In 1918

A. D., who advised to the Mumbai workers to establish the organization 'People's Union' ?

Question

In 1918 A. D., who advised to the Mumbai workers to establish the organization 'People's Union' ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), Rajashree Shahu Maharaj. Marathi accounts of the Bombay working-class movement record that after a successful public meeting at Parel, the mill district of the city, the People's Union — Loksangh in Marathi — was set up at the request of Shahu Chhatrapati, the ruler of Kolhapur, and that the man who did the organising and acted as its secretary was the Bombay labour leader known as Babasaheb Bole, working with Ramchandra Vitthal Vandekar, Parshuramrao Shinde, Damodar Sawlaram Yende, Bhaskar Jadhav and Harishchandra Talcherkar. Its declared object was the all-round economic, social, political and religious advance of the backward classes and the working classes together, which is the exact combination that marks Shahu's politics: he did not treat labour and caste as separate questions, and the body he prompted was aimed at both at once. That is what makes the attribution plausible as well as attested. Shahu was already, by 1918, the most active princely patron of the non-Brahmin and depressed-class movements in western India — the 1902 order reserving half the posts in the Kolhapur administration for the backward classes was his, compulsory and free primary education in his state dates from 1917, and within two years of this episode he would fund Dr Ambedkar's newspaper Mooknayak and preside over the Mangaon conference of 1920. A ruler of that description reaching into Bombay's mill quarters to urge the workers to organise fits his record precisely, and none of the other three names in the options can be placed at a Parel workers' meeting in 1918 at all. Note that the question is about who ADVISED the workers to form the body, not who ran it; the answer is therefore the patron whose urging lay behind the founding, not the secretary who carried it out.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar's association with Bombay's workers is real but it begins later and takes a different institutional form. In 1918 he had just returned from his studies abroad and was teaching political economy at Sydenham College in Bombay; his own public organisations are the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha of 1924, the newspapers Mooknayak from 1920 and Bahishkrit Bharat from 1927, and the Independent Labour Party of 1936, which is where his direct labour politics properly starts. The option is attractive because Ambedkar and Bombay's mill workers do belong together in the mind, and because Shahu Maharaj was his patron in exactly these years — but a patron and his protege are not interchangeable, and the date printed in the stem is the discriminator.  (c) Narayan Meghaji Lokhande cannot be the answer for the simplest of reasons: he died in 1897, twenty-one years before the year printed in the stem. He is nonetheless the most tempting wrong name in the set, because he is the pioneer of exactly this kind of work — a Satyashodhak associate of Jyotirao Phule, editor of Deenbandhu, founder of the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1884, and the man behind the campaign that won mill workers a weekly Sunday holiday in 1890. A candidate who reads 'Mumbai workers' and reaches for the first name in Indian labour history will pick him. The lesson is that in the labour chapter the dates do most of the discriminating: Lokhande is the 1880s and 1890s, the People's Union is 1918.  (d) Bhai Madhavrao Bagal belongs to a later chapter of Maharashtra's public life and to Kolhapur rather than to Bombay's mill districts. He is remembered for the people's movement in Kolhapur and for his part in the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation of the 1950s, not for organising Bombay's textile workers in the closing year of the First World War. The option is placed here because he shares Shahu Maharaj's city and something of his non-Brahmin politics, so a candidate who has correctly identified the Kolhapur connection but not the individual may settle on him. The stem, however, fixes both the year and the place, and neither points to Bagal.

Concept: Bombay's labour movement and Maharashtra's non-Brahmin movement grew up side by side, and MPSC tests whether a candidate can keep their chronology straight. The first phase belongs to Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, a Satyashodhak worker who edited Deenbandhu and founded the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1884, and whose agitation secured the weekly Sunday holiday for mill workers in 1890; he died in 1897. The second phase, around the First World War, is one of rising prices, war-time profits and a workforce large enough to act on its own — Bombay's first general textile strike began in January 1919 after the bonus demand of December 1918, and the All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920. The People's Union of 1918 sits at the opening of this second phase, and its significance is that it was framed to serve the backward classes and the working classes at the same time. Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur is the figure who most consistently joined those two causes: his 1902 reservation order, his patronage of hostels and schools for backward-class students, his support for Ambedkar's Mooknayak in 1920 and his presence at the Mangaon conference of the same year all point the same way. The People's Union is that politics extended from a princely state into the mill quarters of a colonial city.

State PCS 2023 Q2 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q2 — History PYQ with Answer