MPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 3 of 100

Correct — option (1), Vyankatesh Rango Katti. The book's title itself carries the argument: 'vidhava vapan' is the tonsure — the forced shaving of a widow's head — that orthodox Hindu custom in 19th-century Maharashtra imposed on women after their husbands died, and 'anachar' means a corrupt or improper custom, one without real scriptural sanction. Katti's tract belongs to the wave of Marathi reform writing that took on the specific rituals of enforced widowhood — tonsure, the ban on ornaments and coloured clothing, exclusion from auspicious ceremonies — as a target distinct from, though related to, the wider campaign for widow remarriage. This is a narrow, precise attribution question: three plausible reformer names sit alongside the correct one, and only Katti is on record as the author of this particular tract on this particular practice.

• (2)Vishnushastri Pandit — Vishnushastri Pandit is a genuine, well-documented reformer on the adjoining issue — he founded the Widow Remarriage Association at Pune in 1866 and worked to give remarriage social and legal legitimacy — which is exactly why his name is a plausible-looking option here. But his recorded legacy is the remarriage campaign, not authorship of a tract specifically on the tonsure custom; the two causes travelled together in this period but were argued by different writers in different texts.
• (3)Balshastri Jambhekar — Jambhekar belongs to an earlier generation of Maharashtra's reform and print history — he founded the Darpan, the first Marathi-language newspaper, in 1832, and died young in 1846. He is remembered as a pioneer of Marathi journalism and education, not as the author of a tract on widow tonsure; his death predates the period in which this specific reform debate was most actively argued in print.
• (4)Gopal Ganesh Agarkar — Agarkar, editor of the Sudharak and a co-founder with Tilak of the Deccan Education Society, was a committed rationalist who argued for women's education and against orthodox social restriction in general. His name is a natural distractor precisely because his reforming credentials are so broad, but the specific authorship of Vidhava Vapan Anachar is not among his recorded works.

Enforced widow tonsure was one of the specific ritual disabilities — alongside the ban on remarriage, plain dress and exclusion from festive occasions — that Maharashtra's 19th-century reformers treated as separable targets, each requiring its own argument from custom, scripture and reason. A tract titled Vidhava Vapan Anachar is doing exactly that narrower work: not arguing the general case for remarriage, but arguing that this one specific ritual — the tonsure — was an 'anachar', a corrupt practice without proper sanction, that could and should be given up on its own.

MPSC's questions on this period frequently isolate one particular reform tract or one particular custom rather than testing the reform movement in general, which means the useful preparation is a list of specific texts matched to specific authors and specific practices, not a single undifferentiated block of '19th-century Maharashtra reformers'. Reliable, independently verifiable biographical detail on Vyankatesh Rango Katti beyond his authorship of this tract is thin in the sources available for this card, and rather than guess at further biography, this card keeps to what is attributable.

• Vidhava Vapan Anachar argues specifically against the enforced tonsure of Hindu widows, treating it as a corrupt custom ('anachar') rather than a scriptural requirement.
• Widow tonsure was one of several distinct ritual disabilities imposed on widows in 19th-century Maharashtra, alongside bans on remarriage, ornaments and participation in auspicious ceremonies.
• Vishnushastri Pandit founded the Widow Remarriage Association at Pune in 1866, the adjoining but distinct campaign for remarriage rather than tonsure.
• Balshastri Jambhekar founded the Darpan, the first Marathi newspaper, in 1832, and died in 1846, a generation before this specific tract.
• Gopal Ganesh Agarkar edited the Sudharak and co-founded the Deccan Education Society with Tilak, arguing broadly for rational social reform.

• Assuming any well-known Maharashtra reformer could be the author of any reform-era tract on women's issues
• Conflating the campaign against widow tonsure with the separate campaign for widow remarriage — related causes, but argued in different texts by different writers
• Overlooking generational gaps — Jambhekar's death in 1846 rules him out of debates that peaked later in the century

MPSC's fill-in-the-blank questions on reform literature test precise author-to-text matching rather than general awareness of the reform movement, and it draws its wrong options from genuinely accomplished reformers whose real legacy lies in an adjacent but different cause. The safeguard is to keep specific tracts pinned to specific authors rather than relying on a general sense of 'who reformed what' in this period.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Vishnushastri Pandit is chiefly remembered for founding which organisation, at Pune in 1866?

  • (a)Widow Remarriage Association
  • (b)Satyashodhak Samaj
  • (c)Deccan Education Society
  • (d)Prarthana Samaj

  Answer(a) Widow Remarriage Association — founded by Vishnushastri Pandit in 1866 to give social and practical support to widow remarriage. The Deccan Education Society (1884) was founded later by Agarkar and Tilak among others; the Satyashodhak Samaj (1873) was Phule's organisation.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Balshastri Jambhekar is remembered as a pioneer of Marathi journalism chiefly for founding which publication in 1832?

  • (a)Kesari
  • (b)Sudharak
  • (c)Darpan
  • (d)Dnyanodaya

  Answer(c) Darpan — the first Marathi-language newspaper, founded by Balshastri Jambhekar in 1832. Kesari and Sudharak came much later, in the 1880s, under Tilak and Agarkar respectively.