MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 1 of 100

Correct — option (4), 'i, ii and iii only'. The body named in the stem is the Ramabai Association, formed at Boston in 1887 to finance Pandita Ramabai's projected school for high-caste Hindu widows for a period of ten years. Because the money came from American Christian subscribers while the pupils were to be Hindu, the arrangement was built on an explicit promise of religious neutrality inside the school, and the device that was meant to guarantee that promise on the Indian side was a local advisory board of respected Hindu reformers. Ramabai constituted it with the Association's permission when the Sharada Sadan opened at Bombay in 1889, and the accounts of the institution record it as drawn from the moderate reforming circle of the Bombay Presidency — Justice M. G. Ranade, Dr R. G. Bhandarkar and Justice K. T. Telang among them, along with Gopal Hari Deshmukh 'Lokahitawadi', Dr Atmaram Pandurang and other names of the same stamp. That settles statements i, ii and iii together, and it also explains why those three and not others: Ranade and Bhandarkar were the leading men of the Prarthana Samaj, Telang was a High Court judge of unimpeachable standing among orthodox and reformist Hindus alike, and their joint presence was exactly the public guarantee the Association needed. Statement iv names Bapu Hari Shinde, who does not appear in the accounts of this board at all, so any option containing iv fails at once. Since options (1) and (2) each admit only two of the three genuine members and option (3) drags in iv, only option (4) contains all three verified names and nothing else. The board's later history confirms how seriously it was taken: when girls at the Sadan began attending Ramabai's private prayers and some spoke of embracing Christianity, Ranade and Bhandarkar resigned in protest to the Ramabai Association — a resignation that would have carried no weight had they not been on the board in the first place.

• (1)i and ii only — This option accepts Ranade and Bhandarkar but stops short of Telang, and there is no ground for the exclusion. K. T. Telang sat on the same advisory board and belonged to precisely the group Ramabai needed: a judge of the Bombay High Court, a Sanskritist, and a reformer trusted well beyond the reform party itself. A candidate lands here by recalling the Prarthana Samaj pair — Ranade and Bhandarkar are almost always named together — and treating the question as if it were about that Samaj rather than about the Sharada Sadan's committee. The stem asks who was included in the board, not who founded a religious society, and the answer has to take in every name the records place there.
• (2)ii and iii only — Dropping Ranade is the costliest possible mistake in this question. M. G. Ranade was the central figure of nineteenth-century Maharashtra's reform movement and one of Pandita Ramabai's earliest supporters; his wife Ramabai Ranade worked alongside her in the Arya Mahila Samaj, and it is Ranade's name that heads most listings of the Sharada Sadan's advisers. This option keeps Bhandarkar and Telang, so the candidate choosing it has the right circle of men in view but has arbitrarily removed its best-known member — usually because he has confused this board with some other committee, or because he assumes a question would not make the most famous name a correct one.
• (3)i and iv only —

Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858-1922) is asked about in MPSC papers as an institution-builder, and the institutions have to be kept in order. Born Ramabai Dongre and taught Sanskrit by her father, she was given the titles 'Pandita' and 'Saraswati' at Calcutta in 1878 for her learning. In Pune she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj in 1882 and, in the same year, gave evidence before the Hunter Commission asking for the education of women and for Indian women to be trained as doctors. Her books Stri Dharma Niti (1882) and The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887) belong to this period, the second written and published in America. Out of the American lecture tour came the Ramabai Association, formed at Boston in 1887 to fund a school for high-caste widows for ten years, and out of that money came the Sharada Sadan, opened at Bombay in 1889 and moved to Pune the following year. The advisory board is the hinge of the whole arrangement. The Association's subscribers were Christians, the school's pupils were to be Hindu, and the school was pledged to religious neutrality; a board of eminent Hindu reformers was the visible guarantee of that pledge. When the guarantee was felt to have failed, the board members resigned and the controversy that followed is inseparable from the history of the Sadan itself.

