Who among the following was the founder of the Arya Mahila Samaj in the early 1880s?

Correct — C, (c) Pandita Ramabai. Ramabai founded the Arya Mahila Samaj at Pune in 1882, in the year she was widowed and moved there. She was already a public figure by then and an unusual one: taught Sanskrit by her father when almost no woman was, she had been examined by the pandits of Calcutta and given the titles Pandita and Saraswati for her learning, and she used that standing to argue for the education of women from inside the tradition rather than from outside it. The Samaj was her instrument for it — a society of women, in a city that was the headquarters of Maharashtra’s reform movement, formed to promote the education of girls and to work against child marriage; branches followed elsewhere, including one in Bombay. Its most concrete result came almost at once, when Ramabai gave evidence to the Hunter Commission on education and pressed the case for training Indian women as teachers and as doctors. What she did afterwards is often what candidates remember instead — the years in England and America, the book The High-Caste Hindu Woman, the Sharada Sadan opened in 1889 as a home and school for child widows, and the Mukti Mission at Kedgaon — but the organisation named in this stem is the earliest of them, and the date given, the early 1880s, points squarely at it.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Swami Dayananda Saraswati — The word Arya in the name is doing the work here, and it is a coincidence of vocabulary rather than a connection. Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj at Bombay in 1875, wrote the Satyarth Prakash, and preached a return to the Vedas, rejection of idol worship and of caste by birth, and — genuinely — opposition to child marriage and support for widow remarriage and girls’ education. But the Arya Mahila Samaj of 1882 was not one of his foundations, and Dayananda died in 1883. The Arya Samaj’s own contribution to women’s education came later and through different institutions, notably the network of schools that grew after his death.
• (b)Swami Vivekananda — Vivekananda’s organisation is the Ramakrishna Mission, founded in 1897, and his fame rests on the Chicago Parliament of Religions of 1893 and on the monastic and service order established at Belur. He was a boy in his teens in the early 1880s, so the chronology alone excludes him. He is included in this list because he is the other name a candidate is likely to reach for when the option set is full of swamis and samajes, which is exactly the reflex the question is testing.
• (d)Ramabai Ranade — The two Ramabais are different women, and the option is placed here to catch a reader who registers only the first word. Ramabai Ranade, the wife of the judge and reformer Mahadev Govind Ranade, was closely involved with this movement — she established a branch of the Arya Mahila Samaj in Bombay and ran classes for women there — but she did not found the Samaj. Her own institutions came later: the Hindu Ladies’ Social and Literary Club in Bombay in the 1890s, and above all the Seva Sadan, which grew from 1908 into one of the largest training and welfare organisations for women in the country.

Nineteenth-century social reform divides usefully into work done for women and work done by them, and Pandita Ramabai stands at the point where the second begins. The reform societies of the earlier generation — the Brahmo Samaj, the Prarthana Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Widow Remarriage movement — were led by men who argued the case for female education, against sati, against child marriage and for widow remarriage, and they achieved a great deal. What they could not supply was a woman’s account of what those conditions were like, or institutions run by women for women. Pandita Ramabai supplied both: she wrote The High-Caste Hindu Woman for an American audience about the position of widows, she founded a women’s society in 1882 and residential institutions afterwards, and she gave official evidence in her own name. The line runs from her, through Ramabai Ranade’s Seva Sadan and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani’s Bharat Stree Mahamandal, to the national women’s organisations of the twentieth century.

Key facts

• Pandita Ramabai founded the Arya Mahila Samaj at Pune in 1882, the year she was widowed and moved to the city.
• She was given the titles Pandita and Saraswati by the pandits of Calcutta in recognition of her Sanskrit learning.
• She gave evidence before the Hunter Commission on education, urging the training of Indian women as teachers and as doctors.
• Her book The High-Caste Hindu Woman was written during her years abroad and published in 1887.
• She founded the Sharada Sadan in 1889 as a home and school for child widows, and later the Mukti Mission at Kedgaon.
• Ramabai Ranade, a different woman, was the wife of M. G. Ranade; she ran a branch of the Arya Mahila Samaj in Bombay and later built the Seva Sadan from 1908.
• Dayananda Saraswati founded the Arya Samaj at Bombay in 1875 and died in 1883; the similarity of name is coincidental.

Common traps

• Reading only the first word of a name. Arya Samaj and Arya Mahila Samaj are different bodies, and the two Ramabais are different people.
• Ignoring a decade given in the stem. The early 1880s is a strong constraint and eliminates half the option set at once.
• Assuming the better-known reformer must be the founder of the less-known society.
• Attributing every women’s institution in Maharashtra to the same person; Pune alone produced several, founded by different reformers at different dates.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Sharada Sadan, founded in 1889 as a home and school for child widows, was established by whom?

  • (a)Ramabai Ranade
  • (b)Pandita Ramabai
  • (c)Savitribai Phule
  • (d)Anandibai Joshi

  Answer(b) Pandita Ramabai

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Seva Sadan, which by the 1920s was training more than a thousand women a year, is chiefly associated with which of the following?

  • (a)Pandita Ramabai
  • (b)Sarala Devi Chaudhurani
  • (c)Ramabai Ranade
  • (d)Begum Rokeya

  Answer(c) Ramabai Ranade