SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 10 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Awareness · Question 2 of 100

Text as printed on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; answer per SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 6 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. The questions and options here are reproduced as printed on a candidate's own response sheet for this shift — the Commission's text, unchanged. Each answer is SSC's tentative key as marked on that sheet; SSC allowed challenges to it and never publishes a final key. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

Which of the following social reformers of 19th century India was the author of ‘Stree Purush Tulana’?

(a)Pandita Ramabai
(b)Tarabai Shinde
(c)Usha Mehta
(d)Swarnakumari Devi

Answer

Why

Correct — B. Tarabai Shinde wrote 'Stree Purush Tulana' — 'A Comparison Between Women and Men' — in Marathi in 1882.

It is a frontal attack on the double standard that punished a widow for a pregnancy while excusing the men around her, written after one such woman was publicly vilified. Shinde moved in the Satyashodhak circle around Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule, and that is the 19th-century reform world option (b) belongs to.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Pandita Ramabai — Pandita Ramabai is the other great name of the same decade, but her book is 'The High-Caste Hindu Woman', written in English for an American readership. She founded the Sharada Sadan as a home for widows.
(c)
Usha Mehta — Wrong century. Usha Mehta ran the underground Congress Radio during the Quit India movement of 1942, which places her in the freedom struggle, not in 19th-century social reform.
(d)
Swarnakumari Devi — Swarnakumari Devi, Rabindranath Tagore's elder sister, was a Bengali novelist and editor of the journal 'Bharati'. She wrote in Bengali, and her work is literary rather than a reform tract.

Concept

Nineteenth-century reform produced a small number of texts written by women themselves rather than about them, and SSC keys on matching each text to its author.

'Stree Purush Tulana' matters for who wrote it. Not an English-educated reformer addressing a colonial audience, but a woman from Buldhana writing in Marathi, for Marathi readers, in the idiom of the non-Brahmin Satyashodhak movement.

Its target is not a law in the abstract but everyday hypocrisy: the conduct men were forgiven for and women were destroyed for.

SSC asks the pair, almost never the argument. Learn the pair — but the argument is what makes it stick, and it is what separates Shinde from Ramabai when both names appear in the same option set.

Key facts

'Stree Purush Tulana' was published in Marathi in 1882 by Tarabai Shinde.
Tarabai Shinde was associated with the Satyashodhak Samaj, founded by Jyotirao Phule in 1873.
Pandita Ramabai's 'The High-Caste Hindu Woman' (1887) is the English-language book most often confused with it.

Study next

Women's writing of the reform era: Tarabai Shinde, Pandita Ramabai and Savitribai PhuleThe Satyashodhak Samaj and the non-Brahmin movement in MaharashtraWidow remarriage and age-of-consent legislation in 19th-century India

Common traps

Choosing Pandita Ramabai because both women wrote on the condition of women in the same decade.
Reading 'social reformer of 19th century India' loosely and picking Usha Mehta, who belongs to 1942.

Author-to-title is one of SSC's regular General Awareness slots, and this shift uses it again at General Awareness Q.7, which asks who wrote 'The Indian Struggle'.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.