MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 8 of 100

Correct — option (1), the straight-through match (a)-(i), (b)-(ii), (c)-(iii), (d)-(iv). The two rows a candidate can be certain of are the last two, and either of them alone settles the question. Statement (c), Dinkarrao Javalkar, goes with item (iii), the weekly Tej: Javalkar, who lived from 1898 to 1932, was the fiery half of the Jedhe-Javalkar partnership that ran non-Brahmin politics in Poona in the 1920s, and he took the editorship of Tej in 1931, in the last months of a short life, writing in it on subjects such as the raising of a peasant army. He had managed Tarun Maratha at Kolhapur earlier and had taken over Kaivari in 1927, and his notoriety rested on Deshache Dushman of July 1925, the pamphlet attacking Tilak and Chiplunkar as enemies of the country, for which he and Keshavrao Jedhe were prosecuted for sedition and convicted, the conviction being overturned on appeal in October 1926 in a case argued for them by Dr Ambedkar. Statement (d), Shripatrao Shinde, goes with item (iv), Vijayi Maratha: he founded and edited that weekly in 1919 from Poona, and it became the principal organ of the non-Brahmin and peasant cause in western Maharashtra, alongside its contemporaries Brahmanetar at Wardha, Rashtraveer at Belgaum and Jagruti at Baroda. Now look at what those two pairings do to the option set. No other choice offers Tej to Javalkar, and no other choice offers Vijayi Maratha to Shripatrao Shinde; each of the remaining three moves one or both of those titles to a different man. So the two remaining rows, which give statement (a), Vitthal Ramji Shinde, the presidency of the Valve Taluka Shetkari Parishad at Borgaon, and statement (b), Khasesaheb Pawar, the presidency of the fourth session of the Mumbai Prantik Brahmanetar Party, are carried by the same choice and need not be independently recalled. Valve is the English column's spelling of Walwa — the Marathi column prints वाळवे — a taluka in what is now Sangli district; Vitthal Ramji Shinde's presence in a peasant conference is consistent with the direction of his later work, which extended from the campaign against untouchability into the agrarian question in the second half of the 1920s.

• (2)(a) - (iv), (b) - (iii), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i) — This choice reverses the whole column. It hands Vijayi Maratha to Vitthal Ramji Shinde, the weekly Tej to Khasesaheb Pawar, the presidency of the Brahmanetar Party session to Dinkarrao Javalkar and the Borgaon farmers' conference to Shripatrao Shinde. Both of the verifiable rows fail: Vijayi Maratha was founded and edited by Shripatrao Shinde in 1919, not by Vitthal Ramji Shinde, and Tej was Javalkar's paper, not Pawar's. The shared surname is the trap being worked here — Vitthal Ramji Shinde the reformer and Shripatrao Shinde the journalist are two different men of the same period and the same broad politics, and a candidate reading quickly will not register which Shinde a row refers to.
• (3)(a) - (ii), (b) - (iv), (c) - (i), (d) - (iii) — Here Vitthal Ramji Shinde is given the presidency of the Brahmanetar Party session, Khasesaheb Pawar is given Vijayi Maratha, Javalkar is given the Borgaon farmers' conference and Shripatrao Shinde is given the weekly Tej. Both journals are misattributed, which is enough to reject it, and the row that gives Javalkar a farmers' conference is doubly implausible: his working life was spent in Poona city politics, in pamphleteering and in newspaper editing, and he died in 1932 at thirty-four. The choice illustrates why a candidate should anchor on the newspapers rather than on the conferences — the papers have single, documented editors, whereas a conference presidency is a one-off event much harder to recall.
• (4)(a) - (iii), (b) - (i), (c) - (iv), (d) - (ii) — This choice gives the weekly Tej to Vitthal Ramji Shinde, the Borgaon farmers' conference to Khasesaheb Pawar, Vijayi Maratha to Dinkarrao Javalkar and the Brahmanetar Party session to Shripatrao Shinde. The third row is the seductive one, because Javalkar was genuinely a non-Brahmin journalist and Vijayi Maratha was genuinely a non-Brahmin weekly, so the pairing is thematically right and factually wrong. That is the characteristic hazard of this whole cluster: half a dozen men of the same movement, the same decade and the same district, each editing a different paper, so that any name can be attached to any title without the sentence sounding odd. Only the specific editor-to-title link protects a candidate, and here it is Shripatrao Shinde who founded Vijayi Maratha in 1919.

The non-Brahmin movement in the Bombay Presidency turned political after 1920, and its chief instrument was the vernacular weekly. Where the earlier Satyashodhak generation had used the jalsa, the travelling performance, the generation that came up under the shadow of Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur used print, and a cluster of Marathi weeklies appeared to carry the argument: Vijayi Maratha at Poona, Brahmanetar at Wardha, Rashtraveer at Belgaum, Jagruti at Baroda, Tarun Maratha at Kolhapur, Din Mitra from Tarawadi, and later Tej. Their common programme was representation for non-Brahmins in education, government service and the legislature, an attack on the hereditary privileges of the village Brahmin officers, and a claim on Shivaji as a non-Brahmin rather than a Brahmanical symbol. The Mumbai Prantik Brahmanetar Paksha, the Bombay provincial non-Brahmin party, was the political vehicle. The movement supplied much of the personnel and most of the vocabulary of later Maharashtra politics, and by the 1930s its leading figures were dividing between the Congress, which absorbed the Jedhe group, and Ambedkar's separate organisation of the depressed classes.

