MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 2 of 100

Correct — option (3), Nana Jagannath Shankarseth. Jagannath Shankarsheth (1803–1865), universally called 'Nana', was the richest and most publicly active Indian citizen of early nineteenth-century Bombay, and education was the cause he funded most consistently. When Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827, retired, the city's residents raised a subscription in his honour — the Elphinstone Fund — whose purpose was not a statue but an endowment: professorships to teach English and the European sciences to Indians. Shankarseth subscribed ₹25,000 from his own pocket, an enormous personal sum at a time when the whole endowment was being assembled from merchant houses, and that donation is the single fact this question turns on. The money did what it was meant to do; the endowment fed the Elphinstone Institution, from which Elphinstone College descends, and Shankarseth sat at the centre of the machinery that spent it as a leading member of the Bombay Native Education Society and later of the Board of Education. His wider record makes the attribution consistent rather than accidental: he opened a school for girls in his own house at a time when educating girls was socially costly, he was one of only two Indians on the first board of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway that ran the Bombay–Thane line of 1853, he was the founder-president of the Bombay Association in 1852, and he was the first Indian nominated to the Legislative Council of Bombay. The other three names in the option list are genuine figures of Maharashtra's educational history, but they are scholars, teachers and reformers rather than the merchant-philanthropists whose capital paid for that generation's institutions — and two of them were not yet born when the fund was raised.

• (1)Balshastri Jambhekar — Balshastri Jambhekar (1812–1846) is genuinely tied to the Elphinstone institutions — he was among the earliest Indians to teach at the Elphinstone Institution — which is what makes him a well-designed distractor. But the connection runs the wrong way: he was on the payroll as a scholar-teacher, not among the donors. He is remembered as the father of Marathi journalism for starting Darpan in 1832 and the magazine Digdarshan in 1840, work that made him influential and poor rather than wealthy. He was also about fifteen years old when Elphinstone left Bombay in 1827, so a ₹25,000 personal gift was doubly out of the question.
• (2)Ramkrishna Bhandarkar — R. G. Bhandarkar (1837–1925) is eliminated by date alone: he was born a decade after the Elphinstone Fund was raised. He belongs to the next generation entirely — an orientalist and Sanskrit scholar, a member of the Prarthana Samaj, a founder with Ranade and Waman Abaji Modak of the Maharashtra Girls Education Society and its Huzurpaga school in 1885, and the man for whom the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute at Pune was named in 1917. His contribution to Indian education was scholarship and institution-building of a later era, not the merchant philanthropy of the 1820s.
• (4)Waman Aabaji Modak — Waman Abaji Modak also belongs to the generation after this fund. He was one of the founders of the Prarthana Samaj in 1867 alongside Atmaram Pandurang, his public addresses at Pune in 1870 helped spread the Samaj beyond Bombay, and in 1885 he joined Ranade and R. G. Bhandarkar in founding the Maharashtra Girls Education Society and Huzurpaga, the oldest girls' high school in Maharashtra. That is a substantial record in women's education, which is exactly why the name looks plausible here — but it is separated from the 1827 Elphinstone subscription by some four decades, and Modak was a teacher and reformer rather than a donor of large sums.

Western education in early colonial Bombay was not built by government money. The pattern was a public subscription raised by the city's merchant elite — Hindu, Parsi and Muslim alike — which the Bombay Native Education Society then administered, with the colonial administration supplying recognition, curriculum and a few European teachers. The Elphinstone Fund of 1827 is the model case: a testimonial to a departing governor was converted, at the subscribers' own wish, into an endowment for professorships teaching English and European science to Indians, and out of that endowment grew the Elphinstone Institution and eventually Elphinstone College, the school that trained a large part of Bombay's first English-educated professional class. Understanding this explains why the names of merchants — Jagannath Shankarseth, Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, Cowasjee Jehangir — are attached to colleges, hospitals and art schools across the city: private Indian capital, not the exchequer, paid for them.

