SSC CGL 2024 Tier-I · 26 September 2024, Shift 2 · General Awareness · Question 20 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 10 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.

Belur Math was founded by which of the following social reformers in British India?

(a)KT Telang
(b)Swami Vivekanand
(c)VN Mandlik
(d)RG Bhandarkar

Answer

Why

Correct — B. Belur Math was founded by Swami Vivekananda, the chief disciple of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and he is the reformer option (b) names.

It stands on the west bank of the Hooghly in Howrah district, West Bengal, and is the headquarters of both the Ramakrishna Math — the monastic order — and the Ramakrishna Mission, its service wing.

The paper prints the name as Swami Vivekanand. That is the same person.

Why the others are wrong

(a)
KT Telang — KT Telang (1850-1893) was an indologist and a judge of the Bombay High Court. His work lay in western India and in Sanskrit scholarship, not in the Ramakrishna movement.
(c)
VN Mandlik — VN Mandlik (1833-1899) was a Bombay lawyer and an authority on Hindu law. He belongs to the Bombay Presidency's reform circle, which has no connection with Belur.
(d)
RG Bhandarkar — RG Bhandarkar was an orientalist and a Prarthana Samaj figure in western India, later Vice-Chancellor of Bombay University. The Prarthana Samaj is a separate movement from the Ramakrishna Math.

Concept

Vivekananda's line runs from Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa at Dakshineswar to the young monks who gathered around him. After Ramakrishna's death Vivekananda organised them, travelled to the West, and came back to build both an order and a mission.

The Ramakrishna Mission, founded on 1 May 1897, is the service wing — relief work, hospitals, schools. The Ramakrishna Math is the monastic wing.

Belur Math is where both are headquartered, and that twin structure is the thing worth carrying away.

All three wrong options are nineteenth-century reformers of the Bombay Presidency. When the institution in the stem is Bengali, the Bombay names are decoration.

Key facts

Belur Math, on the west bank of the Hooghly in Howrah district, was founded by Swami Vivekananda.
It is the headquarters of both the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission.
Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission on 1 May 1897.
Swami Vivekananda was the chief disciple of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.

Study next

The Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission, and the difference between themVivekananda at the World's Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 1893Reform bodies of the nineteenth century: Brahmo Samaj, Prarthana Samaj, Arya Samaj

Common traps

Crediting Belur Math to Sri Ramakrishna himself rather than to his disciple.
Treating the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission as one body under one name.

The reform slot is a founder-to-organisation pairing. Vivekananda is asked through Chicago 1893 at 12 Sep 2024, 16:00, GA Q.3, and the same slot asks who founded the Brahmo Samaj in 1828 at 18 Sep 2024, 09:00, GA Q.3.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.