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The 'Arya Mahila Samaj', the 'Sharada Sadan' and the 'Mukti Mission' were founded by:
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Answer: Option D — Pandita Ramabai
Detailed Solution
The Arya Mahila Samaj (1882), the Sharada Sadan (1889) and the Mukti Mission (1889) were founded by Pandita Ramabai Saraswati.
About Pandita Ramabai:
- She was born on 23 April 1858 in a Marathi Brahmin family, in the forests of the Western Ghats (in present-day Karnataka).
- Her father, Anant Shastri Dongre, was a Sanskrit scholar who taught her Sanskrit, against the custom of the time.
- After the death of her parents during a famine, she travelled across India with her brother, reciting Sanskrit texts.
- In Calcutta, scholars were so impressed by her knowledge of Sanskrit that they gave her the titles "Pandita" and "Saraswati" (1878).
- She married a lawyer, Bipin Behari Medhavi, of a lower caste; he died within two years, leaving her a widow with a young daughter.
Her work for women:
- In 1882, she founded the Arya Mahila Samaj in Pune, to promote the education of women and to oppose child marriage.
- She gave evidence before the Hunter Education Commission (1882), demanding the training of women teachers and women doctors.
- She went to England in 1883, where she converted to Christianity, and then to the United States (1886-1888), where she wrote "The High-Caste Hindu Woman" (1887), a powerful book on the condition of Hindu women.
- In 1889, she founded the Sharada Sadan, a home and school for widows, in Bombay, which later moved to Pune.
- In 1889 (later expanded in the 1890s), she founded the Mukti Mission at Kedgaon, near Pune, a home for widows, orphans and destitute women.
NCERT on Pandita Ramabai:
- NCERT notes that Pandita Ramabai, a great scholar of Sanskrit, felt that Hinduism was oppressive towards women, and wrote a book about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women.
- She founded a widows' home at Poona to provide shelter to widows who had been treated badly by their husbands' families.
- She translated the Bible into Marathi.
- She died on 5 April 1922.
Why not the other options?
- ✗Savitribai Phule, Tarabai Shinde and Anandibai Joshi were other pioneering women of Maharashtra.
Quick tip
Remember: Pandita Ramabai = Arya Mahila Samaj (1882), Sharada Sadan (1889), Mukti Mission (Kedgaon); "The High-Caste Hindu Woman" (1887).
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Socio-Religious Reform Movements — Preparation
This question tests your understanding of Socio-Religious Reform Movements, a key topic in the General Knowledge section. The detailed solution above uses a step-by-step approach to show the reasoning, and where available, a shortcut that helps you solve similar questions in under 90 seconds during the actual exam.
In the 19th century, reformers worked to remove social evils and revive Indian society. This topic covers organisations such as the Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj, Prarthana Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission, Theosophical Society, Satyashodhak Samaj and the Aligarh Movement, along with their founders and the social reforms they achieved. Questions usually ask who founded an organisation and when, or which reformer is linked to a reform. For example, Raja Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo Samaj and campaigned against sati, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar championed widow remarriage, and Jyotiba Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj. A table of organisation, founder, year and place covers most questions. Practise the socio-religious reform movements questions below, written in the style of the general awareness sections of exams such as SSC, banking, railways, CUET GAT, MAH CET and CLAT. Each question comes with a detailed explanation that adds related facts, so every question helps you revise more than one point.