BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 127 of 144

Correct — B, Batak Mian. Batak Mian Ansari is the name attached, in Bihar's public memory and in every retelling of the episode, to a plot to poison Gandhi at Motihari during the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917. In the account as it is told, he was a cook in the household of an indigo planter, was ordered to serve Gandhi poisoned milk at a dinner, and instead saw to it that Gandhi never drank it — and paid for that with his job, his house and his village, being driven out and reduced to labouring. The setting is solidly documented even where the incident is not: W. S. Irwin, named repeatedly in Rajendra Prasad's own book on the satyagraha as 'the Manager of the Motihari factory', was Gandhi's principal antagonist in Champaran, an 'old and powerful planter' whose letters to the Statesman attacking the enquiry Prasad reproduces in full. What a student should also know is that the poisoning episode is not in the contemporary record. Rajendra Prasad's Satyagraha in Champaran — the fullest first-hand account, written by the man the retellings say was warned — does not mention it, and neither does the Government of Bihar's own History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar, Volume I (1957), which gives the satyagraha a chapter of more than a hundred pages. The story surfaced much later through Batak Mian's family and was carried into national newspapers around the Champaran centenary. That is why the honest way to hold this answer is: Batak Mian is unquestionably the name the question is looking for, and the other three options are impossible — but the details of the episode differ between retellings, so learn the name and be careful with the trimmings.

• (a)Muzaffar Ahmad — Wrong person, wrong province, wrong politics. Muzaffar Ahmad (5 August 1889 – 18 December 1973), known as Kakababu, was a Bengali journalist born at Musapur on Sandwip Island in Chittagong district, and a co-founder of the Communist Party of India. He was sentenced to four years in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case of 1924 and was the chief accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case after the arrests of 20 March 1929, serving until 1936 — the longest term of any of the accused. He had no connection with Bihar, with Champaran or with a kitchen.
• (c)Mir Bakawal — Not a person at all — a Mughal court office, and the trap works precisely because it sounds like a name and is connected with cooking. Abu'l Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari describes the emperor appointing 'a zealous and sincere man as Mir Bakawal, or Master of the Kitchen, upon whose insight the success of the department depends'. The same passage sets out Akbar's anti-poisoning drill: the cook tasted the food, then the Bakawal, then the Mir Bakawal, who sealed the dishes and listed their contents, with macebearers walking before and behind to keep anyone from approaching them. Sixteenth-century Agra, not twentieth-century Motihari.
• (d)None of them — A candidate who has never met the story might reach for this, reasoning that no cook could plausibly be a named figure in the freedom struggle. But the name exists, it is specific, and BPSC has asked about it precisely because Bihar remembers it: Batak Mian Ansari of Champaran, honoured by Rajendra Prasad on a presidential visit to Motihari in 1950 with an order that land be granted to him. Choosing (d) also throws away the elimination that makes this question easy — two of the three named options can be ruled out on sight.

The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 was Gandhi's first civil-disobedience campaign on Indian soil and the reason Bihar occupies the place it does in the freedom struggle. Under the tinkathia system, tenants of the north Bihar indigo estates were bound to grow indigo for the planter on a fixed share of their holding at a price the planter set — five kathas per bigha around 1860, cut to three kathas per bigha about 1867, which is where the name comes from. When German synthetic dye destroyed the market for natural indigo, the planters released tenants from the obligation only against heavy exactions known as sharahbeshi, tawan and harja. Raj Kumar Shukla, an indigo raiyat, pursued Gandhi at the Lucknow Congress of 1916 until he agreed to come. Gandhi reached Motihari in April 1917, was at once served an order under Section 144 CrPC to leave the district — the Commissioner of Tirhut, L. F. Morshead, having written that Gandhi's 'object is likely to be agitation rather than a genuine search for knowledge' — and refused to go; the case was withdrawn. Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Ramnavmi Prasad, Mazharul Haq and J. B. Kripalani recorded the statements of some 25,000 ryots across the district — the figure printed as 2,500 in the body of K. K. Datta's official history and corrected to 25,000 in that volume's own Corrigenda, which is the number worth carrying because the scale is the point. The Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee followed, with Gandhi on it as the tenants' representative, and its report produced the Champaran Agrarian Act, which voided any contract obliging a tenant to set land aside for a particular crop and cut the enhanced rents by 26 per cent generally and 20 per cent on Turkaulia Limited's estates.

