MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 2 of 100

Correct — option (1), Rajashree Shahu Maharaj. Marathi accounts of the Bombay working-class movement record that after a successful public meeting at Parel, the mill district of the city, the People's Union — Loksangh in Marathi — was set up at the request of Shahu Chhatrapati, the ruler of Kolhapur, and that the man who did the organising and acted as its secretary was the Bombay labour leader known as Babasaheb Bole, working with Ramchandra Vitthal Vandekar, Parshuramrao Shinde, Damodar Sawlaram Yende, Bhaskar Jadhav and Harishchandra Talcherkar. Its declared object was the all-round economic, social, political and religious advance of the backward classes and the working classes together, which is the exact combination that marks Shahu's politics: he did not treat labour and caste as separate questions, and the body he prompted was aimed at both at once. That is what makes the attribution plausible as well as attested. Shahu was already, by 1918, the most active princely patron of the non-Brahmin and depressed-class movements in western India — the 1902 order reserving half the posts in the Kolhapur administration for the backward classes was his, compulsory and free primary education in his state dates from 1917, and within two years of this episode he would fund Dr Ambedkar's newspaper Mooknayak and preside over the Mangaon conference of 1920. A ruler of that description reaching into Bombay's mill quarters to urge the workers to organise fits his record precisely, and none of the other three names in the options can be placed at a Parel workers' meeting in 1918 at all. Note that the question is about who ADVISED the workers to form the body, not who ran it; the answer is therefore the patron whose urging lay behind the founding, not the secretary who carried it out.

• (2)Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar — Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar's association with Bombay's workers is real but it begins later and takes a different institutional form. In 1918 he had just returned from his studies abroad and was teaching political economy at Sydenham College in Bombay; his own public organisations are the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha of 1924, the newspapers Mooknayak from 1920 and Bahishkrit Bharat from 1927, and the Independent Labour Party of 1936, which is where his direct labour politics properly starts. The option is attractive because Ambedkar and Bombay's mill workers do belong together in the mind, and because Shahu Maharaj was his patron in exactly these years — but a patron and his protege are not interchangeable, and the date printed in the stem is the discriminator.
• (3)Narayan Meghaji Lokhande — Narayan Meghaji Lokhande cannot be the answer for the simplest of reasons: he died in 1897, twenty-one years before the year printed in the stem. He is nonetheless the most tempting wrong name in the set, because he is the pioneer of exactly this kind of work — a Satyashodhak associate of Jyotirao Phule, editor of Deenbandhu, founder of the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1884, and the man behind the campaign that won mill workers a weekly Sunday holiday in 1890. A candidate who reads 'Mumbai workers' and reaches for the first name in Indian labour history will pick him. The lesson is that in the labour chapter the dates do most of the discriminating: Lokhande is the 1880s and 1890s, the People's Union is 1918.
• (4)Bhai Madhavrao Bagal — Bhai Madhavrao Bagal belongs to a later chapter of Maharashtra's public life and to Kolhapur rather than to Bombay's mill districts. He is remembered for the people's movement in Kolhapur and for his part in the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation of the 1950s, not for organising Bombay's textile workers in the closing year of the First World War. The option is placed here because he shares Shahu Maharaj's city and something of his non-Brahmin politics, so a candidate who has correctly identified the Kolhapur connection but not the individual may settle on him. The stem, however, fixes both the year and the place, and neither points to Bagal.

Bombay's labour movement and Maharashtra's non-Brahmin movement grew up side by side, and MPSC tests whether a candidate can keep their chronology straight. The first phase belongs to Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, a Satyashodhak worker who edited Deenbandhu and founded the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1884, and whose agitation secured the weekly Sunday holiday for mill workers in 1890; he died in 1897. The second phase, around the First World War, is one of rising prices, war-time profits and a workforce large enough to act on its own — Bombay's first general textile strike began in January 1919 after the bonus demand of December 1918, and the All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920. The People's Union of 1918 sits at the opening of this second phase, and its significance is that it was framed to serve the backward classes and the working classes at the same time. Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur is the figure who most consistently joined those two causes: his 1902 reservation order, his patronage of hostels and schools for backward-class students, his support for Ambedkar's Mooknayak in 1920 and his presence at the Mangaon conference of the same year all point the same way. The People's Union is that politics extended from a princely state into the mill quarters of a colonial city.

