MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 10 of 100

Correct — option (2), Vishnushastri Pandit. He is the Maharashtrian reformer whose whole public identity rests on the two things the blank describes: Sanskrit learning, and a full-time commitment to social reform from the middle of the 1860s. His central work was the campaign for widow remarriage. He founded the Punarvivahottejak Mandal, the association for the encouragement of widow remarriage, in 1866, and in 1868 he published in Indu Prakash a Marathi rendering of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's argument for widow remarriage — the shastric case that a Sanskrit scholar was uniquely placed to carry into a Marathi-reading public. That combination is exactly what makes the description in the stem fit him and nobody else on the list. The other three names can be dismissed without any recall of the 1864 date at all, which is the useful part of this question. Two of them are eliminated by arithmetic. Balshastri Jambhekar died in 1846, eighteen years before the year in the stem, so he cannot have resigned anything in 1864. Kashinath Trimbak Telang was born in 1850, so in 1864 he was a boy of fourteen with no government service to resign. That leaves Mahadev Govind Ranade, who is eliminated on a fact rather than a date: Ranade spent his entire working life inside government service, rising through the judicial line to the bench of the Bombay High Court, and his reform work — the Prarthana Samaj, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the Indian National Social Conference — was carried on alongside that career, not in place of it. A man who never left government service cannot be the man who resigned from it. Three independent eliminations, none of which requires knowing the answer, converge on option (2).

• (1)M.G. Ranade — The obvious guess, because Ranade is the best-known social reformer in nineteenth-century Maharashtra, and the phrase 'staunch social reformer' pulls straight towards him. But the sentence turns on a resignation, and Ranade never resigned. He was a government servant throughout his adult life, moving up the judicial service to become a judge of the Bombay High Court, and he was a leading figure in the Prarthana Samaj — founded in Bombay in 1867 by Atmaram Pandurang — and in the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Indian National Social Conference, all while holding office. He was also not principally a Sanskritist. In a fill-in-the-blank item, the words that look like decoration — 'Sanskrit Scholar', 'resigned' — are usually the discriminators, and the famous name is usually the trap.
• (3)Balshastri Jambhekar — Eliminated by date, and decisively. Balshastri Jambhekar died in 1846, eighteen years before the year named in the stem, so no act of his can be placed in 1864. He belongs to an earlier generation entirely — he founded Darpan in 1832, the first Marathi newspaper, and Digdarshan in 1840, and is remembered as the father of Marathi journalism and as an early advocate of the readmission of converts to Hindu society. He was indeed a Sanskrit scholar, which is what makes the name plausible at a glance, but a chronological check retires him before any of that matters.
• (4)K.T. Telang — Also eliminated by date. Kashinath Trimbak Telang was born in 1850 and was therefore fourteen years old in 1864, with no government post to resign from. He fits half the description well — he was a genuine Sanskrit scholar, whose translation of the Bhagavad Gita appeared in the Sacred Books of the East series, and he became a judge of the Bombay High Court and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay — which is why the name is on the list. But his public life begins in the 1870s and 1880s, a generation after the year in the stem. Checking a date against a lifespan is the cheapest elimination available in this question type.

The widow-remarriage question is the hinge of nineteenth-century social reform in western India, and the reason is that it could not be settled by law alone. The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856, secured largely through Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's campaigning in Bengal, made such marriages legally valid across British India; what it could not do was make them socially possible. In Maharashtra the work of making them possible fell to a group of reformers who fought the question on shastric ground, arguing from the texts that remarriage was permitted, because that was the only argument that could move an orthodox community. Vishnushastri Pandit's Punarvivahottejak Mandal of 1866 belongs to that effort, as does the wider work of the Prarthana Samaj, founded in Bombay in 1867, which took up widow remarriage, women's education, the abolition of caste restrictions and the raising of the age of marriage. The reform current also had a second, more radical wing in Jyotirao Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj of 1873, which attacked Brahmanical authority itself rather than arguing within it, and a distinct conservative opposition which held that social change should wait upon political self-government.

