'Shatapatre', a series of about a hundred reform articles written in the Marathi weekly Prabhakar, were the work of

  • (a)Bal Gangadhar Tilak
  • (b)Gopal Hari Deshmukh
  • (c)Gopal Ganesh Agarkar
  • (d)Vishnushastri Chiplunkar
  Answer(b) Gopal Hari Deshmukh: written under the pen-name Lokahitwadi, and collected as Lokhitawadinchi Shatapatre.
• practice, not a real PYQ

  The Satyashodhak Samaj, founded in 1873 to oppose caste privilege and priestly domination, was established by

  • (a)M.G. Ranade
  • (b)Jyotiba Phule
  • (c)Gopal Hari Deshmukh
  • (d)R.G. Bhandarkar
  Answer(b) Jyotiba Phule: the anti-caste current of Maharashtrian reform, distinct from the reformist tradition Deshmukh and Ranade belonged to.