MPSC's Maharashtra history section asks a great many single-sentence questions of exactly this shape — a year, a place, an organisation in quotation marks, and four names. They are decided by chronology far more often than by any deep knowledge of the organisation itself, because two or three of the four names can usually be eliminated on dates alone. Here Lokhande is dead by 1918 and Bagal belongs to a much later movement, which reduces a four-way guess to a two-way choice between Shahu Maharaj and Ambedkar; and the year then separates those two, since Ambedkar's own organisations all post-date 1918. The habit worth building is to carry a short date-spine for this chapter — Bombay Mill-Hands Association 1884, Sunday holiday 1890, Lokhande dies 1897, People's Union 1918, Bombay general strike January 1919, AITUC 1920, Mooknayak 1920, Mangaon 1920, Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha 1924, Independent Labour Party 1936 — and to read the year in the stem before reading the names. The Commission also prints organisation names in transliteration, so a candidate should expect 'People's Union' and the Marathi 'Loksangh' to mean the same body.

• Marathi accounts of the Bombay working-class movement record that the People's Union (Loksangh) was founded after a successful meeting at Parel, at the request of Shahu Chhatrapati of Kolhapur, with Babasaheb Bole as its organiser and secretary.
• The People's Union was framed to work for the all-round economic, social, political and religious advance of the backward classes and the working classes together, joining the two causes that Shahu Maharaj had joined in Kolhapur.
• Narayan Meghaji Lokhande founded the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1884 and won mill workers the weekly Sunday holiday in 1890; he died in 1897 and cannot figure in any event of 1918.
• Shahu Maharaj reserved half the posts in the Kolhapur administration for the backward classes in 1902 and introduced free and compulsory primary education in his state in 1917.
• Dr Ambedkar's own platforms come after this episode — the newspaper Mooknayak in 1920, the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha in 1924 and the Independent Labour Party in 1936.

• Reaching for Lokhande whenever a question mentions Bombay's workers, without checking that he died in 1897 and cannot appear in any event after that year
• Treating Ambedkar and Shahu Maharaj as interchangeable because one was the other's patron; their organisations are separated by several years and by very different structures
• Confusing the person who advised or prompted the founding of a body with the person who organised or led it — this stem asks for the first
• Assuming a Kolhapur name must be the answer to a Kolhapur-flavoured question; Bagal's movements belong to the 1940s and 1950s, not to 1918

Questions on Maharashtra's labour and non-Brahmin movements come to MPSC as crisp one-line recall items: who founded a named body, in which year, in which city, and which newspaper carried its message. Because the field is crowded with names that all belong to the same broad current, the Commission relies on the candidate's date sense to do the sorting, and it will happily place a nineteenth-century pioneer among twentieth-century options. Shahu Maharaj in particular is asked about from several directions — as an administrator of Kolhapur, as the patron of Ambedkar, as a founder of hostels and as a promoter of workers' and backward-class organisations — so it repays keeping a list of the specific acts attached to specific years. Expect at least one item in each paper where the correct answer is settled purely by noticing that a named person was dead, or not yet active, in the year printed in the stem.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Bombay Mill-Hands Association, founded in 1884, and the campaign that won mill workers a weekly Sunday holiday in 1890, are associated with which reformer ?

  • (a)Narayan Meghaji Lokhande
  • (b)Rajarshi Shahu Maharaj
  • (c)Krishnarao Bhalekar
  • (d)S. A. Dange

  Answer(a) Narayan Meghaji Lokhande — a Satyashodhak associate of Jyotirao Phule and editor of Deenbandhu, he founded the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1884 and led the agitation that secured the weekly Sunday holiday in 1890. Shahu Maharaj's labour intervention comes a generation later, and S. A. Dange belongs to the communist trade unionism of the 1920s onward.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following measures of Rajarshi Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur was announced in the year 1902 ?

  • (a)Free and compulsory primary education in the state
  • (b)Reservation of half the posts in the state administration for backward classes
  • (c)Financial support to the newspaper Mooknayak
  • (d)Presiding over the Mangaon conference

  Answer(b) Reservation of half the posts in the state administration for backward classes — Shahu's order of 1902 is one of the earliest affirmative-action measures in India. Free and compulsory primary education in Kolhapur dates from 1917, and both his support for Mooknayak and the Mangaon conference belong to 1920, so all three of those fall outside the year printed in the stem.