This is a fill-in-the-blank item, and the technique it rewards is treating every clause in the sentence as a filter rather than as description. There are three filters here — a Sanskrit scholar, a resignation from government service, and the year 1864 — and each removes at least one name. The year removes two of the four outright, because Jambhekar was dead and Telang was a schoolboy, and a candidate who reflexively checks a date against known lifespans gets half the question free. The verb 'resigned' removes Ranade, whose whole biography is of reform carried on from inside the judicial service. What remains is not a guess but a deduction. This matters on a paper that deducts a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer: an item that looks like pure recall can often be converted into an elimination, and the marks come from noticing that it can. Notice too the shape of the distractor set — four Maharashtrian reformers of overlapping decades, three of them Sanskritists — which is MPSC's standard way of ensuring that recognition alone will not carry a candidate.

• Vishnushastri Pandit, a Sanskrit scholar and social reformer of Maharashtra, founded the Punarvivahottejak Mandal — the association for the encouragement of widow remarriage — in 1866, and in 1868 published in Indu Prakash a Marathi rendering of Vidyasagar's argument for widow remarriage.
• The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856 made widow remarriage legally valid throughout British India, largely through Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's campaigning; the Maharashtra reformers' work was to make it socially possible, which is why their arguments were shastric rather than merely legal.
• Mahadev Govind Ranade, born in 1842, spent his working life in government service and rose to the bench of the Bombay High Court, carrying on his reform work — the Prarthana Samaj, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha of 1870 and the Indian National Social Conference of 1887 — alongside his official career.
• Balshastri Jambhekar, who died in 1846, founded Darpan in 1832, the first Marathi newspaper, and Digdarshan in 1840, and is remembered as the father of Marathi journalism; he belongs to the generation before the widow-remarriage campaigns.
• Kashinath Trimbak Telang, born in 1850, was a Sanskrit scholar whose translation of the Bhagavad Gita appeared in the Sacred Books of the East, and later a judge of the Bombay High Court and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay — a figure of the 1870s and 1880s, not of 1864.

• Reaching for the most famous name in the list: Ranade is the best-known reformer here and the one the sentence is designed to attract, but he never resigned from government service
• Ignoring the date in the stem when lifespans can settle it — Jambhekar died in 1846 and Telang was born in 1850, so both are eliminated by arithmetic alone
• Treating 'Sanskrit Scholar' as decoration; three of the four names on this list were Sanskritists, so the phrase narrows nothing and the resignation is the real filter
• Confusing Vishnushastri Pandit with Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, a different figure of Marathi letters, whose similar name is a standing source of error in this area

MPSC uses the fill-in-the-blank form for reformers and their organisations, and it builds the distractor list from figures of the same region and overlapping decades, so recognition alone never suffices. The details it plants in the sentence — a year, an office resigned, a scholarly description — are the discriminators, and reading them as filters converts most of these items from recall into elimination. UPSC asks the same reform history through consequence and controversy: what an Act changed, why a particular case split the nationalist movement, what distinguished one samaj from another. The overlap is the roster of reformers; the divergence is that MPSC wants the year and the organisation while UPSC wants the argument. A single table of reformer, organisation, year and one line of position answers both, and for Maharashtra candidates it is worth building that table from Marathi as well as English material, because the state commission's pool is wider.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Punarvivahottejak Mandal, the association founded in Maharashtra in 1866 to encourage the remarriage of widows, was established by which of the following reformers ?

  • (a)Mahadev Govind Ranade
  • (b)Vishnushastri Pandit
  • (c)Gopal Hari Deshmukh
  • (d)Dhondo Keshav Karve

  Answer(b) Vishnushastri Pandit — a Sanskrit scholar who argued the case for widow remarriage on shastric ground and who also rendered Vidyasagar's argument into Marathi in Indu Prakash in 1868. Ranade supported the cause from within the Prarthana Samaj while remaining in government service, and Karve belongs to a later generation, founding the widows' home at Hingne and India's first women's university.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Darpan, generally regarded as the first newspaper published in the Marathi language, was started in 1832 by which of the following ?

  • (a)Gopal Ganesh Agarkar
  • (b)Balshastri Jambhekar
  • (c)Vishnushastri Chiplunkar
  • (d)Bal Gangadhar Tilak

  Answer(b) Balshastri Jambhekar — who founded Darpan in 1832 and Digdarshan in 1840, and is remembered as the father of Marathi journalism. Agarkar edited Kesari and later founded Sudharak, Chiplunkar founded Nibandhamala, and Tilak took over Kesari and Maratha, so all four belong to the Marathi press but to distinctly different decades.