“Reformers have to face opposition from our near and dear ones – parents, wives, daughters and countrymen with whom we have to travel through life.” This was said by the social reformer Wamanrao Madha

Question

“Reformers have to face opposition from our near and dear ones – parents, wives, daughters and countrymen with whom we have to travel through life.” This was said by the social reformer Wamanrao Madhavrao Kolhatkar, who hailed from ____________.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), Vidarbha. This is the region the commission's own key attaches to Wamanrao Madhavrao Kolhatkar, and it places him within a strand of nineteenth-century Maharashtra social reform that is easy for a Bombay-Poona-centred syllabus to under-represent: Vidarbha, the eastern Marathi-speaking region administered for much of this period as the Central Provinces and Berar rather than as part of the Bombay Presidency, produced its own reformers, its own local societies and its own resistance from within families and communities, even while it is less often the setting candidates picture when they think of 'Maharashtra reform.' The quotation itself is the more durable thing to carry: it names the reformer's own household — parents, wife, daughter — as the first and hardest site of resistance, a recurring observation across the reform literature of this period, from Ranade's own family difficulties over his remarriage to Karve's over his. Independently verifiable biographical detail on Kolhatkar beyond this attribution is thin in the sources checked for this card, and rather than fill that gap with invented specifics, this card keeps to what the paper itself supplies: the quotation and the region.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Marathwada was administered as part of the Nizam's Hyderabad State until its accession to India in 1948, a very different political and administrative setting from Vidarbha, which lay within British India's Central Provinces and Berar. The two regions are often confused in a quick reading of Maharashtra's regional geography precisely because both are eastern, non-coastal sub-regions distinct from the Bombay-Poona core — but the key attaches this quotation to Vidarbha, not to Marathwada.  (c) Pune is the natural first guess for any question naming a Maharashtra social reformer, since it was the headquarters of the best-documented reform current — Ranade, Agarkar, Tilak, the Deccan Education Society — and a candidate unfamiliar with Kolhatkar may default to it out of habit. That habit is exactly the trap here: not every reformer this paper names belongs to the Pune circle, and MPSC's regional-attribution questions are partly designed to test whether a candidate over-generalises from the most famous case.  (d) Kolhapur has its own well-known reform association, chiefly through Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj's patronage of anti-caste and reservation measures in the early twentieth century, and the state's name is a natural distractor when a question offers a list of Maharashtra sub-regions. But that association belongs to a different reformer and a different mechanism (princely-state patronage rather than individual reform advocacy), and the key does not attach this particular quotation to Kolhapur.

Concept: Maharashtra's nineteenth-century reform movement is often taught as a single Bombay-Poona narrative, but it was in fact regionally distributed: Vidarbha (then part of the Central Provinces and Berar), Marathwada (under Hyderabad State), Kolhapur (a princely state with its own reforming ruler) and the Bombay Presidency proper each carried distinct institutional settings, and each produced reformers whose careers unfolded within those settings' particular constraints rather than through the Deccan Education Society or the Prarthana Samaj that dominate the standard Pune-Bombay account.

State PCS 2025 Q6 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q6 — History PYQ with Answer