ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS :
I. Answer the following questions in one sentence each :
1. How people were divided based on castes ?
Ans: Brahmans and Kshatriya were considered “upper castes”, others, such as traders and money lenders were placed after them, then peasants and artisans such as weavers or potters and at the lowest rung were cities and village cleaners .
2. What was the lower caste restricted from ?
Ans: At the lowest rung was the labourers who kept cities and villages clean were not allowed to enter temples, draw water from the wells used by upper class, or bathe in ponds where upper castes bathed .
3. Who established schools for girls in late nineteenth country ?
Ans: Schools for girls were established by the Arya Samaj in Punjab and Jyotirao Phule in Maharashtra .
4. What was done to encourage Muslim women to read and write ?
Ans: First women learnt to read Koran in Arabic, Mumtaz Ali reinterpreted verses from the Koran these were meant to encourage women to read about religion and domestic management in a language they could understand .
5. Which leaders lent their support to demands for greater equality and freedom for women ?
Ans: In the twentieth century, leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose lent their support to demands for greater equality and freedom for women .
6. What work was available in cities for labourers ?
Ans: According to the new demands of labour they needed drains that had to be dug roads laid, buildings constructed, and cities to be cleaned so they required diggers , coolies , bricklayers , sewage cleaners , sweepers , rickshaw pullers .
7. What were the job opportunities in Army ?
Ans: The army offered a lot of job opportunities . A number of Mahar people, who were regarded as untouchable, found jobs in the Mahar regiment .
8. Who should unite to challenge caste discrimination ?
Ans: Phule proposed that shudras (labour castes) and AtiShudras (untouchable) should unite to challenge caste discrimination .
9. Why was the content in the book Gulamgiri ?
Ans: Phule dedicated his book to all those Americans who had fought to free slaves, thus establishing a link between the conditions of the “lower” castes in India and the black slaves in America .
10. Who continued movement for caste reform in twentieth century after Phule ?
Ans: The movement for caste reform was continued in twentieth century by great Dalit leaders like Dr B. K. Ambedkar in western India and E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker in the south .
11. What does ‘sati’ mean ?
Ans: The word sati means ‘virtuous women’ .
12. Name the 4 castes that divided the people ?
Ans: The 4 castes were Kshatriyas, Brahmanas, Vaishyas and Shudras .
13. Who started girl schools in Maharashtra ?
Ans: Jyotiba Phule started schools for girls in Maharashtra .
14. Who translated an old Buddhist text that was critical of the caste system ?
Ans: Raja Ram Mohan Roy translated an old Buddhist text that was critical of the caste system .
15. What did the Aligarh University offer ?
Ans: The Aligarh Muslim University offered modern education, including the western sciences to Muslim .
16. Where was the first Singh Sabha formed ?
Ans: The first Singh Sabha was formed at Amritsar in 1873 and later in Lahore in 1879 .
II. Answer the following questions in about three sentences :
1. How are the conditions of the women’s in the recent scenario ?
Ans: Nowadays most girls from middle class families go to school, and often study with boys on growing up, many of them go to colleges and universities, and take up jobs after that. They have to be adults before they are legally married, and according to law, they can marry anyone they like, from any caste and community, and widows can remarry too . All women like all men, can vote and stand for elections .
2. What were the conditions of the women two hundred years ago ?
Ans: i) Two hundred years ago things were very different. Most children were married off at an early age .
ii) Both Hindu and Muslim men could marry more than one wife .
iii) In some parts of the country, widows were praised if they chose death by burning themselves on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Women who died in this manner are called sati .
iv) Women rights to property were also restricted .
v) Most women had no access to education. In many parts of the country people believed that if a woman was educated she would become a widow .
3.How was the strategy adopted by Ram Mohan Roy was adopted by other reformers ?
Ans: The strategy adopted by Ram Mohan Roy was used by other reformers as well. Whenever they wished to challenge a practice that seemed harmful , they tried to find a verse or sentence in the ancient sacred texts that supported their points of view .
4. How was Vidhyasagar Ishwarchandra responsible for passing in the widow Remarriage Act ?
Ans: i) Ishwarchandra used the ancient texts to suggest that widows could remarry .
ii) His suggestions were adopted by the British officials and a law was passed in 1856 pertaining to widow marriage .
iii) Those that were against the remarriage of widows opposed him and even boycotted him .
