CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 8 of 120

Correct — D, Amritlal Vithaldas Thakkar. Known everywhere as Thakkar Bapa, he founded the Bhil Seva Mandal in 1922. He had come to social work by an unusual route: trained as a civil engineer, he worked on railway and municipal projects before joining Gokhale's Servants of India Society in 1914 and giving the rest of his life to relief and tribal welfare. The Bhil Seva Mandal took him into the Bhil country of the Panchmahals and the Dangs, where he ran schools, hostels and famine relief among a community the colonial administration had classified and policed rather than served. His work made him the person the national movement turned to on tribal questions — he later became general secretary of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, which Gandhi set up in 1932, and he is credited with putting the word Adivasi into general use for India's tribal peoples.

• (a)Dayaram Gidumal — A Sindhi judge and reformer, 1857 to 1927, who rose to be Judicial Commissioner in Sindh. His social work was with Behramji Malabari — the two co-founded the Seva Sadan — and he helped establish D. J. Sindh College in Karachi. His field was women's education and welfare, not tribal work.
• (b)Gurusaday Dutt — A Bengal-cadre civil servant, 1882 to 1941, remembered for the Bratachari movement he founded in 1932 and for rescuing Bengali folk arts and dances from oblivion — Raibeshe, Kathi, Dhamail, Jhumur and others — along with the folk-art collection that became the Gurusaday Museum. A decade later than the Mandal, and a different cause.
• (c)Dhondo Keshav Karve — Maharashtra's great champion of widows and of women's education, who married a widow himself, built the ashram and schools at Hingne and founded India's first women's university in 1916, later named after Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey. He was made a Bharat Ratna in 1958. Again a real reformer, but of a different cause.

The 1920s saw the national movement extend organised social work into areas the colonial state had neglected, and tribal India was one of them. The Bhils, spread across the borderlands of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, had risen repeatedly in the nineteenth century and were treated by the administration as a policing problem. The Bhil Seva Mandal turned that around, working through schools, hostels, cooperative effort and famine relief, and it became the model for later constructive work among tribal communities.

This is a founder-to-organisation item, and all four options are genuine reformers, so guessing by unfamiliarity does not work. The reliable method is to file each reformer under one cause: Thakkar Bapa with tribal welfare, Karve with widows and women's education, Gidumal with women's welfare in Sindh, Dutt with Bengali folk culture. Thakkar Bapa is the one worth knowing in depth because he recurs across papers — as the founder of the Bhil Seva Mandal, as general secretary of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, as a Servants of India Society man, and as the populariser of the word Adivasi.

• Amritlal Vithaldas Thakkar, 1869 to 1951, popularly Thakkar Bapa, founded the Bhil Seva Mandal in 1922.
• He joined the Servants of India Society, founded by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, in 1914.
• He later served as general secretary of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, established by Gandhi in 1932.
• He is credited with first using the term Adivasi for India's tribal peoples.
• Dhondo Keshav Karve founded India's first women's university in 1916 and received the Bharat Ratna in 1958.

• Mixing up reformers whose names appear together in question papers; sort them by cause rather than by region.
• Dating the Bhil Seva Mandal to the 1930s by confusing it with the Harijan Sevak Sangh of 1932.
• Assuming a tribal-welfare organisation must have been founded by a tribal leader; Thakkar Bapa was a Gujarati engineer.

As a founder-to-organisation item, or as a match-the-following pairing reformers with the bodies they set up.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Thakkar Bapa served as general secretary of which one of the following organisations founded by Mahatma Gandhi?

  • (a)Servants of India Society
  • (b)Harijan Sevak Sangh
  • (c)Seva Sadan
  • (d)Bharat Sevashram Sangha

  Answer(b) Harijan Sevak Sangh — set up by Gandhi in 1932 after the Poona Pact; the Servants of India Society was Gokhale's, and Thakkar Bapa joined it in 1914.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who among the following founded India's first university for women, in 1916?

  • (a)Behramji Malabari
  • (b)Dhondo Keshav Karve
  • (c)Pandita Ramabai
  • (d)Gurusaday Dutt

  Answer(b) Dhondo Keshav Karve — his women's university at Pune, later named after Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey, was the first of its kind in India.