Reform Movements and Cultural Nationalism

The Satyashodhak Samaj, the Truth Seekers' Society, was founded by Jyotirao Phule at Pune in 1873. Its object was the liberation of the shudras and atishudras from Brahmanical dominance: it rejected the necessity of Brahmana priests, instituted marriage and other ceremonies conducted without them, campaigned against caste discrimination and untouchability, and promoted education for lower castes and for women, Phule and Savitribai Phule having opened schools for girls from the late 1840s. It is therefore an anti-caste movement in Maharashtra, giving (c).

• Option (a) misplaces it as tribal upliftment in Bihar, which describes a different set of movements altogether.
• Option (b) misplaces it as a temple-entry movement in Gujarat; temple entry as a distinct campaign belongs chiefly to Kerala and to the Vaikom and Guruvayur satyagrahas, and in any case the Samaj's thrust was against priestly mediation rather than for admission to temples.
• Option (d) misplaces it as a Punjab peasant movement. The item is decided by geography alone once Phule is correctly located in the Bombay Presidency.

• Item 1 is not associated with Keshab Chandra Sen. The Calcutta Unitarian Committee was founded in 1821 by Rammohan Roy together with William Adam and Dwarkanath Tagore, and preceded the Brahmo Sabha of 1828. Sen was born in 1838, so he could not have been associated with its establishment, which is the cleanest way to dispose of the item.
• Item 2 is correctly associated: Sen founded the Nava Vidhan or Church of the New Dispensation in 1880, its place of worship being called the Tabernacle of New Dispensation, in which he sought to synthesise the teachings of the world's religions, a mystical turn that alienated many of his earlier followers.
• Item 3 is correctly associated: Sen established the Indian Reform Association in 1870 on his return from England, working on cheap literature, education for women, temperance and charity, and it was through this body that he pressed for what became the Native Marriage Act of 1872, fixing minimum ages for marriage and permitting inter-caste unions. Hence 2 and 3, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (d) require attributing the Unitarian Committee to him, and (c) requires rejecting the New Dispensation, which is the movement most closely identified with his later career. The item is difficult because it requires three separate attributions with no elimination route unless the candidate holds Sen's dates against Rammohan Roy's.

• Statement 1 is correct. Wood's Despatch of 1854, often called the Magna Carta of English education in India, introduced the grants in aid system, under which private and missionary schools that satisfied prescribed standards of secular instruction and inspection received public funds. This was the origin of the aided school in India and of the enduring pattern of state funded but privately managed education.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Despatch recommended universities on the model of London University, and the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were established in 1857 as examining bodies in consequence.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the discriminating statement. The Despatch did not prescribe English at all levels; it laid down a graded medium, with the vernaculars to be used for mass and primary education and English reserved for higher education, on the express reasoning that European knowledge could reach the mass of the people only through their own languages. Elimination route: statement 3 contains the absolute at all levels, and knowing that Wood's Despatch is the document that rehabilitated vernacular instruction after the Anglicist ascendancy of 1835 is enough to reject it, which removes (b), (c) and (d) together.

Hence (a).

All three contributed and they form a single causal chain, which is why the answer is (d).

• Statement 1 is correct. The Charter Act of 1813 was the first legislative acknowledgement of a state responsibility for Indian education, directing that not less than one lakh of rupees be set apart annually for the revival and improvement of literature, the encouragement of the learned natives of India and the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences. The clause is deliberately ambiguous about the medium and the content, and that ambiguity produced everything that followed.
• Statement 2 is correct. The General Committee of Public Instruction was constituted in 1823 to administer that grant, and it became the forum in which the ambiguity had to be resolved, since the Committee had to decide what literature and whose sciences the money was to be spent on.
• Statement 3 is correct. Its members divided into Orientalists, led by H. T. Prinsep and favouring Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian learning and the vernaculars, and Anglicists, favouring English and Western science. The controversy was settled by Macaulay's Minute of February 1835 and Bentinck's Resolution of March 1835, which directed that funds be spent on English education. Elimination route: there is none of the usual kind, since no statement can be rejected, so the question rewards seeing the sequence rather than checking three separate facts. The chain runs from the money in 1813, through the body that had to spend it in 1823, to the dispute over how, resolved in 1835.

Hence (d).

