Who set up the Bharat Stree Mahamandal which first met in Allahabad in 1910?

Correct — C, (c) Saraladevi Chaudhurani. Sarala Devi Chaudhurani founded the Bharat Stree Mahamandal in 1910, and its first meeting was held at Allahabad — the organisation is usually described as the first women’s organisation of national scope in India to be founded by an Indian woman. She came out of the Tagore household, being a daughter of Swarnakumari Devi, herself a writer and editor, and a niece of Rabindranath Tagore, and she had already made a name editing the journal Bharati and organising festivals in Bengal intended to put some spirit into a generation the nationalists thought too docile. The Mahamandal’s distinctive idea was practical rather than declamatory. Reform associations of the previous century had campaigned for schools, which reached only those girls whose families would let them out of the house; Sarala Devi’s body set out to take education to women who were in purdah and could not attend a school at all, by organising teaching within the home, and it opened branches in a string of cities across northern and eastern India. That is the reason it is treated as a landmark: it was run by women, aimed at women who were beyond the reach of the existing institutions, and organised on an all-India rather than a provincial footing. The stem hands you both discriminators — the year 1910 and the meeting at Allahabad — and only one of the four names fits them.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Annie Besant — Annie Besant belongs to the same period and to women’s organisation too, which is what makes her the most tempting wrong answer. But her body is a different one: the Women’s Indian Association, founded in 1917 at Adyar with Margaret Cousins and Dorothy Jinarajadasa, seven years after the Bharat Stree Mahamandal and in the south rather than at Allahabad. Besant’s other work is easy to list and none of it is this — president of the Theosophical Society from 1907, founder of the Central Hindu College at Benares, founder of the Home Rule League in 1916, editor of New India and Commonweal, and the first woman to preside over a session of the Indian National Congress, at Calcutta in 1917.
• (b)Meherbai Tata — Meherbai Tata was a genuine figure in the women’s movement, but of the following decade and a different kind of work. Lady Meherbai, the wife of Sir Dorabji Tata, campaigned for women’s education and against child marriage in the years when the legislation that became the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 was being fought over, and she was prominent in the women’s organisations of the 1920s. She had no hand in founding the Bharat Stree Mahamandal in 1910, and the name is put in this option to catch a candidate who recognises it as belonging somewhere in the women’s movement without having placed it in time.
• (d)Tarabai Shinde — Tarabai Shinde is remembered for a book, not an organisation. Her Stri Purush Tulana, published in 1882 from Berar, is one of the first sustained pieces of feminist argument written in an Indian language — a furious reply to a newspaper campaign against a widow accused of infanticide, in which she asks why every fault charged against women is found in greater measure among men. She founded no association, national or local, and she died before the period in which women’s organisations of the Mahamandal type multiplied.

The organised women’s movement in India passed through a change of authorship, and this question sits exactly on the hinge. Through the nineteenth century the initiative in women’s causes lay overwhelmingly with male reformers and with the reform societies they ran — Rammohun Roy on sati, Vidyasagar on widow remarriage, Karve on widows’ education, the Prarthana and Arya Samajes on girls’ schooling — and the women involved were largely their wives, daughters and pupils. From about 1910 the initiative passes to women who founded, funded and led their own organisations, and who set the agenda themselves. The Bharat Stree Mahamandal of 1910 is the first of the national bodies; the Women’s Indian Association follows in 1917; the National Council of Women in India in 1925; and the All India Women’s Conference, which became the largest and most durable of them, in 1927. Their concerns broadened as they went — from education at home, to the franchise, to marriage law, to the conditions of women’s work — and by the 1930s they were putting evidence before official committees and drafting legislation.

Key facts

• Sarala Devi Chaudhurani founded the Bharat Stree Mahamandal in 1910; its first meeting was held at Allahabad.
• It is generally described as the first women’s organisation of national scope in India founded by an Indian woman, and it opened branches in several cities.
• Its distinctive aim was to take education to women who observed purdah and therefore could not attend schools, by teaching them in their homes.
• Sarala Devi was a daughter of the writer Swarnakumari Devi and a niece of Rabindranath Tagore, and edited the journal Bharati.
• The Women’s Indian Association was founded in 1917 at Adyar by Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins and Dorothy Jinarajadasa.
• The All India Women’s Conference, the largest of the national women’s bodies, was founded in 1927.
• Tarabai Shinde’s Stri Purush Tulana (1882) is a pioneering feminist tract, and she is remembered as a writer rather than as an organiser.

Common traps

• Treating all four names as interchangeable because they all belong to the women’s movement. Each attaches to a different institution and decade.
• Confusing the Bharat Stree Mahamandal of 1910 with the Women’s Indian Association of 1917 or the All India Women’s Conference of 1927.
• Assuming a woman remembered for a famous book also founded an organisation.
• Ignoring the year and city printed in the stem, which between them settle the question.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Women’s Indian Association, founded in 1917 at Adyar, was set up by Annie Besant along with which two associates?

  • (a)Sarojini Naidu and Muthulakshmi Reddy
  • (b)Margaret Cousins and Dorothy Jinarajadasa
  • (c)Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Rameshwari Nehru
  • (d)Swarnakumari Devi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani

  Answer(b) Margaret Cousins and Dorothy Jinarajadasa

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following was the distinctive aim of the Bharat Stree Mahamandal founded in 1910?

  • (a)To secure the vote for women in provincial elections
  • (b)To promote widow remarriage through legislation
  • (c)To carry education to women in purdah by teaching them in their homes
  • (d)To organise women workers in the textile mills

  Answer(c) To carry education to women in purdah by teaching them in their homes