MPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 1 of 100

Correct — option (2), Tukaram Tatya Padval. Padval (1838–1898), born into a Bhandari merchant family of Bombay, wrote Jatibhed Viveksar ('Essence of the Discernment of Caste Distinctions') and first published it in 1861 under the pseudonym 'Ek Hindu' — 'One Hindu' — with Jyotiba Phule credited as the book's publisher. A second, considerably enlarged edition followed in 1865, growing from 59 pages to 170 and sharpening its critique of Brahmanical textual authority by turning scripture itself against the caste hierarchy it was used to justify. It stands among the earliest sustained lower-caste critiques of caste to appear in Marathi print, and it belongs to the same reforming current that ran from Dadoba Pandurang's Paramahansa Sabha of the 1840s through to Phule's own Satyashodhak Samaj, founded in 1873. Padval himself moved through that current: associated with the Paramahansa Sabha in his early years, drawn later into Phule's circle, and in his later life a founder of the Tatwavivechaka press and a member of the Theosophical Society, where he worked alongside Olcott and Blavatsky and published the verses of the seventeenth-century poet-saint Tukaram. The question is really testing whether a candidate can separate the author of this specific 1861 tract from the far more famous name who published it — which is exactly the confusion the other three options are built to invite.

• (1)Mahatma Jyotiba Phule — The most natural wrong answer, because Phule's name is genuinely attached to this book — he is recorded as its publisher in 1861 — and he is by far the best-known anti-caste writer of the period. But publishing a work is not authoring it. Phule's own major writings are separate texts: Gulamgiri (1873), an indictment of Brahmanical dominance framed as slavery, and Shetkaryacha Asud (1883), his tract on the condition of the peasant cultivator. Jatibhed Viveksar is Padval's own composition; Phule's role in it was to see it into print.
• (3)Vitthal Ramji Shinde — Shinde belongs to a later generation of the same reform tradition — he founded the Depressed Classes Mission in 1906 to work against untouchability — but he was born in 1873, twelve years after Jatibhed Viveksar was first published. He cannot be the author of a book that predates his own birth, and his own writing and institution-building took a different, twentieth-century form focused specifically on the Depressed Classes rather than a general tract on caste distinction.
• (4)Bhaurao Paigonda Patil — Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil is remembered for founding the Rayat Shikshan Sanstha in 1919, the mass rural-education movement that opened schooling to backward-caste and poor students across Maharashtra. His field was institution-building in education, roughly sixty years after Padval's book, and he has no authorship connection to Jatibhed Viveksar — the option works only by trading on his general fame as a Maharashtra social reformer.

Jatibhed Viveksar sits at the point where Maharashtra's caste-reform current turned from private, semi-secret defiance of ritual rules into a public, printed argument against the institution of caste itself. Dadoba Pandurang's Paramahansa Sabha of the 1840s had broken caste taboos quietly, at closed meetings; by 1861, Padval was willing to put a sustained written case against caste distinction into general Marathi circulation, backed by Phule's willingness to publish it. That combination of authorship and publication is precisely the detail this question isolates.

MPSC's Maharashtra-reform questions frequently turn on exactly this kind of pairing — an author and the more famous associate who helped a work reach print, or a mentor and the pupil who carried the ideas forward. The safe habit is to keep a short, deliberate list of who *wrote* each landmark tract as distinct from who *sponsored*, *published*, or was merely *influenced by* it, because the options in this style of question are drawn from exactly that confusion.

• Tukaram Tatya Padval (1838–1898), of a Bhandari merchant family in Bombay, wrote Jatibhed Viveksar and first published it in 1861 under the pseudonym 'Ek Hindu'.
• Jyotiba Phule was the book's publisher, not its author; the second, enlarged edition of 1865 ran to 170 pages against the first edition's 59.
• Padval passed through Dadoba Pandurang's Paramahansa Sabha and later Phule's circle before founding the Tatwavivechaka press and joining the Theosophical Society around 1880.
• Phule's own signature works are separate texts — Gulamgiri (1873) and Shetkaryacha Asud (1883) — and he founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873.
• Vitthal Ramji Shinde (born 1873) and Bhaurao Patil (Rayat Shikshan Sanstha, 1919) belong to later phases of the same reform tradition and have no authorship link to this 1861 book.

• Crediting Phule with a book because his name is historically attached to its publication, when the actual author is someone else
• Assuming any prominent Maharashtra social-reform name from this era is interchangeable with any other
• Ignoring the dates — Shinde and Patil belong to generations after this book was already in print

MPSC likes a bare fill-in-the-blank on who wrote a specific reform-era Maharashtra text, and it builds the wrong options from adjacent, easily confused reformers — a publisher instead of the author, or a reformer from a different decade entirely. The safeguard is a short table of author, year and organisation for each landmark tract, kept separate from a table of who else was associated with it.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Jyotiba Phule served as the publisher, in 1861, of an important Marathi anti-caste tract that he did not himself author. That book was:

  • (a)Gulamgiri
  • (b)Jatibhed Viveksar
  • (c)Shetkaryacha Asud
  • (d)Sarvajanik Satyadharma Pustak

  Answer(b) Jatibhed Viveksar — written by Tukaram Tatya Padval and published in 1861 with Phule's help; Gulamgiri and Shetkaryacha Asud are Phule's own compositions, and the Sarvajanik Satyadharma Pustak is the Satyashodhak Samaj's later scripture, compiled after Phule's death.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Vitthal Ramji Shinde is chiefly remembered for founding which organisation, in 1906, to work against untouchability?

  • (a)Satyashodhak Samaj
  • (b)Depressed Classes Mission
  • (c)Rayat Shikshan Sanstha
  • (d)Paramahansa Sabha

  Answer(b) Depressed Classes Mission — founded by Shinde in 1906. The Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) was Phule's organisation, the Rayat Shikshan Sanstha (1919) was Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil's, and the Paramahansa Sabha (1849) predates Shinde's birth.