Match List – I of social reformers with List – II of their societies and choose answer from the code given below :
List – I List – II
a. Brahma Samaj i. Vishnu Shastri Pandit

Question

Match List – I of social reformers with List – II of their societies and choose answer from the code given below :
List – I                    List – II
a. Brahma Samaj        i. Vishnu Shastri Pandit
b. Ramkrishna Mission        ii. Swami Vivekananda
c. Servants of India Society        iii. Raja Rammohan Roy
d. Vidhwa Vivah Samaj        iv. Gopal Krishna Gokhale
Code :
     a     b     c     d

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, iii     ii     iv     i. Note first that the lists are the other way round from the usual arrangement: List-I holds the organisations and List-II the people, despite the stem calling List-I the reformers. Work with what is printed. Three of the four pairings are beyond argument. The Brahmo Samaj grew out of the Brahmo Sabha founded by Raja Rammohan Roy at Calcutta in 1828, so a matches (iii). The Ramakrishna Mission was founded by Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna's chief disciple, on 1 May 1897, and is headquartered at Belur Math in West Bengal — so b matches (ii). The Servants of India Society was formed on 12 June 1905 by Gopal Krishna Gokhale with its headquarters at Pune, to train men who would give their lives to public service in the manner of a secular religious order — so c matches (iv). Those three alone fix the code, because only one option opens iii, ii and continues with iv. The remaining pairing follows by elimination and is independently right: the Vidhwa Vivah Samaj, the widow remarriage association, belongs to Vishnu Shastri Pandit, one of the leading advocates of women's causes in western India in that generation and a figure the reform circles around the Rukhmabai case knew well. The sequence is therefore iii, ii, iv, i — code (c).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Gets the first two right and then swaps the last two, handing the Servants of India Society to Vishnu Shastri Pandit and the Vidhwa Vivah Samaj to Gopal Krishna Gokhale. It is the closest wrong option, and the one a candidate reaches for after fixing the two famous pairings and then guessing between the remaining names. Gokhale's society was a national political and service organisation founded in 1905, not a widow-remarriage association.  (b) Correct only on the first pairing. It gives the Ramakrishna Mission to Vishnu Shastri Pandit and the Servants of India Society to Swami Vivekananda — the second of which inverts the whole point of the list, since Vivekananda's organisation is the monastic one and Gokhale's is the secular public-service one.  (d) The escape is available only if all three codes fail, and code (c) reproduces every pairing correctly. The temptation towards it comes from the stem's own wording, which calls List-I 'social reformers' when List-I in fact holds the societies — but a mislabelled heading is not a defect in the match, because the entries themselves are unambiguous.

Concept: The socio-religious reform movements of the nineteenth century split along two axes worth holding separately. The first is region: Bengal produced the Brahmo Samaj and the Ramakrishna movement, western India the Prarthana Samaj, the Satyashodhak Samaj and the widow-remarriage associations, north India the Arya Samaj, and south India the Self-Respect Movement of the next century. The second is method. Reformist bodies worked within their tradition and appealed to reason and to reinterpreted scripture — the Brahmo Samaj rejected idolatry and the need for a priestly class to interpret texts. Revivalist bodies appealed instead to a purified past. And a third strand, of which the Servants of India Society is the clearest example, was not religious at all: Gokhale's society trained full-time public workers on subsistence allowances, effectively a secular order, and it is the ancestor of the modern idea of professional public service. The Ramakrishna Mission sits between the strands, propagating Vedanta while making organised social service — schools, hospitals, relief work — its practical expression, on the principle of karma yoga.

State PCS 2025 Q85 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q85 — History PYQ with Answer