BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 137 of 144

Correct — C, Karnataka. Ambabai is the woman satyagrahi of the Civil Disobedience years who is placed at Udupi — spelt Udipi in the older records — on the Kannada-speaking coast. Every version of the account is consistent on the same details: married at twelve, widowed at sixteen, she picketed shops selling foreign cloth and liquor at Udupi, was arrested and imprisoned, and between prison terms made speeches, taught spinning and organised prabhat pheris, the dawn processions that were the signature mobilising device of 1930–34. Udupi has never belonged to any of the other three States. It sat in South Kanara district of the Madras Presidency through the freedom struggle; the States Reorganisation Act of 1956 split that district, sending Kasaragod taluk to the new Kerala and the rest, Udupi and Mangalore included, to Mysore State, which was renamed Karnataka on 1 November 1973. Udupi became a district in its own right only in 1997, carved out of Dakshina Kannada. Two honest caveats belong on this card. This paper has no official key — the answer is ours, reached independently by two models that could not see each other's work, and both marked it medium rather than high confidence. The reason for that caution is sourcing rather than geography: the Ambabai account could not be traced in this pass to a government, archival or scholarly text that could actually be opened. She does not appear in the full texts of Sumit Sarkar's Modern India 1885–1947, of Bipan Chandra and others' India's Struggle for Independence, or of Manmohan Kaur's Role of Women in the Freedom Movement 1857–1947, and the specialist studies of women in the movement that most likely carry her are behind lending restrictions. So treat the biography as the received account rather than as a documented one. What the question actually turns on is safe: the name Ambabai is attached to Udupi wherever the story is told, and Udupi is in Karnataka.

• (a)Kerala — The pull is real, because Udupi's coast and Malabar were both parts of the same Madras Presidency, and the 1956 reorganisation cut South Kanara in two — Kasaragod taluk did go to Kerala, Udupi did not. Malabar also ran one of the fiercest women's campaigns of the period, so a candidate half-remembering a coastal woman picketer reaches for Kerala. But Kerala's figure of exactly that campaign is A. V. Kuttimalu Amma of Anakkara in Palakkad, who organised the women's picketing at Thrissur on 25 April 1931 with Margaret Pavamani and was jailed in 1932 along with her two-month-old baby. Nothing in the Ambabai account touches Malabar, Cochin or Travancore.
• (b)Andhra Pradesh — Coastal Andhra was also Madras Presidency territory, was a salt-satyagraha and no-revenue stronghold, and contributed 2,878 of the 1930–31 jail-goers on Jawaharlal Nehru's own tally, so the option is not absurd. It also produced the best-documented woman organiser of the period, Durgabai Deshmukh of Rajahmundry in East Godavari, who marshalled women satyagrahis during Civil Disobedience, was imprisoned three times between 1930 and 1933, founded the Andhra Mahila Sabha in 1937, was the only woman on the Constituent Assembly's panel of chairmen and became the first chairperson of the Central Social Welfare Board in 1953. Ambabai's picketing, however, is placed at Udupi, not at Kakinada, Rajahmundry or Masulipatam.
• (d)Madhya Pradesh — This is the throwaway option and it is wrong on both geography and the kind of action involved. Ambabai's arena was coastal urban picketing of imported cloth and liquor shops; the Central Provinces' celebrated contribution to the same years was inland and different in character — the forest satyagraha offered in Betul in May 1932 under tribal leaders such as Maimu Gond and Chaitu Koiku, in a province that supplied 2,255 of the 1930–31 jail-goers. No telling of the Ambabai story places her anywhere in the Narmada valley or the Central Provinces, and no woman of that name is attached to the region's movement.

The Civil Disobedience Movement, launched with the Dandi march in March 1930 and revived after the truce broke down in January 1932, was the moment Indian women entered the national movement in numbers. Its programme was made for mass, local, repeatable action: breaking the salt law, refusing land revenue and chaukidari tax, and above all picketing shops that sold foreign cloth and liquor — work that could be done by a group standing outside a shop in its own town, day after day, without leadership or funds. Women took to that last item in particular, together with prabhat pheris, the dawn processions that sang nationalist songs through a neighbourhood before the working day began. The scale is documented. Of the 29,054 Civil Disobedience prisoners counted on 15 November 1930, 359 were women and 2,050 were under seventeen; in the second phase, an official break-up of 74,671 convictions up to April 1933 counts 3,630 women. Sumit Sarkar reads this as a real step forward in the emancipation of Indian women, and quotes a U.P. police chief complaining in September 1930 that loyal officials had 'suffered more from taunts and abuse from their female relatives than from any other source'. The risk was not symbolic: at Dharasana on the Bombay coast in May 1930 the American journalist Webb Miller watched 'unresisting men being methodically bashed into a bloody pulp', and Purshotamdas Thakurdas protested at 'the beating of women and little children of ten and twelve years of age by the police'. Ambabai belongs to that cohort: not a national leader, but one of the thousands of local women whose picketing and prison terms made the movement a mass movement.

