Pandita Ramabai with the permission of the Ramabai Association, appointed an advisory board to advise her, who among the following was included in this advisory board ?
i. Justice M. G. Ranade
ii. Dr.

Question

Pandita Ramabai with the permission of the Ramabai Association, appointed an advisory board to advise her, who among the following was included in this advisory board ?
i. Justice M. G. Ranade
ii. Dr. R. G. Bhandarkar
iii. Justice K. T. Telang
iv. Bapu Hari Shinde

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), 'i, ii and iii only'. The body named in the stem is the Ramabai Association, formed at Boston in 1887 to finance Pandita Ramabai's projected school for high-caste Hindu widows for a period of ten years. Because the money came from American Christian subscribers while the pupils were to be Hindu, the arrangement was built on an explicit promise of religious neutrality inside the school, and the device that was meant to guarantee that promise on the Indian side was a local advisory board of respected Hindu reformers. Ramabai constituted it with the Association's permission when the Sharada Sadan opened at Bombay in 1889, and the accounts of the institution record it as drawn from the moderate reforming circle of the Bombay Presidency — Justice M. G. Ranade, Dr R. G. Bhandarkar and Justice K. T. Telang among them, along with Gopal Hari Deshmukh 'Lokahitawadi', Dr Atmaram Pandurang and other names of the same stamp. That settles statements i, ii and iii together, and it also explains why those three and not others: Ranade and Bhandarkar were the leading men of the Prarthana Samaj, Telang was a High Court judge of unimpeachable standing among orthodox and reformist Hindus alike, and their joint presence was exactly the public guarantee the Association needed. Statement iv names Bapu Hari Shinde, who does not appear in the accounts of this board at all, so any option containing iv fails at once. Since options (1) and (2) each admit only two of the three genuine members and option (3) drags in iv, only option (4) contains all three verified names and nothing else. The board's later history confirms how seriously it was taken: when girls at the Sadan began attending Ramabai's private prayers and some spoke of embracing Christianity, Ranade and Bhandarkar resigned in protest to the Ramabai Association — a resignation that would have carried no weight had they not been on the board in the first place.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option accepts Ranade and Bhandarkar but stops short of Telang, and there is no ground for the exclusion. K. T. Telang sat on the same advisory board and belonged to precisely the group Ramabai needed: a judge of the Bombay High Court, a Sanskritist, and a reformer trusted well beyond the reform party itself. A candidate lands here by recalling the Prarthana Samaj pair — Ranade and Bhandarkar are almost always named together — and treating the question as if it were about that Samaj rather than about the Sharada Sadan's committee. The stem asks who was included in the board, not who founded a religious society, and the answer has to take in every name the records place there.  (b) Dropping Ranade is the costliest possible mistake in this question. M. G. Ranade was the central figure of nineteenth-century Maharashtra's reform movement and one of Pandita Ramabai's earliest supporters; his wife Ramabai Ranade worked alongside her in the Arya Mahila Samaj, and it is Ranade's name that heads most listings of the Sharada Sadan's advisers. This option keeps Bhandarkar and Telang, so the candidate choosing it has the right circle of men in view but has arbitrarily removed its best-known member — usually because he has confused this board with some other committee, or because he assumes a question would not make the most famous name a correct one.

Concept: Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858-1922) is asked about in MPSC papers as an institution-builder, and the institutions have to be kept in order. Born Ramabai Dongre and taught Sanskrit by her father, she was given the titles 'Pandita' and 'Saraswati' at Calcutta in 1878 for her learning. In Pune she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj in 1882 and, in the same year, gave evidence before the Hunter Commission asking for the education of women and for Indian women to be trained as doctors. Her books Stri Dharma Niti (1882) and The High-Caste Hindu Woman (1887) belong to this period, the second written and published in America. Out of the American lecture tour came the Ramabai Association, formed at Boston in 1887 to fund a school for high-caste widows for ten years, and out of that money came the Sharada Sadan, opened at Bombay in 1889 and moved to Pune the following year. The advisory board is the hinge of the whole arrangement. The Association's subscribers were Christians, the school's pupils were to be Hindu, and the school was pledged to religious neutrality; a board of eminent Hindu reformers was the visible guarantee of that pledge. When the guarantee was felt to have failed, the board members resigned and the controversy that followed is inseparable from the history of the Sadan itself.

State PCS 2023 Q1 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q1 — History PYQ with Answer