Who among the following gave a personal sum of ₹ 25,000 to the Elphinstone Fund ?

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Correct — option (3), Nana Jagannath Shankarseth. Jagannath Shankarsheth (1803–1865), universally called 'Nana', was the richest and most publicly active Indian citizen of early nineteenth-century Bombay, and education was the cause he funded most consistently. When Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827, retired, the city's residents raised a subscription in his honour — the Elphinstone Fund — whose purpose was not a statue but an endowment: professorships to teach English and the European sciences to Indians. Shankarseth subscribed ₹25,000 from his own pocket, an enormous personal sum at a time when the whole endowment was being assembled from merchant houses, and that donation is the single fact this question turns on. The money did what it was meant to do; the endowment fed the Elphinstone Institution, from which Elphinstone College descends, and Shankarseth sat at the centre of the machinery that spent it as a leading member of the Bombay Native Education Society and later of the Board of Education. His wider record makes the attribution consistent rather than accidental: he opened a school for girls in his own house at a time when educating girls was socially costly, he was one of only two Indians on the first board of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway that ran the Bombay–Thane line of 1853, he was the founder-president of the Bombay Association in 1852, and he was the first Indian nominated to the Legislative Council of Bombay. The other three names in the option list are genuine figures of Maharashtra's educational history, but they are scholars, teachers and reformers rather than the merchant-philanthropists whose capital paid for that generation's institutions — and two of them were not yet born when the fund was raised.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Balshastri Jambhekar (1812–1846) is genuinely tied to the Elphinstone institutions — he was among the earliest Indians to teach at the Elphinstone Institution — which is what makes him a well-designed distractor. But the connection runs the wrong way: he was on the payroll as a scholar-teacher, not among the donors. He is remembered as the father of Marathi journalism for starting Darpan in 1832 and the magazine Digdarshan in 1840, work that made him influential and poor rather than wealthy. He was also about fifteen years old when Elphinstone left Bombay in 1827, so a ₹25,000 personal gift was doubly out of the question.  (b) R. G. Bhandarkar (1837–1925) is eliminated by date alone: he was born a decade after the Elphinstone Fund was raised. He belongs to the next generation entirely — an orientalist and Sanskrit scholar, a member of the Prarthana Samaj, a founder with Ranade and Waman Abaji Modak of the Maharashtra Girls Education Society and its Huzurpaga school in 1885, and the man for whom the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute at Pune was named in 1917. His contribution to Indian education was scholarship and institution-building of a later era, not the merchant philanthropy of the 1820s.  (d) Waman Abaji Modak also belongs to the generation after this fund. He was one of the founders of the Prarthana Samaj in 1867 alongside Atmaram Pandurang, his public addresses at Pune in 1870 helped spread the Samaj beyond Bombay, and in 1885 he joined Ranade and R. G. Bhandarkar in founding the Maharashtra Girls Education Society and Huzurpaga, the oldest girls' high school in Maharashtra. That is a substantial record in women's education, which is exactly why the name looks plausible here — but it is separated from the 1827 Elphinstone subscription by some four decades, and Modak was a teacher and reformer rather than a donor of large sums.

Concept: Western education in early colonial Bombay was not built by government money. The pattern was a public subscription raised by the city's merchant elite — Hindu, Parsi and Muslim alike — which the Bombay Native Education Society then administered, with the colonial administration supplying recognition, curriculum and a few European teachers. The Elphinstone Fund of 1827 is the model case: a testimonial to a departing governor was converted, at the subscribers' own wish, into an endowment for professorships teaching English and European science to Indians, and out of that endowment grew the Elphinstone Institution and eventually Elphinstone College, the school that trained a large part of Bombay's first English-educated professional class. Understanding this explains why the names of merchants — Jagannath Shankarseth, Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, Cowasjee Jehangir — are attached to colleges, hospitals and art schools across the city: private Indian capital, not the exchequer, paid for them.

State PCS 2024 Q2 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q2 — History PYQ with Answer