MPSC treats the Maharashtra non-Brahmin movement as core examinable material and asks about it mainly through people, papers and events. The recurring difficulty is that the movement produced many men of similar background operating in the same two decades, several sharing surnames, so that a candidate who has revised the movement as a narrative but not as a table cannot answer a matching question about it. Build the table with three columns: the person, the paper or organisation they are attached to, and the one event or publication that is uniquely theirs. On this question the reliable anchors are the two journals, because a paper has one founding editor and the attribution is documented; presidencies of particular sessions and conferences are harder and rarer. That points to a general method for matching items with mixed content: identify which of the four items is the best documented, use it to strike choices, and let the harder items ride on the choice that survives, rather than trying to recall all four independently.

• Shripatrao Shinde, 1881 to 1957, founded and edited the Marathi weekly Vijayi Maratha in 1919; it became the leading organ of the non-Brahmin and peasant cause in western Maharashtra.
• Dinkarrao Javalkar, 1898 to 3 May 1932, managed Tarun Maratha at Kolhapur, took over Kaivari in 1927 and edited the weekly Tej in 1931.
• Javalkar's pamphlet Deshache Dushman of July 1925 attacked Tilak and Chiplunkar; he, Keshavrao Jedhe and the printer were convicted of sedition, and the conviction was reversed on appeal in October 1926 in a case argued by Dr Ambedkar.
• Other Marathi non-Brahmin periodicals of the period were Brahmanetar at Wardha, Rashtraveer at Belgaum and Jagruti at Baroda; the political vehicle of the movement in the presidency was the Mumbai Prantik Brahmanetar Paksha.
• The English column of this question prints Valve where the Marathi column prints वाळवे, a taluka in what is now Sangli district; the spelling is reproduced here exactly as the paper printed it.

• Failing to distinguish Vitthal Ramji Shinde the reformer from Shripatrao Shinde the journalist; the shared surname is what two of the wrong choices are built on
• Matching by theme, so that any non-Brahmin journalist can be attached to any non-Brahmin weekly — the pairings are individually documented and cannot be reasoned out from the politics
• Trying to recall all four rows independently when only one securely known row is needed; no other choice gives Tej to Javalkar
• Assuming the two columns as printed side by side propose a pairing, when the adjacency is only the layout of the page

MPSC returns to Marathi periodicals and their editors year after year, in matching form and in single-fact form alike, and the pool is small enough to be learnt exhaustively: Darpan and Bal Shastri Jambhekar, Dnyanaprakash, Kesari and Maratha with Tilak, Sudharak with Agarkar, Din Bandhu with Krishnarao Bhalekar, Din Mitra with Mukundrao Patil, Mooknayak and Bahishkrit Bharat with Ambedkar, Vijayi Maratha with Shripatrao Shinde. The commission also mixes journals with organisations and with conference presidencies in the same four-row match, as it does here, which raises the difficulty because the second kind of fact is far less often written down. The defence is to be exhaustively secure on the journals, since those rows will always be present and will always be enough to eliminate.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Marathi weekly Vijayi Maratha, founded in 1919 and the leading organ of the non-Brahmin movement in western Maharashtra, was founded and edited by which of the following ?

  • (a)Vitthal Ramji Shinde
  • (b)Shripatrao Shinde
  • (c)Mukundrao Patil
  • (d)Dinkarrao Javalkar

  Answer(b) Shripatrao Shinde — he founded and edited Vijayi Maratha in 1919. Vitthal Ramji Shinde, who shares the surname, was the reformer of the Depressed Classes Mission and is the standard trap on this question; Mukundrao Patil ran Din Mitra from 1910; and Javalkar's papers were Tarun Maratha, Kaivari and Tej.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The pamphlet Deshache Dushman, published in July 1925 and attacking Tilak and Chiplunkar, led to a sedition prosecution of which pair of non-Brahmin leaders ?

  • (a)Keshavrao Jedhe and Dinkarrao Javalkar
  • (b)Bhaskarrao Jadhav and Shripatrao Shinde
  • (c)Mukundrao Patil and Krishnarao Bhalekar
  • (d)Vitthal Ramji Shinde and Khasesaheb Pawar

  Answer(a) Keshavrao Jedhe and Dinkarrao Javalkar — the Poona duo of the non-Brahmin movement. They were convicted along with the printer, and the conviction was overturned on appeal in October 1926 in a case argued for them by Dr Ambedkar, which is the detail examiners most often attach to the episode.