MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 11 of 100

Correct — option (4), Shetkaryacha Asood. The question gives no criterion, so the criterion has to be found in the titles themselves, and it is authorship. Three of the four are works of Mukundrao Patil, the Satyashodhak journalist who founded the weekly Din Mitra in 1910 from the village of Tarawadi and edited it without a break until his death in 1967, making him the longest-serving voice of the movement in print. Kulkarni Leelamrut is his best-known book, a satire on the exploitation practised by the hereditary village officers — the kulkarni was the village accountant, an office held by right of birth — and it drew a prosecution over its publication in which Dr Ambedkar conveyed his support to Patil and offered to appear for him. Shetaji Pratap belongs beside it as another of the works through which Patil reached both untouchable and caste-Hindu readers. Vithobachi Shikwan is his booklet setting out the teaching of the Varkari tradition in plain language that an unlettered listener could follow, which is characteristic of his method: he wrote for villagers, not for the literary societies of Poona and Bombay. Shetkaryacha Asud, the Cultivator's Whipcord, is by Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, and that is what makes it the odd title in the set. It is Phule's indictment of the condition of the peasant under the combined weight of the moneylender, the government revenue system and the priesthood, written a generation earlier — the standard dated list of Phule's works places it in July 1881, in the stretch of his career that also produced Gulamgiri in 1873 and Ishara in October 1885. Phule died in 1890, twenty years before Patil founded Din Mitra, so the two men belong to consecutive generations of the same tradition rather than to the same working life: Phule created the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873 and Patil is one of the men who carried its argument into the twentieth-century countryside. The examiner has chosen the four titles so that all of them look alike thematically — village exploitation, peasant grievance, popular religion — and only the name on the title page separates them.

• (1)Vithobachi Shikwan — This is a booklet by Mukundrao Patil explaining the philosophy of the Varkari sect in language a village audience could follow, so it belongs with the other two Patil titles rather than standing apart from them. It is the choice most likely to be picked by a candidate who looks for the odd title by subject instead of by author, because on the face of it a work about Vithoba and the Varkari devotional tradition seems to sit at a distance from three titles about peasants and village officers. That reasoning is the trap. Patil's engagement with the Varkari tradition was of a piece with the rest of his work, since the Satyashodhak argument turned in part on wresting popular devotion away from priestly control.
• (2)Kulkarni Leelamrut — Kulkarni Leelamrut is Mukundrao Patil's most famous work and therefore firmly inside the group of three rather than outside it. It satirises the injustice and extortion practised by the hereditary village officers, with the patil as the wronged figure and the kulkarni as the target, and it reached readers well beyond its intended audience — it is recorded as having inspired untouchables as well as caste Hindus, and the case brought over its publication is remembered because Dr Ambedkar offered to defend Patil in it. A candidate might pick it here on the ground that it is the only title naming a specific office rather than a general class of person, but grammatical shape is not the criterion the question is using.
• (3)Shetaji Pratap — Shetaji Pratap is likewise a work of Mukundrao Patil, named alongside Kulkarni Leelamrut among the writings through which he reached a mixed readership. It is the least familiar of the four titles to most candidates, and unfamiliarity is exactly why it attracts a guess: on a question that asks for the odd one out, the title you have never heard of feels like the outsider. That instinct is worth naming and resisting, because an examiner setting an odd-one-out item has no reason to make the answer the obscure entry, and here the criterion is authorship, on which this title sits squarely with two of its neighbours.

The Satyashodhak Samaj that Jyotirao Phule founded in 1873 did not end with him. Its second life, from about 1910 to the 1930s, was carried by village-level journalists and performers who took the argument out of Poona and into the Marathi countryside, and Mukundrao Patil is the central figure of that phase. Din Mitra, which he founded in 1910 and ran for fifty-seven years, was published from a village rather than a city and written for a readership of cultivators; it belongs to a family of Marathi anti-caste papers running from Krishnarao Bhalekar's Din Bandhu in the 1870s through to the papers of the non-Brahmin movement after 1920. What united Phule's generation with Patil's was the identification of three linked oppressors of the peasant — the moneylender, the revenue administration and the hereditary priestly and clerical castes of the village — and the conviction that the remedy was education and the removal of ritual authority. Phule attacked them in the Shetkaryacha Asud, Patil in the Kulkarni Leelamrut, and the continuity between those two books is the substance of this question.

