To become a member of ________; “Person had to eat bread prepared by Christians and drink water at the hands of Muslims”.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), Prarthana Samaj. Standard accounts of the Bombay reform milieu of the mid-to-late nineteenth century — the current that produced the Prarthana Samaj in 1867 under Atmaram Pandurang — record this exact practice as a deliberate test of a member's readiness to break caste purity rules in the most literal, bodily way available: sharing bread baked by a Christian and water carried by a Muslim, an act that orthodox custom treated as polluting regardless of the food or water itself. The practice traces to the earlier, secretive Paramahansa Sabha of the 1840s, whose members already broke caste rules by eating food cooked across caste lines at closed meetings, and the Prarthana Samaj drew several of its founding generation from that same reforming milieu — which is why the commission's key, and the standard reference sources this card was checked against, attach the practice to the Prarthana Samaj specifically. The underlying point to carry, independent of the exact organisational label, is the method itself: nineteenth-century Bombay reformers treated commensality across caste and religious lines as a direct, testable act of reform, not merely a stated belief.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The Brahmo Samaj, founded by Ram Mohan Roy in Calcutta in 1828, was primarily a movement against idolatry and for monotheistic worship, focused on scriptural and theological reform in Bengal rather than on a specific initiation ritual of inter-religious commensality. It is a natural distractor because it is the most famous reform samaj of the era, but this particular practice is not recorded as one of its membership requirements.  (b) The Arya Samaj, founded by Dayananda Saraswati in 1875, moved in something close to the opposite direction on questions of ritual purity: it emphasised a return to Vedic authority and later developed shuddhi, a purification ritual for readmitting or converting people into the Hindu fold, rather than a ritual built around eating food prepared by Christians and Muslims. Its reforming energy was directed at reviving what it saw as authentic Vedic practice, not at deliberately transgressing caste-purity rules through inter-religious commensality.  (d) Jyotiba Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj, founded in Pune in 1873, organised its reform programme around anti-Brahminical critique, the dignity of the peasant and lower castes, and its own simplified Satyashodhak marriage rites — a different focus and a different generation of Bombay-Poona reform from the specific bread-and-water initiation this question describes, which belongs to the Prarthana Samaj's inheritance from the earlier Paramahansa Sabha.

Concept: This question captures a distinctive method within nineteenth-century Bombay's reform current: rather than only arguing against caste restriction in print, some reformers built literal, physical tests of a member's commitment into the act of joining their society. Eating food cooked by, or sharing water carried by, a person of a different caste or religion was exactly the kind of act orthodox purity codes forbade, which made it an effective — if provocative — demonstration that a member had genuinely broken with caste orthodoxy rather than merely voiced disagreement with it.

State PCS 2025 Q9 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q9 — History PYQ with Answer