Who was the founder of 'Satyashodhak Samaj' having its primary emphasis on the seeking of truth ?

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Correct — D, Jyotiba Phule. Jyotirao Govindrao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj — literally the Truth-Seekers' Society, which is what the question's phrase 'emphasis on the seeking of truth' is translating — at Pune on 24 September 1873. Its programme was the rights of Shudras, Dalits and women: it attacked caste hierarchy and idolatry, and it made a point of conducting marriages and other ceremonies without Brahmin priests, on the argument that no intermediary is needed between a person and the truth. The founding sits inside a life of consistent work in the same direction — with Savitribai Phule he opened a school for girls at Bhide Wada, Pune, in 1848, opened a home for widows and a centre against infanticide in 1863, and campaigned for widow remarriage; his book Gulamgiri, 'Slavery', also of 1873, was dedicated to the American abolitionists. The title 'Mahatma' was conferred on him in 1888. B. R. Ambedkar later named Phule as one of his three gurus, with the Buddha and Kabir.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Ranade was a reformer in the same city and the same decades, which is what makes him the strongest distractor, but his institutions were different ones — the Prarthana Samaj, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, and the National Social Conference founded in 1887 to carry on social-reform debate that the Indian National Congress had decided to keep off its own agenda. He worked for reform from within the upper-caste reformist tradition; Phule's Samaj was built by and for those outside it.  (b) Wrong organisation, wrong city and wrong generation. Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj at Calcutta in 1828 and is remembered above all for the campaign that led to the abolition of sati in 1829. He died in 1833, forty years before the Satyashodhak Samaj was founded.  (c) Tarabai Shinde belongs to the same Maharashtrian reform current and is a major figure in her own right — her Stri Purush Tulana of 1882 is among the earliest modern feminist tracts written in an Indian language — but she was not the founder. The Samaj was founded in 1873, nine years before that book appeared.

Concept: The Satyashodhak Samaj marks a shift in nineteenth-century Indian social reform. The earlier bodies — the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal, the Prarthana Samaj in western India — were led by educated upper-caste men seeking to purify religion and remove specific evils such as sati, child marriage and the ban on widow remarriage. Phule's Samaj started from a different place: that caste itself was the injustice, that the lower castes and women should lead their own emancipation, and that priestly mediation could simply be dispensed with. That is why it organised priest-free marriages, ran schools, and drew its membership largely from non-Brahmin cultivating castes. Its line continues through the non-Brahmin politics of western and southern India and into Ambedkar's work.

State PCS 2022 Q40 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q40 — History PYQ with Answer