• Option (b) is correct. Dinabandhu Mitra's Neeldarpan was written in 1860, and the four events in date order run: Neeldarpan in 1860, Satyendranath Tagore's success in the Indian Civil Service examination in 1863, the founding of the Arya Samaj by Dayanand Saraswati in 1875, and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's Anandamath in 1882. Neeldarpan therefore comes first. The play is anchored by the Indigo Revolt of 1859 to 1860 in Bengal, which it dramatised; its English translation, published under James Long's name, led to Long's prosecution and imprisonment for libel, with Michael Madhusudan Dutt as the translator. That association with the indigo disturbances is the surest way to date it, since a play written about a revolt cannot precede the revolt.
• Option (d) is the closest competitor at 1863 and can be placed by remembering that Satyendranath Tagore, brother of Rabindranath, sat the examination in London within a few years of the Crown assuming direct government in 1858.
• Option (a) at 1875 is fixed by the standard cluster of reform bodies, the Arya Samaj in that year and the Prarthana Samaj in 1867.
• Option (c) at 1882 is fixed by Anandamath being a post revolt novel containing Vande Mataram, later adopted as the national song. Elimination route: the two literary works can be separated at once because Neeldarpan responds to an event of 1860 while Anandamath belongs to the 1880s, and once the field narrows to the 1860 and 1863 pair the answer follows.

Hence (b).

• Pair 1 is incorrectly matched. The Sanskrit College at Benaras was founded in 1791 by Jonathan Duncan, the Resident at Benaras, to cultivate Hindu law and learning and to supply the courts with qualified pandits. Sir William Jones was a judge of the Supreme Court at Calcutta and the founder in 1784 of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and it is that association, together with his standing as the great Orientalist of the period, that makes his name plausible here.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. The Calcutta Madrasa was established in 1781 by Warren Hastings for the study of Muslim law and Arabic and Persian learning, with the parallel purpose of producing officers competent in the law administered in the courts.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched, and this is the finest trap in the paper. Fort William College was founded at Calcutta in 1800 for the training of newly arrived civil servants in Indian languages, law and custom, and its founder was Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess Wellesley, the Governor General. Arthur Wellesley was his younger brother, the soldier who commanded at Assaye and later became the Duke of Wellington, and he founded nothing of the kind. The surname is right and the given name is wrong, so a candidate who checks only the family name will accept the pair. Elimination route: rejecting pair 1 removes options (a) and (c), and accepting pair 2, which is standard, then settles the answer at (b) without the candidate ever having to resolve the Wellesley confusion.

Hence (b).

Desher Katha, published in Bengali in 1904, was an exposition of the economic drain and of the psychological hold colonial rule exercised over the educated Indian mind.

• Statement 1 is correct, since Deuskar's central argument was that the most dangerous conquest was the conquest of the mind, which he described in terms of a hypnotic spell.
• Statement 2 is correct, since the book sold in tens of thousands during the Swadeshi years and its themes fed directly into jatra, street performance and swadeshi folk song before it was proscribed in 1910.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the discriminating statement. Deuskar, a Marathi speaking writer settled in Bengal, used desh to mean India as a whole, and the pan Indian sense of the word was precisely what gave the book its nationalist force. The answer is 1 and 2, giving (a).
• Options (b), (c) and (d) all admit the Bengal specific reading of desh.

Gopal Baba Walangkar, a retired army man from the Mahar community and an associate of Jyotiba Phule, began Vital Vidhvansak in 1888. It is recognised as the first periodical addressed specifically to the untouchable communities and it attacked the scriptural basis of caste, giving (a).

• Option (b) is wrong because Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873 and wrote Gulamgiri, but the journal in question was Walangkar's; Phule's associated periodical was Deenbandhu, brought out by Krishnarao Bhalekar.
• Option (c) is wrong because Gandhi's Harijan began only in 1933 and was addressed to a caste Hindu readership as much as to Dalits.
• Option (d) is wrong because Ambedkar's Mooknayak dates from 1920 and Bahishkrit Bharat from 1927, both well after 1888.

Rakhmabai was married in childhood to Dadaji Bhikaji and on attaining adulthood refused to live with him. He sued for restitution of conjugal rights, so statement 3 is correct and the litigation is the leading Indian case on that remedy. The proceedings turned on whether a marriage contracted in infancy could bind an adult woman, which brought the question of the age at which consent becomes meaningful into public debate and contributed directly to the Age of Consent Act of 1891, so statement 2 is correct.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Rakhmabai went on to study medicine in England and became one of India's first practising women doctors, but the case itself raised no issue of a right to education. The answer is 2 and 3, giving (b).
• Options (a), (c) and (d) all import the education claim.

