In 1877, 'The Great Delhi Darbar' was held, who described it as, 'An Indian Parliament' ?

Question

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Correct — option (4), G. V. Joshi. Ganesh Vasudeo Joshi was a founding member of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the political body launched at Pune in 1870. When the Government of India staged the Delhi Durbar of January 1877 to proclaim Queen Victoria 'Empress of India,' the Sabha sent Joshi to Delhi as its representative — deliberately dressed in hand-spun khadi rather than court dress — to read out a memorial on the Sabha's behalf. That memorial made a pointed, politely worded demand: that Indians be granted 'the same political and social status as is enjoyed by her British subjects.' It was Joshi who described this assembly of Indian princes and notables gathered before the Viceroy as 'An Indian Parliament' — a description that was itself an argument, since the Durbar was a display of imperial pageantry with no representative or legislative character at all, and Joshi's phrase held that gap up for comparison. The gesture is remembered as an early rehearsal of the kind of organised political demand-making that the Indian National Congress would formalise seven years later, in 1885.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Mahadev Govind Ranade was closely associated with the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and became one of the guiding intellectual figures behind its memorials and petitions to government in this period, which is exactly why his name sits naturally next to this quote. But the 1877 Delhi deputation and the 'Indian Parliament' description belong specifically to Joshi, who travelled to Delhi and read the memorial in person — not to Ranade.  (b) Kashinath Trimbak Telang was a contemporary Bombay-based jurist and reformer of the same broad generation of moderate political activity, which makes him a plausible-sounding distractor here. No source ties him to the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha's 1877 Delhi deputation or to this quote; his own public career centred on Bombay rather than this specific episode.  (c) S. H. Chiplunkar is recorded among the founding members of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha in 1870, alongside Joshi — which is precisely why the option is a convincing trap: he shares the same institutional home as the correct answer. But the deputation to the 1877 Durbar and the phrase describing it as an 'Indian Parliament' are attributed to Joshi, not to Chiplunkar.

Concept: The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, founded in Pune in 1870, was one of the earliest organised bodies to petition the colonial government on behalf of Indian political opinion, well before the Indian National Congress existed. Its 1877 Delhi deputation shows the Sabha using an imperial spectacle — staged precisely to display loyalty and hierarchy — as an occasion to voice a demand for equal status instead.

State PCS 2025 Q14 — History PYQ with Answer

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