This is a pure elimination question, and it is winnable even by a candidate who has never heard of Batak Mian. Work down the options rather than searching memory for the right one. Muzaffar Ahmad is a name from Bengal communism, a full generation and a whole political world away from a Champaran kitchen in 1917 — and a candidate who knows the Meerut Conspiracy Case knows it cannot be him. Mir Bakawal is the more elegant trap: it reads like a proper name and it is about food, but it is a Mughal designation for the Master of the Kitchen, which is the sort of half-remembered word that feels plausible under time pressure. That leaves 'Batak Mian' and 'None of them', and the question's own phrasing settles it — a stem this specific, naming a state, a year and a method, is not written about a man who does not exist. The single discriminating fact is therefore not the poisoning story at all: it is knowing that 'Mir Bakawal' is a job and not a person. That is the piece of knowledge the setter is really testing, and it is worth carrying, because Mughal administrative titles reappear as distractors across BPSC and UPSC papers alike. One further habit is worth building here. When a state commission asks about a figure who lives mainly in local memory, learn the name and the outline and stop there — do not memorise the circumstantial detail, because the retellings do not agree with one another and an exam will never turn on which of them is right.

• Batak Mian Ansari, of Champaran, is the cook named in every account of the 1917 poisoning plot at Motihari; Rajendra Prasad, on a visit to Motihari as President of India in 1950, publicly recalled the episode and ordered that land be granted to him — though the acreage differs between accounts and the family says only a fraction was ever received
• The episode is absent from the contemporary record: Rajendra Prasad's Satyagraha in Champaran (Navajivan; second revised edition, September 1949) does not mention it, and neither does the Government of Bihar's official History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar, Volume I (1957), whose Chapter VI, 'Mahatma's Mission in Champaran', runs to over a hundred pages
• W. S. Irwin, the manager of the Motihari indigo factory, is real and well attested — Rajendra Prasad calls him 'an old and powerful planter', quotes his letter of 16 October 1917, and reprints the letters he published in the Statesman in October 1917 attacking the Champaran enquiry
• Mir Bakawal was the Master of the Imperial Kitchen under Akbar; the Ain-i-Akbari records that food was tasted by the cook, then the Bakawal, then the Mir Bakawal, who sealed the dishes with his own seal, and that macebearers escorted the dishes to keep anyone from approaching them
• Muzaffar Ahmad (1889–1973), the first option, was a co-founder of the Communist Party of India from Sandwip in Chittagong district — accused in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case of 1924 and the Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929, with no Bihar connection whatever

• Treating 'Mir Bakawal' as a personal name; it is the Mughal designation for the Master of the Kitchen, deliberately chosen here because it sounds like a name and belongs to the world of food
• Confusing Muzaffar Ahmad, the CPI founder from Bengal, with any of the Bihari Muslim figures of the Champaran period such as Mazharul Haq
• Reciting the poisoning story with borrowed detail — the retellings disagree on whether Batak Mian warned Gandhi directly or told Rajendra Prasad, and on how much land was granted; the name is safe, the trimmings are not

BPSC likes the human detail of Bihar's freedom struggle — the cook, the raiyat who fetched Gandhi, the district committee member — and it will name a person and expect the candidate to place him. It asks these as straight one-line recall with one or two impossible options thrown in, so elimination pays. UPSC handles Champaran quite differently: it asks what the satyagraha signified (2018: the joining of peasant unrest to the national movement), or tests the personnel through paired statements (2010: Raj Kumar Shukla, not Rajendra Prasad, brought Gandhi to Champaran; Kripalani was there), or simply asks where Gandhi's first Indian satyagraha took place.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In the Mughal administration, the 'Mir Bakawal' was the officer in charge of which department?

  • (a)The imperial kitchen
  • (b)The imperial stables
  • (c)The military pay and accounts office
  • (d)The royal karkhanas and stores

  Answer(a) The imperial kitchen — Abu'l Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari calls the Mir Bakawal the 'Master of the Kitchen'. The military pay office was under the Mir Bakhshi and the karkhanas and stores under the Mir Saman and the Diwan-i-Buyutat.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following best describes the tinkathia system that Gandhi went to Champaran to fight in 1917?

  • (a)A tax of one-third of the produce levied on all tenants of north Bihar
  • (b)An obligation on the tenant to grow indigo on three kathas of every bigha of his holding for the planter
  • (c)A system of three-year leases granted to European planters by the Bihar zamindars
  • (d)A revenue settlement introduced in Champaran by Lord Cornwallis in 1793

  Answer(b) An obligation on the tenant to grow indigo on three kathas of every bigha of his holding for the planter — abolished by the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918 after the enquiry committee on which Gandhi sat.