Fort William College was founded in 1800 to train newly arrived Company writers in Indian languages, law, custom and revenue practice before they took up district posts, Wellesley's stated concern being the ignorance and youth of civil servants sent out from England. Hence (d).

• Option (a) is wrong because the Court of Directors in fact disapproved of the institution as expensive and ordered its curtailment, which is why Haileybury was set up in England in 1806 to do the preliminary training there.
• Option (b) is wrong because the revival of oriental learning was the purpose of the Asiatic Society founded by William Jones in 1784 and of the Calcutta Madrasa and Benares Sanskrit College.
• Option (c) is wrong because William Carey's appointment to teach Bengali and Sanskrit was a consequence of the College, not a motive for founding it.

Tagore visited the Besant Theosophical College at Madanapalle in 1919 and there rendered Jana Gana Mana into English as The Morning Song of India, with the principal James Cousins and his wife Margaret, who set the notation still used today.

• Option (c) is therefore correct.
• Option (a) is wrong because Pingali Venkayya's flag work is associated with Machilipatnam and its presentation to Gandhi at Vijayawada in 1921.
• Option (b) is wrong because Pattabhi Sitaramaiah is associated with Masulipatnam and with his defeat by Subhas Chandra Bose at Tripuri in 1939, not with leading Quit India from Madanapalle.
• Option (d) is wrong because the Theosophical Society moved its headquarters to Adyar in Madras in 1882, having been founded in New York in 1875. Hence (c). The Theosophical link is the trap, since Madanapalle does host a Theosophical college, but hosting a college is not hosting the first headquarters.

John Elliot Drinkwater Bethune founded the Hindu Female School in Calcutta in 1849, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar served as its secretary, using the position to advance female education alongside his campaigns for widow remarriage and against child marriage. After Bethune's death the institution was renamed in his memory, so option (c) is correct.

• Option (a) fails on chronology, since Annie Besant arrived in India in 1893 and her educational work centres on the Central Hindu College at Banaras.
• Option (b) fails because Debendranath Tagore's work lies with the Brahmo Samaj and the Tattvabodhini Sabha.
• Option (d) fails on chronology, Sarojini Naidu being born in 1879. Hence (c). Two of the four options can be eliminated on dates alone, which is the efficient route.

• Statement I is correct. Roy was a serious student of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic learning, translated the Vedanta and several Upanishads into Bengali and English, and grounded his critique of idolatry and ritual in the authority of the ancient texts themselves. His argument was that contemporary practice had departed from the monotheism of the original sources, which presupposes respect for those sources rather than rejection of them.
• Statement II is correct. He championed rational and scientific enquiry, campaigned for modern Western education alongside indigenous learning, opposed sati, defended women's property rights and argued against polygamy and the degraded status of women. The two statements are not in tension: this combination of reverence for the classical inheritance with insistence on reason and social equality is the defining feature of his reformism, and the standard textbook formulation. Both hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each require one settled statement to be rejected, and option (d) rejects both, which no reading of Roy supports.

E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, known as Periyar, founded the Self-Respect Movement in Tamil Nadu in 1925 after leaving the Congress over its handling of caste, particularly the Vaikom episode and the question of communal representation. The movement was rationalist and anti-Brahmanical in character, rejecting caste hierarchy, priestly mediation and the ritual authority of scripture, and it institutionalised this in practice through self-respect marriages conducted without Brahmin priests or Vedic rites, which Tamil Nadu later gave legal recognition. It also campaigned for women's rights including widow remarriage and against child marriage, and it fed into the Dravidian political movement through the Dravidar Kazhagam. This gives (a).

• Option (b), Ambedkar, led the parallel and equally radical anti-caste struggle in western India through the Mahad Satyagraha, the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha and later the Constituent Assembly, but he did not found this movement.
• Options (c) and (d), Bhaskarrao Jadhav and Dinkarrao Javalkar, were figures of the non-Brahmin and Satyashodhak tradition in Maharashtra, which makes them plausible distractors, but the Self-Respect Movement is distinctly Periyar's.