Who is the author of the famous book ‘Gulamgiri’ ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Jyotiba Phule. Gulamgiri was written by Jyotirao Govindrao Phule and published in Marathi in 1873, with a preface in English. Its title means 'slavery', and the book is one of the earliest sustained critiques of the caste system in any Indian language — it has been called the seed text of anti-brahminical consciousness. The year is worth holding for a second reason: 1873 is also the year, on 24 September, that Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Society of Truth Seekers, to work for the rights of Shudras, Dalits and women, open to people of all castes and religions, and campaigning against idolatry, priestly mediation and caste itself. Phule (1827–1890) came from Satara district and had begun far earlier: with his wife Savitribai he opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848, and in the same year read Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, which he later said shaped his sense of social justice. His other writings run from Tritiya Ratna in 1855 and Brahmananche Kasab in 1869 to Shetkaryacha Aasud, the Cultivator's Whipcord, on the condition of the peasant. The title Mahatma was conferred on him in 1888. Since a book has one author and only one of the three named men wrote this one, option (d) 'More than one of the above' cannot be right — a 'more than one' option needs two listed choices that are true together, and here they are mutually exclusive.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The best-known anti-caste author in India, which is precisely why the option works, but Gulamgiri predates his birth by nearly twenty years. Ambedkar's own texts are Annihilation of Caste, the undelivered address of 1936, and Who Were the Shudras?, among others — and he named Phule as one of his intellectual gurus, which is the connection that makes the mix-up so easy.  (c) E. V. Ramasamy, called Periyar, led the Self-Respect Movement and later the Dravidar Kazhagam in the Tamil country, and wrote in Tamil — his best-known text is his reading of the Ramayana. He belongs to the same anti-caste tradition as Phule, a generation later and in another language, which is what puts him on this list.  (d) Authorship of a single book is exclusive: if Phule wrote Gulamgiri, then Ambedkar and Periyar did not. The option can only be correct where the stem's claim can hold of several choices at once. Test it before choosing it — name the second option that would also have to be true, and if you cannot, the option is not available.

Concept: Gulamgiri belongs to the first generation of the anti-caste movement, and its argument is contained in its title. Writing in 1873, less than a decade after the American Civil War, Phule set the servitude of the lower castes alongside the slavery that abolitionists across the Atlantic had just fought to end, and drew the parallel deliberately rather than decoratively. His programme was practical as much as polemical: schools for girls and for the excluded castes from 1848 onwards, an association — the Satyashodhak Samaj — that performed marriages without priests, and a newspaper, Deenbandhu, to carry its views. The line of descent from that work runs through Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur to Ambedkar, who counted Phule among his gurus, and sideways to Periyar's Self-Respect Movement in the Tamil country. What distinguishes Phule within that lineage is that he wrote at the very beginning, in Marathi, for a readership that had almost no printed anti-caste literature to draw on.

State PCS 2025 Q123 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q123 — History PYQ with Answer