MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 9 of 100

Correct — option (2), 'a d c b'. All four bodies are pre-Congress associations, and the order is settled by their founding years. Statement a, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, is the earliest: it was founded at Pune in 1870, with Ganesh Vasudev Joshi — 'Sarvajanik Kaka' — as its moving spirit and M. G. Ranade as its most influential member, and it set out to act as a bridge between the government and the people, sending petitions, collecting economic evidence and running famine relief. Statement d, the Indian Association, follows in 1876: Surendranath Banerjee and Anandamohan Bose founded it at Calcutta, and it was the first of these bodies to attempt genuinely all-India agitation, campaigning over the age limit for the civil service examination and organising conferences that prefigured the Congress. Statement c, the Madras Mahajan Sabha, comes in 1884, founded by M. Viraraghavachariar, G. Subramania Iyer and P. Ananda Charlu, and drawing together the local associations of the Madras Presidency. Statement b, the Bombay Presidency Association, is the last, founded in 1885 by Pherozeshah Mehta, K. T. Telang and Badruddin Tyabji — the three men Bombay called its triumvirate — as a body more broadly based than the older Bombay Association. So the sequence runs 1870, 1876, 1884, 1885, which is a, d, c, b, and only option (2) prints it. Two things are worth carrying away. The whole span is fifteen years, and the last three of these bodies cluster in the decade immediately before the Indian National Congress met in December 1885 — the Bombay Presidency Association being founded earlier in that very year. These associations supplied the Congress with its men, its methods and much of its early agenda.

• (1)b a d c — This option opens with the Bombay Presidency Association, which is in fact the last of the four, founded in 1885. The error is a natural one: Bombay is where the Indian National Congress first met in December 1885, so the city drifts to the front of any list about the origins of organised nationalism. But the Bombay Presidency Association was itself a late arrival, formed only months before the Congress and after the older Bombay Association had lost its energy. The option also places the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha second, when it is the earliest body on the list by six years. Fixing the earliest item first is the quickest way to eliminate an option of this kind.
• (3)c d b a — This option makes the Madras Mahajan Sabha the earliest and the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha the latest, which inverts the true order almost exactly. The Madras Mahajan Sabha was founded in 1884, by which time the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha had been at work for fourteen years, running relief operations and submitting memorials on revenue and famine. Anyone attracted by this option has probably learnt the four bodies as a set of names without years attached. The correction is to remember that the presidency associations of Madras and Bombay, despite their imposing titles, both belong to the mid-1880s, while the earlier organising happened at Pune and Calcutta.
• (4)d b a c — This option begins with the Indian Association, which is second rather than first, and then puts the Bombay Presidency Association immediately after it, six years before that body existed. The Indian Association of 1876 is a defensible guess for the earliest, since it is the best known of the four and the most nearly national in ambition, and Surendranath Banerjee's account of it has shaped how the period is remembered. But the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha precedes it by six years. In ordering questions the most famous item is rarely the earliest, and fame is the least reliable proxy for date that a candidate can use.

Organised political association in India begins a generation before the Indian National Congress, and the Congress of 1885 is better understood as the confluence of these earlier bodies than as a fresh start. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, founded in 1870, was designed as a representative body that could speak to the government on behalf of the people of the Deccan; it undertook famine inquiry and relief, argued about land revenue, and gave M. G. Ranade the platform from which he developed his economic writing. The Indian Association, founded at Calcutta in 1876 by Surendranath Banerjee and Anandamohan Bose, was consciously broader — cheaper subscriptions to widen membership, agitation over the civil service age limit, branches beyond Bengal, and national conferences in 1883 and 1885. The Madras Mahajan Sabha of 1884 pulled together the local associations of the south, and the Bombay Presidency Association of 1885 gave the western presidency a body led by Pherozeshah Mehta, K. T. Telang and Badruddin Tyabji. Each of them practised the same politics — petition, memorial, deputation, the press — and each of them sent its leading men into the Congress, which is why the early Congress looks so much like these associations meeting together once a year.