The question is not really about Ambabai's biography — it is a place-to-State conversion, and it is solved by one anchor. Fix the town first: every version of the account puts her picketing at Udupi. Then convert the town to a modern State, and be careful not to reason from the 1930 map, because in 1930 Udupi was in the Madras Presidency along with Malabar, coastal Andhra and Tamil country, which is exactly why three of the four options are old Madras Presidency territory and only one is not. The conversion that matters is 1956: South Kanara's Kannada-speaking talukas, Udupi among them, went to Mysore State, later renamed Karnataka; only Kasaragod went to Kerala. If you cannot recall the Ambabai story at all, the option set still leans one way — Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh each have their own famous women of the movement whose names a candidate would recognise, while Karnataka's regional satyagrahis are the ones examiners reach for when they want an unfamiliar name. Note the sourcing limit stated above, and note one more hazard the setter may not have intended: Ambabai is also the popular name of the goddess Mahalakshmi at Kolhapur, so the word itself pulls a candidate towards Maharashtra — which is not on the list.

• Of the 29,054 Civil Disobedience prisoners counted on 15 November 1930, 359 were women and 2,050 were below the age of 17 (Sumit Sarkar, Modern India 1885–1947)
• In the second phase of Civil Disobedience, an official break-up of 74,671 convictions up to April 1933 records 3,630 women
• Jawaharlal Nehru estimated 92,124 jail-goers in 1930–31, the largest contingents being Bengal 15,000, Bihar 14,251, U.P. 12,651 and Punjab 12,000
• Udupi lay in South Kanara district of the Madras Presidency; in 1956 Kasaragod taluk went to Kerala and the rest of the district to Mysore State, renamed Karnataka on 1 November 1973; Udupi became a separate district in 1997
• Karnataka's signature Civil Disobedience action was the 1932 no-tax movement in Ankola and Siddapur talukas of North Kanara, where over 200 villages withheld revenue; on 1 May 1932 about 4,000 villagers carried freshly cut firewood into Ankola taluka headquarters for auction
• Picketing of foreign-cloth and liquor shops and the organising of prabhat pheris were the two activities in which women's participation was heaviest in 1930–34
• The Congress put the principle behind that participation on paper in the middle of the movement: the Karachi resolution of March 1931 promised equality before the law irrespective of sex and adult suffrage

• Reading the modern State map back into 1930 — Udupi was Madras Presidency territory then, and the question is asking which present-day State the place now falls in
• Confusing this Ambabai with the goddess Ambabai (Mahalakshmi) of Kolhapur, which pulls the mind towards Maharashtra — a State that is not even on the option list
• Assuming that because Malabar and coastal Andhra ran famous women's campaigns, any unfamiliar woman picketer must belong to one of them

BPSC likes single-name recall of regionally rooted, less celebrated freedom fighters and then asks you to place them on the present-day State map — the whole item is a name-to-place pairing with four States as options, and the same habit produces its questions on Sahajanand Saraswati and Bihar or on Annie Besant's 1918 Bihar tour. UPSC almost never asks which State a person 'belonged to'; it asks what the person did — Aruna Asaf Ali and the Quit India underground, Usha Mehta and the secret Congress Radio — or ties a named leader to one specific episode, as with Rajagopalachari and the Vedaranyam salt march of April 1930.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Before the States Reorganisation of 1956, Udupi formed part of which district of the Madras Presidency?

  • (a)South Kanara
  • (b)Malabar
  • (c)North Kanara
  • (d)Bellary

  Answer(a) South Kanara — its Kannada-speaking talukas, Udupi included, went to Mysore State in 1956 while Kasaragod taluk went to Kerala; North Kanara was a Bombay Presidency district.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which woman freedom fighter of Malabar was imprisoned in 1932 along with her two-month-old infant during the Civil Disobedience Movement?

  • (a)Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
  • (b)A. V. Kuttimalu Amma
  • (c)Durgabai Deshmukh
  • (d)Aruna Asaf Ali

  Answer(b) A. V. Kuttimalu Amma — born at Anakkara in Palakkad in 1905, she organised women's picketing at Thrissur on 25 April 1931 and was jailed the following year with her infant daughter.