_________, a Sanskrit Scholar and a Staunch Social reformer, resigned from government service in 1864 to devote himself to the cause of social reforms.

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Correct — option (2), Vishnushastri Pandit. He is the Maharashtrian reformer whose whole public identity rests on the two things the blank describes: Sanskrit learning, and a full-time commitment to social reform from the middle of the 1860s. His central work was the campaign for widow remarriage. He founded the Punarvivahottejak Mandal, the association for the encouragement of widow remarriage, in 1866, and in 1868 he published in Indu Prakash a Marathi rendering of Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's argument for widow remarriage — the shastric case that a Sanskrit scholar was uniquely placed to carry into a Marathi-reading public. That combination is exactly what makes the description in the stem fit him and nobody else on the list. The other three names can be dismissed without any recall of the 1864 date at all, which is the useful part of this question. Two of them are eliminated by arithmetic. Balshastri Jambhekar died in 1846, eighteen years before the year in the stem, so he cannot have resigned anything in 1864. Kashinath Trimbak Telang was born in 1850, so in 1864 he was a boy of fourteen with no government service to resign. That leaves Mahadev Govind Ranade, who is eliminated on a fact rather than a date: Ranade spent his entire working life inside government service, rising through the judicial line to the bench of the Bombay High Court, and his reform work — the Prarthana Samaj, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the Indian National Social Conference — was carried on alongside that career, not in place of it. A man who never left government service cannot be the man who resigned from it. Three independent eliminations, none of which requires knowing the answer, converge on option (2).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The obvious guess, because Ranade is the best-known social reformer in nineteenth-century Maharashtra, and the phrase 'staunch social reformer' pulls straight towards him. But the sentence turns on a resignation, and Ranade never resigned. He was a government servant throughout his adult life, moving up the judicial service to become a judge of the Bombay High Court, and he was a leading figure in the Prarthana Samaj — founded in Bombay in 1867 by Atmaram Pandurang — and in the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the Indian National Social Conference, all while holding office. He was also not principally a Sanskritist. In a fill-in-the-blank item, the words that look like decoration — 'Sanskrit Scholar', 'resigned' — are usually the discriminators, and the famous name is usually the trap.  (c) Eliminated by date, and decisively. Balshastri Jambhekar died in 1846, eighteen years before the year named in the stem, so no act of his can be placed in 1864. He belongs to an earlier generation entirely — he founded Darpan in 1832, the first Marathi newspaper, and Digdarshan in 1840, and is remembered as the father of Marathi journalism and as an early advocate of the readmission of converts to Hindu society. He was indeed a Sanskrit scholar, which is what makes the name plausible at a glance, but a chronological check retires him before any of that matters.  (d) Also eliminated by date. Kashinath Trimbak Telang was born in 1850 and was therefore fourteen years old in 1864, with no government post to resign from. He fits half the description well — he was a genuine Sanskrit scholar, whose translation of the Bhagavad Gita appeared in the Sacred Books of the East series, and he became a judge of the Bombay High Court and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bombay — which is why the name is on the list. But his public life begins in the 1870s and 1880s, a generation after the year in the stem. Checking a date against a lifespan is the cheapest elimination available in this question type.

Concept: The widow-remarriage question is the hinge of nineteenth-century social reform in western India, and the reason is that it could not be settled by law alone. The Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856, secured largely through Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's campaigning in Bengal, made such marriages legally valid across British India; what it could not do was make them socially possible. In Maharashtra the work of making them possible fell to a group of reformers who fought the question on shastric ground, arguing from the texts that remarriage was permitted, because that was the only argument that could move an orthodox community. Vishnushastri Pandit's Punarvivahottejak Mandal of 1866 belongs to that effort, as does the wider work of the Prarthana Samaj, founded in Bombay in 1867, which took up widow remarriage, women's education, the abolition of caste restrictions and the raising of the age of marriage. The reform current also had a second, more radical wing in Jyotirao Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj of 1873, which attacked Brahmanical authority itself rather than arguing within it, and a distinct conservative opposition which held that social change should wait upon political self-government.

State PCS 2026 Q10 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q10 — History PYQ with Answer