5. What happened in second half of nineteenth century ?
Ans: i) By the second half of the nineteenth century, the movement in favour of widow remarriage spread to other parts of the country .
ii) In the Telugu speaking areas of Madras presidency Veerasalingam Pantulu formed an association for widow remarriage .
iii) In the north, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the reform association called Arya Samaj also supposed widow remarriage .
6. Why were people afraid of sending girls to school in mid nineteenth century ?
Ans: i) Vidyasagar in Calcutta and many other reformers in Bombay set up schools for girls .
ii) When the first schools were opened in the mid-nineteenth century,many people were afraid of them. They feared that schools would take girls away from home, prevent them from doing their domestic duties .
iii) The girls had to travel through public places in order to reach school. Many people felt that girls should stay away from public places .
iv) Therefore, throughout the nineteenth century, most educated women were taught at home by liberal fathers or husbands .
7. How were Muslim women taught in nineteenth century ?
Ans: i) In aristocratic Muslim households in north India, women learnt to read the Koran in Arabic
ii) They were taught by women who came home to teach .
iii) Some reformers such as Mumtaz Ali reinterpreted verses from the Koran to agree for women education
8. How did Muslim women’s play a critical role with regards to educating women’s ?
Ans: i) From the early twentieth century, Muslim women like the Begums of Bhopal played a notable role in promoting education among women .
ii) They founded a primary school for girls at Aligarh . Another remarkable woman, Begum Rokeya Hossain started schools for Muslim girls at Patna and Calcutta .
iii) She was fearless critic of conservative ideas, arguing that religious leaders of every faith accorded an inferior place to women .
9. How was the progress of women in India in 1880’s ?
Ans: i) By 1880’s, Indian women began to enter universities. Some of them trained to be doctors, some became teachers .
ii) Many women began to write and publish their critical views on the place of women in society .
iii) Tarabai Shinde, a woman educated at home at Poona, published a book, Stripurushtulna (a comparison between women and men), criticizing the social differences between men and women .
10. How did Pandita Ramabai help the women’s ?
Ans: i) Pandit Ramabai , a great scholar of Sanskrit, felt that Hinduism was oppressive towards women, and wrote a book about miserable lives of upper caste Hindu women .
ii) She founded a widow’s home at Poona to provide shelter to widows who had been treated badly by their husband’s relatives .
iii) Here women were trained so that they could support themselves economically .
11. Where did the labour come from for jobs in cities ?
Ans: i) The poor from the villages and small towns, many of them from low castes, began moving to the cities where there was a new demand for labour .
ii) Some also went to work in plantations in Assam, Mauritius, Trinidad and Indonesia work in the new location was often very hard .
iii) But the poor, the people from lower castes,saw this as an opportunity to get away from the oppressive hold that upper caste landowners had on them .
III. Answer the following questions in about four sentences :
1. How did the movement of social change reach wider ?
Ans: i) In early nineteenth century, debates and discussions about social customs and practices took a new character .
ii) For the first time books, newspapers, magazines, leaflets and pamphlets were printed .
iii) These were for cheaper and far more accessible than the manuscripts .
iv) All kinds of issues social, political, economic and religious could now be debated and discussed by men in the new cities . The discussions could reach out to a wider public and could become linked to movement for social change.
2. What reforms did Raja Ram Mohan Roy do ?
Ans: i) Raj Ram Mohan Roy was a reformer who founded a reform association known as the Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta .
ii) People such as Roy are described as reformers because they felt that changes were necessary in society and unjust practices needed to be removed .
iii) He thought that the best way to ensure such changes was by telling people to give up old practices and adopt a new way of life .
3. What did Raja Ram mohan Roy write about status of women ?
Ans: Ram Mohan Roy was keen to spread the knowledge of western education in the country and bring about greater freedom and equality for women. He wrote about the way women were forced to bear the burden of domestic work, confined to the kitchen and not allowed to move out and become educated .
4. How did Ram Mohan Roy change the lives of widows ?
Ans: i) Ram Mohan Roy was particularly moved by the problems faced by widows in their lives. He began to campaign against the practice of sati .
ii) He tried to show through his writings that the practise of widow burning was not found in ancient texts .
iii) British had also began to criticize Indian traditions and customs. They were willing to listen to Ram Mohan Roy who was reputed to be a learned man .
