Person · judge & social reformer · India
Mahadev Govind Ranade
Also known as Mahadev Govind Ranade, M.G. Ranade, Justice Ranade
Maharashtrian judge and social reformer (1842-1901), Elphinstone College alumnus (1862 — among its earliest graduates), who served on the Bombay High Court from 1893, founded the Prarthana Samaj in 1867 as a Bombay Vedantic-reform movement paralleling Rammohan Roy's Brahmo Samaj, co-founded the Deccan Education Society in 1884 that established Fergusson College at Pune, and presided over the Indian National Social Conference. His writing in The Rise of the Maratha Power (1900) was the first substantial modern Marathi-English historical synthesis of the Maratha state, and his sustained campaign against caste discrimination, widow remarriage prohibition and child marriage made him the Deccan's central nineteenth-century reformer.
- Date
- 1842–1901
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Tradition
- Standard reference and biographical literature; INC proceedings and contemporary memoirs.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
He married Ramabai Ranade when he was thirty-two and she was eleven; her Ranade: His Wife's Reminiscences (1910) is one of the earliest Indian women's political autobiographies and describes the household she entered as a child-bride and her own transformation into a Pune Seva Sadan social worker. Tilak was his bitter opponent on social reform and his sometime ally on economics; Gokhale was his most devoted student.
About the place
Placed at Pune where he taught and reformed.
Connections (3)
- Disciple ofGopal Krishna Gokhale
Gopal Krishna Gokhale was Mahadev Govind Ranade's most devoted student from his Elphinstone and Fergusson days in the 1880s. Gokhale's own moderate political temperament — constitutional, patient, programme-oriented — was substantially Ranade's inheritance, and the Servants of India Society Gokhale founded in 1905 extended Ranade's Prarthana Samaj reform organisation into full-time political work. Ranade's death in 1901 made Gokhale the Deccan moderate tradition's institutional heir.
- Educated atElphinstone College, Bombay
Mahadev Govind Ranade was among the first graduates of Elphinstone College Bombay (1862), where he studied law and English literature and formed the reform orientation that defined his sixty-year career. His Elphinstone classmates and immediate successors — Pherozeshah Mehta, Dinshaw Wacha, Badruddin Tyabji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale — formed the Bombay reform generation that produced the Prarthana Samaj, the Bombay Association and the Indian National Congress.
- Based atPune
Mahadev Govind Ranade based his reform work at Pune from 1871 — founding the Prarthana Samaj there, teaching at the Deccan College, serving on the Fergusson College governing council, and running the Indian National Social Conference. His Pune residence became the moderate nationalist tradition's household workshop, and his wife Ramabai Ranade's own Seva Sadan social-work base at Pune extended his reform programme into Marathi women's education and widow rehabilitation.