The odd-one-out form appears in MPSC papers without any stated criterion, and part of the test is working out what the criterion must be. Three possibilities are worth checking in order: shared author, shared period, and shared genre or subject. Here the subject is deliberately common to all four titles, which rules out the third and points to the first. The commission uses this form heavily on Marathi literature because it can compress four attributions into one question, and because a candidate who has revised authorship as a two-column table answers it instantly while a candidate who recognises titles only by sound cannot. The wider habit the format rewards is refusing to be moved by unfamiliarity: a title you do not recognise is not evidence of anything, and picking it because it is strange is guessing dressed up as reasoning. Work out the criterion, apply it to the three titles you do know, and let the fourth follow.

• Mukundrao Patil founded the Marathi weekly Din Mitra in 1910 from the village of Tarawadi and edited it continuously until his death in 1967; he was among the most important Satyashodhak journalists of the twentieth century.
• Kulkarni Leelamrut, Patil's best-known work, satirises the exploitation practised by hereditary village officers; Dr Ambedkar conveyed his support to Patil and offered to defend him in the case arising from its publication.
• Shetaji Pratap and Vithobachi Shikwan are also works of Mukundrao Patil, the latter a booklet explaining Varkari philosophy in language accessible to ordinary villagers.
• Shetkaryacha Asud, the Cultivator's Whipcord, is Jyotirao Phule's tract on the condition of the peasant; the standard dated list of his works places it in July 1881.
• Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873 and died in 1890, twenty years before Patil started Din Mitra, so the two men belong to successive generations of the same movement.

• Looking for the odd title by subject when all four titles have been chosen to share a subject; the criterion here is authorship and nothing else
• Picking the least familiar title on the assumption that obscurity marks the outsider, which is guessing rather than reasoning
• Confusing Shetkaryacha Asud, Phule's tract of the early 1880s, with the works of the later Satyashodhak journalists who continued his argument
• Assuming that a writer who addressed devotional religion cannot be the same writer who attacked the village officers; Patil did both, and for the same reason

MPSC asks about Marathi social-reform literature constantly and varies only the wrapper: an odd-one-out as here, a four-row author-and-title match, a single who-wrote-this question, or a statement list in which one statement carries a false attribution. The pool of authors is small — Phule, Lokhitwadi, Agarkar, Ranade, Karve, Tarabai Shinde, Vitthal Ramji Shinde, Mukundrao Patil, Krishnarao Bhalekar, Ambedkar — and the pool of titles is not much larger, so the whole area can be secured with a table of author against title and approximate date. Where the commission raises the difficulty, it does so by including one lesser-known title from a well-known author's list, as it does here with two of Patil's minor works, so revise each author's full list rather than only their famous book.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Marathi satire Kulkarni Leelamrut, which attacked the exploitation practised by hereditary village officers and led to a prosecution in which Dr Ambedkar offered to appear for the author, was written by whom ?

  • (a)Krishnarao Bhalekar
  • (b)Mukundrao Patil
  • (c)Jyotirao Phule
  • (d)Tarabai Shinde

  Answer(b) Mukundrao Patil — the Satyashodhak journalist who founded the weekly Din Mitra in 1910 and edited it until 1967. Kulkarni Leelamrut is his best-known book and reached untouchable and caste-Hindu readers alike; Bhalekar's paper was Din Bandhu, Phule's peasant tract was the Shetkaryacha Asud, and Tarabai Shinde wrote Stri Purush Tulana.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Marathi tract Shetkaryacha Asud, an indictment of the peasant's condition under the moneylender, the revenue system and the priesthood, was written by which reformer ?

  • (a)Mukundrao Patil
  • (b)Gopal Hari Deshmukh
  • (c)Jyotirao Phule
  • (d)Vitthal Ramji Shinde

  Answer(c) Jyotirao Phule — the Cultivator's Whipcord belongs to the early 1880s, with the standard dated list of his works placing it in July 1881, between Gulamgiri of 1873 and Ishara of October 1885. Mukundrao Patil, the usual distractor, wrote on the same subject but a generation later and from a village newspaper rather than from the Satyashodhak Samaj's founding circle.