Who defended Chiplunkar's attack on Mahatma Jyotirao Phule through his newspaper, considered as the beginning of non Brahmin journalism ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), Krushnaji Bhalekar. Read the stem first, because its English is compressed: it is not asking who defended Chiplunkar, it is asking who answered Chiplunkar's attack on Jyotirao Phule, and it identifies that man by the newspaper he ran — a paper reckoned to mark the beginning of non-Brahmin journalism in Marathi. Both halves point to one person. Krishnarao Pandurang Bhalekar (1850-1910) was a cultivator's son from the Pune district, a close associate of Jyotirao Phule and a worker of the Satyashodhak Samaj, and in January 1877 he started the weekly Deenbandhu at Pune. Deenbandhu was the first newspaper to be run from inside the Satyashodhak movement and to speak for the peasant, the labourer and the non-Brahmin castes rather than about them, and it is on that ground that Marathi accounts treat it as the founding moment of bahujan or non-Brahmin journalism. The attack it had to answer came from Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, whose Nibandhamala — the celebrated series of essays that began in 1874 and did more than any other writing of the decade to shape modern Marathi prose — turned its polemical force on Phule and on the Satyashodhak position. Phule's reply, Sarvajanik Satya Dharma Pustak and his other writings apart, needed a periodical that could answer week by week, and Bhalekar's Deenbandhu supplied it. The other three names in the options belong to the same broad reforming decades but to different work: none of them founded this paper, and the paper is what the stem uses to identify the man.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the near-miss of the question and the one that catches candidates who know a good deal rather than a little. Narayan Meghaji Lokhande is genuinely bound up with Deenbandhu — he took charge of the paper after Bhalekar and carried it to Bombay, where it became the voice of the mill workers, and he went on to found the Bombay Mill-Hands Association in 1884 and to win the weekly Sunday holiday in 1890. But editing a paper later is not founding it, and the stem is about the man whose newspaper began non-Brahmin journalism and answered Chiplunkar. Whenever a question turns on a periodical, it is worth separating three roles that are constantly confused: who started it, who edited it afterwards, and from which city it was issued at each stage.  (b) Bhau Daji Lad belongs to an earlier and quite different Bombay world. He was a physician and antiquarian, a scholar of inscriptions, a Sheriff of Bombay and a moving spirit in the city's learned and municipal life, commemorated today in the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum at Byculla. He died in 1874, three years before Deenbandhu was founded, so he cannot be the man the stem describes. He appears in the options because he is a familiar nineteenth-century Bombay name of unquestioned reforming credentials, which is exactly the kind of plausibility MPSC likes to offer; the candidate's protection is to date the newspaper first and then ask who was alive and active to run it.  (c) Tukaram Tatya Padval belongs to the anti-caste writing of the generation just before this one — his Jatibhed Viveksar, a critical examination of caste distinction, is the work he is remembered for, and it circulated in the 1860s, well before the newspaper named in the stem existed. His medium was the book and the pamphlet rather than the weekly press, which is precisely the difference the stem is testing: the beginning of non-Brahmin journalism required a periodical that could answer an opponent week by week, and that is what Bhalekar's Deenbandhu was. Choosing this option usually means the candidate has correctly placed the name inside the anti-caste tradition but has not asked which of these men actually ran a newspaper.

Concept: The quarrel between Vishnushastri Chiplunkar and Jyotirao Phule is the central argument of Marathi public life in the 1870s and 1880s, and the press is where it was fought. Chiplunkar's Nibandhamala, begun in 1874, is the founding text of a confident, nationalist, Sanskrit-rooted Marathi prose; its author went on to help found the New English School in 1880 and the newspapers Kesari and Mahratta in 1881, and his essays attacked Phule's Satyashodhak criticism of caste and of Brahmanical authority. Phule's side of the argument needed a periodical of its own, and it got one when Krishnarao Bhalekar, a Satyashodhak worker and cultivator, started Deenbandhu at Pune in January 1877. The importance of Deenbandhu is not only that it defended Phule but that it changed who was speaking: it was written from within the non-Brahmin and peasant world for readers of that world, which is why it is treated as the beginning of non-Brahmin journalism in Marathi. The paper then had a second life under Narayan Meghaji Lokhande, who took it to Bombay and turned it into an organ of the mill workers, so the same title carries both the anti-caste and the early labour movements — and that continuity is exactly why the two men are so often confused.

State PCS 2023 Q3 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q3 — History PYQ with Answer