5. What were the opinion of orthodox Hindus and Muslims regarding women education ?
Ans: i) Many Hindu nationalists felt that Hindu women were adopting western ways and that this would corrupt Hindu culture and bring down family values .
ii) Orthodox Muslims were also worried about the impact of these changes .
6. How did the women actively work for reforms by the end of the nineteenth century ?
Ans: i) By the end of the nineteenth century, women themselves were actively working for reform. They wrote books, edited magazines, founded schools and training centres and set up women’s associations .
ii) From the early twentieth century, they formed political pressure groups to push through laws for female suffrage and better health care and education for women .
iii) Some of them joined various kinds of nationalist and socialist movements .
7. How did the Social Reformers criticize the caste inequalities ?
Ans: i)Ram Mohan Roy translated an old Buddhist text that was critical of caste .
ii) The Prarthana Samaj stuck to the tradition of Bhakti that believed in spiritual equality of all castes .
iii) In Bombay , the Paramhans Mandali was founded to work for the abolition of caste .
iv) Christian missionaries began setting up schools for tribal groups and “lower” caste children , these children were thus helped with some resources to make their way to change the world .
8. How did the social reformers from lower caste confronted against social inequality and injustice ?
Ans: i) The Satnami movement in central India,founded by a leader named Ghasidas who came from a ‘low’ caste,worked among the leather workers and organised a movement to improve their social status .
ii) In eastern Bengal,Haridas Thakur’s Matua sect worked among ‘low’ caste Chandala cultivators Haridas questioned Brahmanical texts that supported the caste system .
iii) Shri Narayana Guru, proclaimed the ideas of unity of all people within one sect a single caste and one guru .
9. Write about Mahatma Jyotiba Phule ?
Ans: One of the most vocal among the ‘low-caste’ leaders was Mahatma Jyotiba Phule . He was born in 1827, he studied in schools set up by Christian missionaries on growing up he developed his own ideas about the injustices of caste society. He set out to attack the Brahmans claim that they were superior to others,since they were Aryans .
10. Why did Jyotirao Phule attack the Brahmans ?
Ans: i) Jyotirao Phule attacked the Brahmans because they claimed that they were superior to others,since they were Aryans .
ii) Phule argued that the Aryans were foreigners who came from outside the subcontinent,and defeated and supressed the children of the country .
iii) The Aryans had established their dominance and began looking at the defeated population as inferior or low castes .
11. How was Ambedkar’s life in childhood days ?
Ans: Ambedkar was born into a Mahar family. As a child he experienced what caste prejudice meant in everyday life. In school he was forced to sit outside the classroom on the ground and was not allowed to drink water from taps that upper-caste children used. After finishing school, he got a fellowship to go to the US for higher studies.
12. What was the movement carried out by the non-Brahmans in the early 20th century ?
Ans: In the early twentieth century the initiative came from those non-Brahman castes that had acquired access to education,wealth and influence. They argued that Brahmans were heirs of Aryan invaders from the north who had conquered southern lands from the original inhabitants of the region the Dravidian races .
13. What was the opinion of E.V.Ramaswamy Naicker regarding untouchables ?
Ans: E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker,or Periyar, as he is called came from middle class family. He has been an ascetic in his early life and had studied Sanskrit scriptures carefully. Periyar founded the self-respect movement. The untouchables were the true upholders of an original Tamil and Dravidian culture. They had been subjugated by the Brahmans. He felt that all religious authorities saw social divisions and inequality as God given. The untouchables had to free themselves from all religions in order to achieve social equality .
14. What was the opinion of E.V. Ramaswamy regarding Hindu scripts ?
Ans: i) Periyar was an outspoken critic of Hindu scriptures,especially the codes of manu, the ancient law giver and the Bhagwad Gita and the Ramayana.He said that these texts had been used to establish the authority of Brahmans over lower castes and the domination of men over women .
ii) The speeches,writings and movements of lower caste leaders did lead to rethinking and some self-criticism among upper-caste nationalist leaders .
iii) The orthodox Hindu society also reacted by founding Sanatan Dharma Sabhas and the Bharat Dharma Mahamandals,etc .