MPSC sets ordering questions on the pre-Congress associations regularly, and the reason is that the four or five bodies involved are easy to name and hard to date. The Commission compounds the difficulty in this paper by printing the options as bare strings of letters separated by spaces rather than by commas, so the sequences must be read off the page with care. The technique is the same as for any chronological item: write the year against each printed statement before looking at the options, then fix the first position, which usually removes half the choices, and confirm with the last. It is worth holding a short list for this topic — Landholders' Society 1838, British Indian Association 1851, Bombay Association 1852, Madras Native Association 1852, East India Association 1866 in London, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 1870, Indian Association 1876, Madras Mahajan Sabha 1884, Bombay Presidency Association 1885, Indian National Congress December 1885 — because MPSC draws its option sets from anywhere in that list, and mixes the Calcutta bodies of the 1850s with the presidency associations of the 1880s.

• The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha was founded in 1870, with Ganesh Vasudev Joshi as its moving spirit and M. G. Ranade as its most influential member; it worked on famine relief, land revenue and memorials to government.
• The Indian Association was founded at Calcutta in 1876 by Surendranath Banerjee and Anandamohan Bose, and agitated over the age limit for the civil service examination while building branches beyond Bengal.
• The Madras Mahajan Sabha was founded in 1884 by M. Viraraghavachariar, G. Subramania Iyer and P. Ananda Charlu, drawing together the local associations of the Madras Presidency.
• The Bombay Presidency Association was founded in 1885 by Pherozeshah Mehta, K. T. Telang and Badruddin Tyabji, earlier in the same year in which the Indian National Congress first met at Bombay in December.
• The chronological order of the four printed bodies is therefore 1870, 1876, 1884 and 1885 — Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Indian Association, Madras Mahajan Sabha, Bombay Presidency Association.

• Placing a Bombay body first because the Congress first met in Bombay; the Bombay Presidency Association was founded only in 1885, later than all three others
• Assuming the Indian Association is the earliest because it is the best remembered, when the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha precedes it by six years
• Confusing the Bombay Presidency Association of 1885 with the older Bombay Association of 1852, or the Madras Mahajan Sabha of 1884 with the Madras Native Association of 1852
• Misreading options that are printed as bare letter sequences separated only by spaces, as they are in this question

The pre-Congress associations are among MPSC's most frequently repeated modern-history topics, and they appear in three forms: an ordering question like this one, a founder-matching question, and a single-line question asking which body was founded in a given year or city. Because the names are formulaic — association, sabha, samaj, all qualified by a place — the Commission can build a plausible option set out of bodies separated by thirty years. The defence is a dated list learnt as a spine, with founder and city attached to each entry. Note also that this paper prints ordering options as bare sequences of statement labels without commas, and that the English statement list here is labelled with lower-case letters while the same list in the Marathi column carries Devanagari labels, so the two columns' options are not interchangeable.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Bombay Presidency Association, founded in 1885, was established under the leadership of which group of leaders ?

  • (a)Pherozeshah Mehta, K. T. Telang and Badruddin Tyabji
  • (b)M. G. Ranade, G. V. Joshi and G. K. Gokhale
  • (c)Surendranath Banerjee, Anandamohan Bose and W. C. Bonnerjee
  • (d)G. Subramania Iyer, M. Viraraghavachariar and P. Ananda Charlu

  Answer(a) Pherozeshah Mehta, K. T. Telang and Badruddin Tyabji — the three men known in Bombay as its triumvirate founded the Association early in 1885, months before the Indian National Congress first met in the same city in December. Option (4) names the founders of the Madras Mahajan Sabha of 1884, and option (2) names the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha's circle, which is why both are plausible.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following pre-Congress political associations was the earliest to be founded ?

  • (a)Indian Association
  • (b)Madras Mahajan Sabha
  • (c)Poona Sarvajanik Sabha
  • (d)Bombay Presidency Association

  Answer(c) Poona Sarvajanik Sabha — founded in 1870, it precedes the Indian Association of 1876, the Madras Mahajan Sabha of 1884 and the Bombay Presidency Association of 1885. Its work on famine relief and land revenue, and the presence of M. G. Ranade in it, made it the most substantial political body in western India before the Congress.