NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 127 of 150

Correct — C, Vishnushastri Pandit. Vishnushastri Pandit (1827-1876) was a Marathi writer and reformer from Satara who made widow remarriage his life's work, and he is the only one of the four who founded an organisation dedicated to it. He set up the Vidhava Vivaha Mandali, the widow remarriage association, in Bombay in the mid-1860s, and he backed the argument with his own conduct by marrying a widow himself. In 1870 he argued the case in a public debate at Poona before the Shankaracharya. Contemporaries called him the Vidyasagar of Maharashtra, after the Bengali reformer whose campaign had produced the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856.

• (a)Bal Gangadhar Tilak — Tilak was born in 1856 and was a schoolboy at the date in the stem. He belongs to the next generation and to nationalist politics — the Deccan Education Society, Kesari and Maratha, the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals and the Home Rule League — not to the widow remarriage movement, on which his instincts ran the other way.
• (b)Jyotirao Phule — Phule was a genuine Maharashtra reformer who did work for widows — he and Savitribai Phule opened a girls' school at Pune in 1848 and a home for widows in 1863 — but the body he founded was the Satyashodhak Samaj, in 1873, and its purpose was the wider anti-caste cause. He did not start the widow remarriage society this stem is describing.
• (d)Pandita Ramabai — Pandita Ramabai was born in 1858 and is remembered for the Sharada Sadan, the home and school for widows she opened at Bombay in 1889 and later moved to Pune, and for the Arya Mahila Samaj. Her work is real but it comes two decades after the date in the stem.

Nineteenth-century social reform in western India worked through voluntary associations rather than through the state, and each association can be tied to a founder and a cause. Vishnushastri Pandit's widow remarriage association is the Maharashtra counterpart of the Bengal campaign that Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar had carried to the statute book in 1856. The legal victory was national, but making remarriage socially possible needed local societies that would find grooms, meet costs and absorb the ostracism that followed a wedding.

Dates in this topic vary between sources and it is worth knowing that before you memorise one. The paper prints 1866; Pandit's association is elsewhere dated to December 1865 in Bombay, and some standard textbooks put the movement he led in the 1850s. Nothing in the item turns on the year, because only one of the four names founded a widow remarriage body at all, and that is the safe way to answer it. The chronology is also the fastest filter — Tilak was ten years old and Ramabai eight when this society was founded, so both can be struck out before the reformers' work is even considered.

• Vishnushastri Pandit (1827-1876) founded the Vidhava Vivaha Mandali, the widow remarriage association, in Bombay in the mid-1860s.
• He married a widow himself and argued the case publicly at Poona in 1870 before the Shankaracharya.
• He was called the Vidyasagar of Maharashtra, after the Bengali reformer behind the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856.
• Jyotirao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873, an anti-caste body, not a widow remarriage society.
• Pandita Ramabai opened the Sharada Sadan for widows in 1889, more than twenty years after the date in this stem.

• Reaching for the famous name — Phule and Tilak are better known, and neither founded this society.
• Assuming every Maharashtra reform body belongs to Phule; the Satyashodhak Samaj is a different organisation with a different purpose.
• Fixing on the printed year when sources put the founding at 1865 or 1866 — answer from who, not when.

NDA sets reformer-and-organisation as a straight who-founded-what, or as a matching list of four reformers against four bodies.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Satyashodhak Samaj was founded in 1873 by

  • (a)Vishnushastri Pandit
  • (b)Jyotirao Phule
  • (c)M. G. Ranade
  • (d)Gopal Krishna Gokhale

  Answer(b) Jyotirao Phule — the 'Truth-Seekers' Society', founded at Pune for the rights of the lower castes and of women.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Sharada Sadan, a home and school for widows, was started by

  • (a)Savitribai Phule
  • (b)Pandita Ramabai
  • (c)Anandibai Joshi
  • (d)Ramabai Ranade

  Answer(b) Pandita Ramabai — opened at Bombay in 1889 and later moved to Pune.