Test: Class 12 History NCERT Based- 4 - UPSC MCQ

• Shah Mal lived in a large village in pargana Baraut in Uttar Pradesh. He belonged to a clan of Jat cultivators whose kinship ties extended over chaurasee des (eighty-four villages).

• The lands in the region were irrigated and fertile, with rich dark loam soil. Many of the villagers were prosperous and saw the British land revenue system as oppressive: the revenue demand was high and its collection inflexible.

• Consequently cultivators were losing land to outsiders, to traders and moneylenders who were coming into the area. Shah Mal mobilised the headmen and cultivators of chaurasi des, moving at night from village to village, urging people to rebel against the British.

They provided for noble families and the army.

• Indian merchants, artisans and other workers who had economic dealings with European merchants lived outside these forts in settlements of their own.

• Thus, from the beginning there were separate quarters for Europeans and Indians, which came to be labelled in contemporary writings as the “White Town” and “Black Town” respectively. Once the British captured political power these racial distinctions became sharper.

From the mid-eighteenth century, there was a new phase of change. Commercial centres such as Surat, Masulipatnam and Dhaka, which had grown in the seventeenth century, declined when trade shifted to other places.

• “Moderates” who preferred a more gradual and persuasive approach. Among these Moderates was Gandhiji’s acknowledged political mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, as well as Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who, like Gandhiji, was a lawyer of Gujarati extraction trained in London.

• On Gokhale’s advice, Gandhiji spent a year travelling around British India, getting to know the land and its peoples.

• In the end of December 1929, the Congress held its annual session in the city of Lahore. The meeting was significant for two things: the election of Jawaharlal Nehru as President, signifying the passing of the baton of leadership to the younger generation

• Soon after the observance of this “Independence Day”, Mahatma Gandhi announced that he would lead a march to break one of the most widely disliked laws in\ British India, which gave the state a monopoly in the manufacture and sale of salt.

• His picking on the salt monopoly was another illustration of Gandhiji’s tactical wisdom. For in every Indian household, salt was indispensable; yet people were forbidden from making salt even for domestic use, compelling them to buy it from shops at a high price. The state monopoly over salt was deeply unpopular; by making it his target, Gandhiji hoped to mobilise a wider discontent against British rule.

• The Irwin Declaration of October 1929 committed Britain to eventual Dominion Status for India. Despite such a policy having been implicit for a decade, the Declaration was denounced by many at the Tory Right New Delhi Conference of December 1929 between Irwin and the Indian leaders failed to reach agreement.

• Gandhi now began a campaign of civil disobedience with a view to achieving complete independence

• India's first Civil Disobedience Movement, Champaran Satyagraha, was launched by Mahatma Gandhi to protest against the injustice meted out to tenant farmers in Champaran district of Bihar. It is widely regarded as the place where Gandhi made his first experiments in Satyagraha and then replicated them elsewhere.

• During British rule, many tenant farmers were forced to grow indigo on part of their land, often working under oppressive conditions. This indigo was used to make dye. But the demand for indigo dropped when the Germans invented a cheaper artificial dye.

• However, during the First World War, the German dye ceased to be available and indigo once more became profitable for the British. Many tenants were forced again into indigo cultivation - required by their lease under British law.

• This led to anger and resentment among the tenants, with several alleging that the landlords were using strong- arm tactics. A farmer named Raj Kumar Shukla appealed to Gandhiji to organize the struggle to save the plantation workers.

• Shukla's persuasion paid off and Gandhi visited the district in April 1917 and Satyagraha started. The main objective of the Satyagraha was to create awakening among the peasants against the European planters.

• In the 1920s, Jawaharlal Nehru was increasingly influenced by socialism, and he returned from Europe in 1928 deeply impressed with the Soviet Union.

• As he began working closely with the socialists (Jayaprakash Narayan, Narendra Dev, N.G. Ranga and others), a rift developed between the socialists and the conservatives within the Congress.

• After becoming the Congress President in 1936, Nehru spoke passionately against fascism, and upheld the demands of workers and peasants. Worried by Nehru’s socialist rhetoric, the conservatives, led by Rajendra Prasad and Sardar Patel, threatened to resign from the Working Committee, and some prominent industrialists in Mumbai issued a statement attacking Nehru