MPSC's Maharashtra-history questions frequently ask who paid for an institution rather than who taught in it, because the donor is a single checkable fact while the teaching staff is not. This item also rewards a simple chronological reflex that settles half the option list without any knowledge of the fund at all: the Elphinstone Fund dates to 1827, and two of the four men offered — Bhandarkar, born 1837, and Modak, active from the 1860s — belong to the second half of the century. Building a rough birth-and-activity timeline for the standard cast of Maharashtra reformers is therefore worth more marks than memorising their achievements in isolation, because a great many MPSC options can be struck out on dates before their substance is even considered. A further reason this particular donation is examined is that it is the starting point of a chain the syllabus follows for the rest of the century: the Elphinstone institutions trained the first generation of Bombay's English-educated professionals, and it was from that class that the Bombay Association of 1852 and eventually the Indian National Congress of 1885 drew their membership.

• Jagannath 'Nana' Shankarsheth (1803–1865) gave ₹25,000 personally to the Elphinstone Fund, the subscription raised in honour of Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827.
• The fund was used to endow professorships teaching English and European sciences to Indians; the Elphinstone Institution, and later Elphinstone College, grew from it under the Bombay Native Education Society.
• Shankarseth started a school for girls in his own residence and served on the Board of Education, making him a participant in spending the fund as well as a subscriber to it.
• He was the founder-president of the Bombay Association, established in 1852, and the first Indian to be nominated to the Legislative Council of Bombay.
• He was one of only two Indians on the first board of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, the company that ran India's first passenger train from Bombay to Thane in April 1853.

• Confusing the men who taught at the Elphinstone institutions with the men who paid for them — Jambhekar taught there, Shankarseth funded them
• Ignoring dates: Bhandarkar was born in 1837 and Modak was active from the 1860s, so neither could have subscribed to an 1827 fund
• Assuming a testimonial fund for a departing governor was spent on a memorial; this one was deliberately converted into an educational endowment

Questions of this kind give four real names from Maharashtra's educational and reform history and hang the item on one specific act — a donation, a founding, a first appointment. MPSC likes them because the fact is unambiguous and printed in every standard state-history text, and it likes the ₹ figure in the stem because it makes the question feel harder than it is. The efficient preparation is a table of institution, founder or donor, place and decade for nineteenth-century Bombay and Pune, kept alongside the birth and death years of the standard cast, so that chronology can eliminate options that substance alone would not.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Bombay Association, founded in 1852 as one of the earliest organisations for political representation in western India, had which of the following as its first president ?

  • (a)Dadabhai Naoroji
  • (b)Jagannath Shankarseth
  • (c)Balshastri Jambhekar
  • (d)Mahadev Govind Ranade

  Answer(b) Jagannath Shankarseth — he was the founder-president of the Bombay Association in 1852. Dadabhai Naoroji was associated with the Association and with later bodies such as the East India Association, but the founding presidency belongs to Shankarseth; Jambhekar had died in 1846 and Ranade belongs to the following generation.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Maharashtra Girls Education Society and its Huzurpaga school, the oldest girls' high school in Maharashtra, were founded in 1885 by which group of reformers ?

  • (a)Jyotirao Phule, Savitribai Phule and Sagunabai
  • (b)M. G. Ranade, R. G. Bhandarkar and Waman Abaji Modak
  • (c)Jagannath Shankarseth, Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy and Balshastri Jambhekar
  • (d)Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and V. K. Chiplunkar

  Answer(b) M. G. Ranade, R. G. Bhandarkar and Waman Abaji Modak — they founded the Maharashtra Girls Education Society and Huzurpaga in 1885. The Phules had opened the pioneering girls' school at Pune in 1848, a separate and earlier effort, while Agarkar, Tilak and Chiplunkar are associated with the New English School of 1880 and the Deccan Education Society of 1884.