Test: UPSC Prelims (Past Year Questions) Modern History 2015-20 -1 - UPSC MCQ

Rukhmabai (1864-1955) was the first practising female doctor in colonial India.
She was married off at the young age of eleven. She refused to live her husband Dadaji Bhikaji  by going against the norms of society.

In 1885, after 12 years of marriage, Bhikaji sought “restitution of conjugal rights”.
The British precedents could not be implied in this case, as British law was meant to be
applied in the case of consenting adults.

Judgement on the case stated that Rukhmabai had been wed as an innocent child, had no say in the matter and now couldn’t be forced.
In March 1887, Rukhmabai was ordered to go live with her husband or spend six months in jail. Rukhmabai bravely said that she would rather face maximum penalty than accept the verdict given. Subsequently,  Rukhmabai wrote to Queen Victoria. The Queen overruled the court’s verdict and dissolved the marriage.

The case led to the influence on the passage of the Age of Consent Act, 1891, which made child marriages illegal across the British Empire.

S1 and S2: Among the most popular and influential swadeshi texts was Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar’s (1869-1912) work, Desher Katha (Story of the Nation), written in 1904. It summarized the work of M. G. Ranade and D. Naoroji in a popular idiom and warned in its concluding chapter against the colonial state’s “hypnotic conquest of the mind.” The colonial state proscribed the text in 1910, but by then it had sold over 15,000 copies, informed swadeshi street plays and folk songs, and had assumed the status of mandatory reading for an entire generation of swadeshi activists

S3: This was clearly national in context. He was compatriot of Sri Aurobindo and was against overall colonial hegemony – clearly in the national context. However as there is no specific reference available to know for sure – one might go by literal interpretation of the word to mean Desh in the context of Bengal too. But we would like to go with A – as in the larger context Desh refers to nation at large.

Option A: They were applicable to both.

Option C: This was due to commercialization of agriculture, not land reforms.

1. The Act expressly asserted the Crown’s sovereignty over British India.

2. It allotted Rs 100,000 to promote education in Indian masses and allowed them to open anywhere anytime.

3. This act permitted Christian missionaries to propagate English and preach their religion.

S2: The National Council of Education (or NCE) was an organisation founded by Indian nationalists in Bengal in 1906 to promote science and technology as part of a swadeshi industrialisation movement. It established the Bengal National College and Bengal Institute which would later merge to form Jadavpur University.

S1: Harijan Sevak Sangh is a non-profit organisation founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1932 to eradicate untouchability in India, working for Harijan or Dalit people and upliftment of scheduled castes of India.

S2: All India Kisan Sabha (All India Peasants Union, also known as the Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Sabha), was the name of the peasants front of the undivided Communist Party of India, an important peasant movement formed by Sahajanand Saraswati in 1936.

S3: It was founded in 1925 by S. Ramanathan who invited E. V. Ramasamy (also called as Periyar by his devoted followers) to head the movement in Tamil Nadu, India against Brahminism.

S2: He supported it. Pasting this section from B.R. Nanda’s book:

S3: This is quite well known.

The HMS was founded in Howrah in 1948 by socialists Forward Bloc followers and independent unionists which included Basawon Singh (Sinha), Ashok Mehta, R.S. Ruikar, Maniben Kara, Shibnath Banerjee, R.A. Khedgikar, T.S. Ramanujam, V.S. Mathur, G.G. Mehta. R.S. Ruikar was elected president and Ashok Mehta general secretary. HMS absorbed the Royist Indian Federation of Labour and the Hind Mazdoor Panchayat, which was formed in 1948 by socialists leaving the increasingly communist dominated AITUC.

The French assistance to Tipu Sultan in 1798 was the last instance of active intervention of any other European power in India. To counter the intrigues of Napoleon and any further development in French Power in India, Wellesley, who was extremely influenced with the imperial thoughts, came up with the scheme of eliminating the French Power from India for ever. He placed the British on the head of the great Indian confederacy. The Fourth Anglo Mysore war had placed England on the Military supremacy in India and now Wellesley used the Subsidiary Alliance System aggressively.

1. It was a Treaty, between the company and the Indian native rulers. In return for a payment or subsidy, the company would place garrison troops in that ruler’s territory to fight against their rivals.

2. An Indian ruler entering into a subsidiary alliance with the British would accept British forces within his territory and to pay for their maintenance.

Lajpat Rai adopted Mazzini as his own guru after reading Surendranath’s Speeches. In 1896, he wrote a series of books in Urdu, which he named the ‘Great Men of the World’. The first great man he chose was his Italian guru Giuseppe Mazzini, and then Garibaldi, along with Sivaji, Dayananda and Sri Krishna. His purpose in selecting Mazzini and Garibladi was to infuse patriotic sentiment in the youth of Punjab, who had no access to books in English.

S2: Also, it led the British government to enact laws so that the land of tribals could not be taken by outsiders (dikus).

Option C: A major impact of British rule was the dictated growth of commercial crops like tea and indigo to fulfil the needs of European markets.

Option D: Colonial rule negatively affected Indian industries and handicrafts, hence Indian owned factories and handicrafts were on decline. Consequently there were new cities coming up called the presidency towns along with de-urbanization phenomenon (machalipatnam lost its importance). There was no rapid increase in urban population.

S2 and S3: In 1823, the Governor-General-in Council appointed a “General Committee of Public Instruction”, which had the responsibility to grant the one lakh of rupees for education. That committee consisted of 10 European members of which Lord Macaulay was the president. The committee decided to spend major portions from the grant for the improvement of oriental literature. Even, the General Committee of Public Instruction also was not able to decide the medium of instruction by vote; because out of ten members, five were supporters of English language or Anglicist as the medium of instruction and the rest were supporters of oriental or classic language or Classicists as a medium of instruction. This is the famous Anglicist and Classicists controversy. As a president of General Committee of Public Instruction, Lord Macaulay wrote a minute on 2nd February 1835, where he made the conclusion regarding the controversy. Lord Macaulay stressed the implementation of the English language as a medium of instruction through his minute. According to him, English was the best medium of instruction.

1. Swami Dayanand established Arya Samaj = 1875

2. Dinabandhu Mitra wrote Neeldarpan = 1858-1859

3. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Anandmath = 1882

4. Satyendranath Tagore became the first Indian to succeed in the Indian Civil Services Examination = 1863