CDS (I) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 115 of 120

Correct — A, Radhakanta Deb. Radhakanta Deb founded the Dharma Sabha in Calcutta in 1830, and its immediate purpose was to have the ban on sati repealed. Lord William Bentinck's regulation of 1829 had made widow-burning a criminal offence, and the Sabha's members read that as the government intruding into Hindu religious practice in breach of assurances of non-interference; they carried an appeal to the Privy Council, which rejected it in 1832. The body then broadened into a general defence of orthodox Hindu practice — it opposed the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act of 1856 and ran the newspaper Samachar Chandrika. Radhakanta Deb himself was no simple obscurantist, and later became the first President of the British Indian Association in 1851, but on questions of religious custom he stood on the conservative side of the argument.

• (b)Ram Mohan Roy — The exact opposite position. Ram Mohan Roy campaigned for the abolition of sati and founded the Brahmo Sabha; the Dharma Sabha was formed to resist the very measure he had pressed for.
• (c)Dwarkanath Tagore — Tagore was Ram Mohan Roy's associate and a supporter of the reforming side in Calcutta, not the founder of the body organised against it.
• (d)Keshab Chandra Sen — Sen belongs to a later generation of Brahmo leadership, well after 1830, and to the reforming rather than the orthodox camp.

The Bengal of the 1820s and 1830s held two organised positions rather than one. On one side stood the reformers around Ram Mohan Roy, who read the scriptures as authorising change and who worked with the colonial state to end sati. On the other stood the orthodox gentry of the Dharma Sabha, who accepted colonial rule but insisted that religious custom lay outside its competence. Both were modern in method — petitions, newspapers, appeals to law — even where they argued for opposite outcomes.

The four names are all Calcutta figures of roughly the same world, so this is a question about which side of the sati argument each stood on. Fix one anchor — Ram Mohan Roy for abolition, Radhakanta Deb against — and the rest follows, since Dwarkanath Tagore is on Roy's side and Keshab Chandra Sen belongs to the Brahmo movement of a later decade. Note the printed wording too: the body is normally called simply the Dharma Sabha, and the paper's 'Hindu Dharma Sabha' is a descriptive rendering rather than the organisation's usual name. It does not affect the answer.

• Radhakanta Deb founded the Dharma Sabha at Calcutta in 1830.
• It was formed to seek repeal of the ban on sati imposed by Lord William Bentinck's regulation of 1829.
• Its appeal to the Privy Council was rejected in 1832.
• The Sabha later opposed the Hindu Widow Remarriage Act of 1856 and published the newspaper Samachar Chandrika.
• Radhakanta Deb became the first President of the British Indian Association in 1851.

• Reading any nineteenth-century Calcutta association as reformist; the Dharma Sabha was formed to resist a reform.
• Confusing the Dharma Sabha with the Brahmo Sabha, founded two years earlier by Ram Mohan Roy.
• Placing Keshab Chandra Sen in the 1830s; his prominence comes decades later.

As a founder-to-organisation match, or as a statements item on the response to the abolition of sati.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Dharma Sabha, founded in 1830, was organised chiefly to

  • (a)promote English education in Bengal
  • (b)seek repeal of the ban on sati
  • (c)campaign for widow remarriage
  • (d)demand Indian entry into the civil services

  Answer(b) seek repeal of the ban on sati — it appealed to the Privy Council against Bentinck's 1829 regulation and lost in 1832.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The newspaper Samachar Chandrika was associated with which organisation?

  • (a)Brahmo Sabha
  • (b)Dharma Sabha
  • (c)Indian Association
  • (d)Young Bengal

  Answer(b) Dharma Sabha — the orthodox body founded by Radhakanta Deb published it.