MPSC's Maharashtra social-reform section rewards the candidate who knows the machinery of a reform institution and not merely its founder's name. Questions of this shape ask who sat on a committee, who funded a body, where and in which year an institution opened, and which two organisations of similar name must not be confused. Pandita Ramabai is a favourite because her career threads through so many of them: the Arya Mahila Samaj, the Hunter Commission evidence, the Ramabai Association at Boston, the Sharada Sadan at Bombay and then Pune, and later Mukti Sadan at Kedgaon. The habit the format rewards is to attach each name to the exact body it belonged to, and then to answer combination options by elimination rather than by recognition — find the one statement you can positively rule out, strike every option containing it, and see what survives. Here statement iv does that work by itself: strike it and options (3) falls away, leaving a choice between how many of the remaining three the candidate can vouch for. The three that remain are precisely the three the sources name, which is why the fullest of the surviving options is the answer.

• The Ramabai Association was formed at Boston in 1887, during Pandita Ramabai's American tour, and undertook to finance her school for high-caste Hindu widows for a period of ten years.
• The Sharada Sadan, the school the Association paid for, opened at Bombay in 1889 and was shifted to Pune in 1890; its advisory board of Hindu reformers was the guarantee of the school's promised religious neutrality.
• Justice M. G. Ranade, Dr R. G. Bhandarkar and Justice K. T. Telang are all recorded on the Sharada Sadan's advisory board, together with Gopal Hari Deshmukh 'Lokahitawadi', Dr Atmaram Pandurang and others of the same reform circle.
• Ranade and Bhandarkar resigned from the advisory board and wrote to the Ramabai Association after pupils of the Sadan began attending Ramabai's private prayers and some expressed a wish to become Christians.
• Pandita Ramabai founded the Arya Mahila Samaj at Pune in 1882 and in the same year gave evidence before the Hunter Commission, asking for the education of women and for Indian women to be trained as doctors.

• Confusing the Ramabai Association, the American body that raised the money, with the Sharada Sadan, the school in India that the money paid for
• Answering with the Prarthana Samaj pair of Ranade and Bhandarkar alone and forgetting Telang, who sat on the same advisory board
• Mixing up Ramabai Ranade, wife of M. G. Ranade, with Pandita Ramabai Saraswati — they were contemporaries and co-workers, not the same person

MPSC returns to nineteenth-century Maharashtra's reformers year after year, and the questions cluster around four things: the year and place an institution was founded, the periodical it published, the person who presided over or advised it, and the controversy that broke it. Pandita Ramabai appears in all four modes. When the item is a combination question with a Roman-numeral statement list, as here, the productive method is elimination on the strength of a single name rather than confirmation of all four — a candidate who is certain of only one false statement can usually reach the answer, whereas a candidate who tries to verify each name in turn runs out of time. The Commission also likes to test whether a candidate can separate two bodies with overlapping names or overlapping personnel, so it is worth rehearsing the Association-versus-Sadan distinction and the Ramabai Ranade-versus-Pandita Ramabai distinction before the paper.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Ramabai Association, formed in 1887 to fund Pandita Ramabai's school for high-caste widows, was established in which city ?

  • (a)London
  • (b)Boston
  • (c)Bombay
  • (d)Calcutta

  Answer(b) Boston — the Association was formed there in 1887, during Pandita Ramabai's American tour, and undertook to finance her school for ten years. The school it paid for, the Sharada Sadan, opened at Bombay in 1889 and shifted to Pune in 1890. Calcutta is where she had earlier been given the titles 'Pandita' and 'Saraswati' in 1878, which is why it attracts the careless.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Pandita Ramabai founded the Arya Mahila Samaj in 1882 in which city, and gave evidence in the same year before which body ?

  • (a)Pune; the Hunter Commission
  • (b)Bombay; the Hunter Commission
  • (c)Pune; the Sadler Commission
  • (d)Bombay; the Sadler Commission

  Answer(a) Pune; the Hunter Commission — the Arya Mahila Samaj was founded at Pune in 1882, and in the same year Ramabai appeared before the Hunter Commission on education to press for the schooling of women and for the training of Indian women as doctors. The Sadler Commission belongs to 1917-19 and dealt with university education, so it cannot be the body she addressed.