The book, 'Jatibhed Viveksar' was written by ____________.

Question

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Correct — option (2), Tukaram Tatya Padval. Padval (1838–1898), born into a Bhandari merchant family of Bombay, wrote Jatibhed Viveksar ('Essence of the Discernment of Caste Distinctions') and first published it in 1861 under the pseudonym 'Ek Hindu' — 'One Hindu' — with Jyotiba Phule credited as the book's publisher. A second, considerably enlarged edition followed in 1865, growing from 59 pages to 170 and sharpening its critique of Brahmanical textual authority by turning scripture itself against the caste hierarchy it was used to justify. It stands among the earliest sustained lower-caste critiques of caste to appear in Marathi print, and it belongs to the same reforming current that ran from Dadoba Pandurang's Paramahansa Sabha of the 1840s through to Phule's own Satyashodhak Samaj, founded in 1873. Padval himself moved through that current: associated with the Paramahansa Sabha in his early years, drawn later into Phule's circle, and in his later life a founder of the Tatwavivechaka press and a member of the Theosophical Society, where he worked alongside Olcott and Blavatsky and published the verses of the seventeenth-century poet-saint Tukaram. The question is really testing whether a candidate can separate the author of this specific 1861 tract from the far more famous name who published it — which is exactly the confusion the other three options are built to invite.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The most natural wrong answer, because Phule's name is genuinely attached to this book — he is recorded as its publisher in 1861 — and he is by far the best-known anti-caste writer of the period. But publishing a work is not authoring it. Phule's own major writings are separate texts: Gulamgiri (1873), an indictment of Brahmanical dominance framed as slavery, and Shetkaryacha Asud (1883), his tract on the condition of the peasant cultivator. Jatibhed Viveksar is Padval's own composition; Phule's role in it was to see it into print.  (c) Shinde belongs to a later generation of the same reform tradition — he founded the Depressed Classes Mission in 1906 to work against untouchability — but he was born in 1873, twelve years after Jatibhed Viveksar was first published. He cannot be the author of a book that predates his own birth, and his own writing and institution-building took a different, twentieth-century form focused specifically on the Depressed Classes rather than a general tract on caste distinction.  (d) Karmaveer Bhaurao Patil is remembered for founding the Rayat Shikshan Sanstha in 1919, the mass rural-education movement that opened schooling to backward-caste and poor students across Maharashtra. His field was institution-building in education, roughly sixty years after Padval's book, and he has no authorship connection to Jatibhed Viveksar — the option works only by trading on his general fame as a Maharashtra social reformer.

Concept: Jatibhed Viveksar sits at the point where Maharashtra's caste-reform current turned from private, semi-secret defiance of ritual rules into a public, printed argument against the institution of caste itself. Dadoba Pandurang's Paramahansa Sabha of the 1840s had broken caste taboos quietly, at closed meetings; by 1861, Padval was willing to put a sustained written case against caste distinction into general Marathi circulation, backed by Phule's willingness to publish it. That combination of authorship and publication is precisely the detail this question isolates.

State PCS 2025 Q1 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q1 — History PYQ with Answer