Jyotiba Phule was associated with

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Correct — D, Anti-caste Movement. Jyotirao Govindrao Phule (1827-1890) of Pune is the founding figure of the modern anti-caste movement in India. Every part of his life's work points the same way: he and Savitribai Phule opened a school for girls at Bhide Wada in Pune in 1848 at a time when education for Shudra and Ati-Shudra children and for women was effectively closed; in 1863 they opened a home for widows and a centre against infanticide; he campaigned for widow remarriage; and in 1873 he published Gulamgiri, 'Slavery', a frontal attack on caste which he dedicated to the American abolitionists. In the same year, on 24 September 1873, he founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Truth-Seekers' Society, whose programme was the rights of Shudras, Dalits and women, and which conducted marriages and other ceremonies without Brahmin priests on the argument that no intermediary was needed. The title 'Mahatma' was conferred on him in 1888. B. R. Ambedkar counted Phule as one of his three gurus, alongside the Buddha and Kabir — a fair measure of where he sits in the lineage of the anti-caste struggle.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Wrong domain and largely the wrong period. Organised trade unionism in India is a twentieth-century development — the All India Trade Union Congress was founded in 1920, three decades after Phule's death in 1890. Phule worked on education, caste and the position of women, not on organising industrial labour.  (b) Phule did write with real sympathy for the cultivator — his 1883 tract on the condition of the peasantry is well known — but he is not a leader of the peasant movement as the term is used in Indian history. That movement is an organised twentieth-century phenomenon: the All India Kisan Sabha was formed at Lucknow in 1936 with Swami Sahajanand Saraswati as its first president. Sympathy for a class is not the same as leadership of its movement.  (c) The cleanest kill in the set, on chronology alone. The Civil Disobedience Movement began in 1930 with Gandhi's Dandi march — forty years after Phule died in 1890. He could not have been associated with it in any sense.

Concept: Nineteenth-century Indian social reform ran in two distinct channels. One, represented by the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal and the Prarthana Samaj in western India, was led by educated upper-caste men seeking to purge religion of specific evils — sati, child marriage, the ban on widow remarriage — while leaving the social order intact. The other, which Phule opened, began from the position that caste itself was the injustice, that the lower castes and women should lead their own emancipation, and that priestly authority could simply be dispensed with. That second channel is what 'the anti-caste movement' names. It runs forward through the non-Brahmin politics of western and southern India — the Justice Party, Periyar's Self-Respect Movement — and into Ambedkar's constitutional work.

State PCS 2022 Q87 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q87 — History PYQ with Answer