The following statements are written about
a. He played an important role in the field of education in Maharashtra.
b. He prepared textbooks on various subjects.
c. He wrote a book 'Shunyalabdhi' on M

Question

The following statements are written about
a. He played an important role in the field of education in Maharashtra.
b. He prepared textbooks on various subjects.
c. He wrote a book 'Shunyalabdhi' on Mathematics and Science in Marathi.
d. Keshavrao Bhavalkar has written his biography.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), Balshastri Jambhekar. The four printed statements are a description with the name removed, and statement c is the one that closes the identification beyond argument: 'Shunyalabdhi' is Jambhekar's, the first book in Marathi on the mathematics of the calculus, written for students going on to higher study, and no other name in the options is attached to it. Statements a and b agree with the same man at every point. Bal Gangadhar Shastri Jambhekar (1812-1846) of Pombhurle in Ratnagiri district was the first Indian professor at the Elphinstone Institution, held the post of Native Secretary to the Board of Education, was made a Justice of the Peace and directed the Colaba observatory — a career spent almost entirely inside the machinery that was building modern education in the Bombay Presidency. He wrote the first Marathi textbooks across an extraordinary spread of subjects: history, geography, grammar, prosody, ethics and mathematics, including Hindusthanacha Itihas, England Deshachi Bakhar, Niti Katha and a compendium of English grammar. That is statement b exactly, and statement a follows from it. His fame outside the classroom rests on the press — Darpan, the first Marathi newspaper, which he began on 6 January 1832 and ran as a bilingual Marathi and English weekly, and Digdarshan, the first Marathi periodical, from 1840; 6 January is observed in Maharashtra as journalism day in his memory. Statement d names a biographer, and it is not the clue that decides the question: statements a, b and c fix the man on their own, and the sound method in a description question is to answer from the statement that only one candidate can satisfy.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Dadoba Pandurang Tarkhadkar is the strongest wrong answer here, because he genuinely did prepare textbooks and genuinely did shape education in the Bombay Presidency. His Marathi grammar, first published in 1836, was the standard work for generations and earned him the name of the father of Marathi grammar; he served as a deputy collector and as an inspector of schools, and he founded the Manav Dharma Sabha at Surat in 1844 and the Paramahansa Sabha in Bombay in 1849. What he did not write is a Marathi book on the calculus. Statement c is the discriminator in this set, and a candidate who reads only statements a and b — both of which fit Dadoba comfortably — will stop one line too early.  (b) Atmaram Pandurang Tarkhadkar, the younger brother of Dadoba, belongs to medicine and to religious reform rather than to schoolbooks. He was among the earliest Indian physicians trained in the Bombay medical school and is remembered as the founder of the Prarthana Samaj in 1867, the Bombay body that Ranade and Bhandarkar later made the centre of moderate Hindu reform. He sat on the advisory board of Pandita Ramabai's Sharada Sadan as well. None of the four printed statements fits him: he wrote no textbooks, produced no Marathi work on mathematics, and his public reputation was not made in education. The shared surname with option (1) is the whole of this option's plausibility.  (d) Gopal Hari Deshmukh, known by the pen-name Lokahitawadi, was a judge and one of the boldest reforming writers of nineteenth-century Maharashtra, but his medium was the newspaper essay and not the schoolbook. His Shatapatre, the hundred letters published in the weekly Prabhakar from 1848, attacked caste, priestly authority and the subjection of women, and they belong to the same reforming decade as Jambhekar's later work. He is placed in this option because he is a name of exactly the right period and standing, and because 'played an important role in the field of education' sounds like something a candidate might attach to any prominent reformer. The specific claim about a Marathi book on mathematics and science is what he cannot satisfy.

Concept: Balshastri Jambhekar is the figure in whom the two beginnings of modern Marathi public life — the printed newspaper and the printed textbook — meet in one person. Born at Pombhurle in Ratnagiri district in 1812 and dead at thirty-four in 1846, he was trained in Sanskrit learning at home and in English at Bombay, and he moved into every institution the new education was creating: the Elphinstone Institution, where he became the first Indian to hold a professorship, the Board of Education, where he served as Native Secretary, the Colaba observatory, which he directed, and the bench, where he sat as a Justice of the Peace. On 6 January 1832 he brought out Darpan, the first Marathi newspaper, printed in two columns of Marathi and English so that Indian opinion could be read by the government and English ideas by Indians; in 1840 he followed it with Digdarshan, the first Marathi periodical. The textbooks belong to the same project of making Marathi carry modern knowledge, and 'Shunyalabdhi', the first Marathi treatment of the calculus, is its most striking single instance, since it required inventing the vocabulary as well as writing the book. Maharashtra observes 6 January as journalism day in his memory.

State PCS 2023 Q8 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q8 — History PYQ with Answer