Match the social reformers with their literature :
(a) Vitthal Ramji Shinde
(b) Dadoba Pandurang
(c) Gopal Hari Deshmukh
(d) Jyotirao Phule
(i) Ishara
(ii) Dharmavivechan
(iii) Bhartiya Asprushatecha

Question

Match the social reformers with their literature :
(a) Vitthal Ramji Shinde
(b) Dadoba Pandurang
(c) Gopal Hari Deshmukh
(d) Jyotirao Phule
(i) Ishara
(ii) Dharmavivechan
(iii) Bhartiya Asprushatecha Prashna
(iv) Jatibhed

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), which reads (a)-(iii), (b)-(ii), (c)-(iv), (d)-(i). Take the four pairings one at a time. Vitthal Ramji Shinde, statement (a), goes with Bhartiya Asprushatecha Prashna, item (iii): his 1933 treatise on the question of untouchability in India, the culmination of a lifetime's work that had begun with the Depressed Classes Mission he founded in Bombay in 1906 and that had already produced Bahishkrut Bharat in 1908, a modern history of the movement against untouchability in 1922 and a study of the excluded classes in Burma in 1927. Dadoba Pandurang Tarkhadkar, statement (b), goes with Dharmavivechan, item (ii): published in 1868 under the pen name Ek Jagadwasi Arya, it belongs beside his other religious writing such as Paramhamsik Brahmadharma of 1880, and sits in the rationalist current that ran through the Manav Dharma Sabha and the Paramhansa Sabha in Bombay, though he is more widely remembered for his Marathi grammar of 1836 and for his tract against the plight of widows in 1857. Gopal Hari Deshmukh, statement (c), the essayist who wrote as Lokhitwadi, goes with Jatibhed, item (iv): caste was his standing subject, the hundred and eight letters collected as the Shatapatre had attacked the caste order and priestly authority directly, and Jatibhed is among the thirty-five books he wrote. That leaves Jyotirao Phule, statement (d), with Ishara, item (i), which he published in October 1885, late in a career whose other titles are far better known — Tritiya Ratna of 1855, Brahmananche Kasab of 1869, Gulamgiri of 1873, Shetkaryacha Asud of 1881 and the Sarvajanik Satya Dharma Pustak of 1889. That last pairing is also the fastest route through the item: the four choices attach four different items to Phule, and only this one gives him Ishara, so a candidate who is sure of Phule alone can settle the whole question without adjudicating the other three rows at all.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Every row of this choice is displaced. It hands Dharmavivechan to Vitthal Ramji Shinde, Ishara to Dadoba Pandurang, Bhartiya Asprushatecha Prashna to Gopal Hari Deshmukh and Jatibhed to Jyotirao Phule. The last of those is the one that will tempt a candidate, because Phule did write at length against caste and a title meaning caste distinction looks like his. But Jatibhed belongs to Lokhitwadi, and Phule's contribution to this list is Ishara. The choice also puts the 1933 book on untouchability in the hands of a writer of the 1840s and 1850s, which a candidate who carries approximate dates for each reformer can reject at once without knowing the titles at all.  (b) This choice gives Ishara to Vitthal Ramji Shinde, Jatibhed to Dadoba Pandurang, Dharmavivechan to Gopal Hari Deshmukh and Bhartiya Asprushatecha Prashna to Jyotirao Phule. The fatal row is the last: Phule died in 1890, and the treatise on untouchability is Shinde's work of 1933, so no amount of thematic plausibility can bridge the gap. This is the value of carrying lifespans rather than only titles — Phule 1827 to 1890, Dadoba Pandurang in the generation of the 1810s to the 1880s, Lokhitwadi 1823 to 1892, Shinde 1873 to 1944 — because a matching question of this shape can often be broken on chronology before any title is recognised.  (c) Here Shinde is given Jatibhed, Dadoba Pandurang is given Bhartiya Asprushatecha Prashna, Deshmukh is given Ishara and Phule is given Dharmavivechan. Two of these are thematically seductive: Shinde did write on caste, and Phule did write on religion, so a candidate matching by subject rather than by authorship can talk themselves into both. Matching by theme is the standard failure mode on this format, because the examiner chooses the four items precisely so that each one is thematically compatible with more than one of the four names. The only reliable route is authorship — this title, that author — and the dating check as a second filter.

Concept: The four names in this question are four successive layers of Maharashtra's reform tradition, and reading them as a sequence makes the titles easier to place. Dadoba Pandurang Tarkhadkar belongs to the earliest layer, the Bombay of the Elphinstone Institution and the Manav Dharma Sabha, where reform meant rationalist criticism of ritual conducted largely in English-educated circles and often anonymously — his Dharmavivechan of 1868 appeared under a pen name. Gopal Hari Deshmukh, writing as Lokhitwadi from Poona, took the same rationalism into Marathi journalism and made it public and combative, attacking caste and priestly authority in the Shatapatre and founding papers to carry the argument. Jyotirao Phule broke the frame altogether by shifting the subject from reforming Hinduism to the condition of the shudras, atishudras and women, founding the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873 and writing for a readership the earlier reformers had not addressed. Vitthal Ramji Shinde belongs to the fourth layer, the organised twentieth-century movement against untouchability, working through the Depressed Classes Mission from 1906 and through scholarship of which the 1933 treatise is the summit.

State PCS 2021 Q6 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q6 — History PYQ with Answer