BPSC 70th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 72 of 143

Correct — A, Mohd. Wali Hassan. This one can be settled from the provincial government's own record rather than from a list of names. K. K. Datta's official three-volume History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar, prepared for the Government of Bihar and published in 1957, prints in Volume II the schedule of publications forfeited by the Government of Bihar and Orissa during 1929-30. Item (d) of that schedule reads: 'A pamphlet in Urdu, entitled Garib Hindustan, by Muhammad Wali Hasan, Puraini, Bhagalpur, and printed at the Rahmani Press, Patna (forfeited on the 19th June, 1930).' Every element of the stem is in that one line — the title, the language, the province, the year, and the fact of the ban — and the author it names is the man printed as option (a), with the transliteration loosened from 'Muhammad Wali Hasan' to 'Mohd. Wali Hassan' in the way BPSC habitually loosens Urdu names. The date matters as much as the name: 19 June 1930 falls in the middle of the Civil Disobedience Movement, weeks after the Dandi march of April 1930, when the colonial administration was forfeiting nationalist pamphlets across the provinces. Note the two locational details in the record, because they are what make the identification specific rather than a guess: the author is placed at Puraini in the Bhagalpur division, and the pamphlet was printed at the Rahmani Press in Patna. None of the other three names appears anywhere in that forfeiture schedule.

• (b)Ali Mohd. Shad — A plausible-sounding name of the same Urdu literary milieu, which is exactly its function on the paper — the examiner needs three names a candidate cannot confidently rule out. It does not appear in the Bihar and Orissa forfeiture schedule for 1929-30 that records Garib Hindustan, and no source attributes the pamphlet to him.
• (c)Shaikh Mian Jaan — Again a name of the right period and register, and again absent from the record of proscribed publications that names this pamphlet's author. Candidates who half-remember 'a Bihari Muslim writer banned in 1930' have no way to separate this from the answer except by having met the actual forfeiture entry.
• (d)Badrul Hassan — The most dangerous distractor because it shares the surname element 'Hassan' with the correct option, so a candidate who has stored only half the name — 'Hassan, something Hassan' — has a fifty-fifty guess left. The recorded author is Wali Hasan of Puraini, not Badrul Hassan.

Book-banning in colonial India was done by forfeiture: a provincial government issued a notification declaring every copy of a named publication forfeited to the Crown, after which possessing or circulating it was an offence and the police could seize copies and, in serious cases, the press that printed it. Because each notification had to name the work, its author, its language and often its printer, the proscription registers are now one of the richest sources for the history of nationalist publishing — they preserve the existence of pamphlets whose copies were destroyed. The legislative frame moved in waves: the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 under Lytton, aimed specifically at Indian-language papers and repealed by Ripon in 1882; the Indian Press Act of 1910, which demanded security deposits and was repealed in 1922; and the Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act of 1931, passed as Civil Disobedience peaked. Bihar's own proscribed literature of this period is overwhelmingly Urdu and Hindi pamphlet material, cheap, short and locally printed, because that is what the movement actually read.

There is no way to reason to this answer from principles — it is a recall item, and the honest way to teach it is to show where the fact lives rather than to dress up a guess. What a student can do is store the entry the way the record stores it, as a cluster: Garib Hindustan, Urdu pamphlet, Muhammad Wali Hasan of Puraini in Bhagalpur, Rahmani Press at Patna, forfeited 19 June 1930. Clusters survive revision; a bare name does not, and a bare name is precisely what the paper attacks by putting a second 'Hassan' among the options. One residual caution is worth being straight about. The identification rests on the official Bihar history's forfeiture list and on Urdu literary archives that catalogue Ghareeb Hindustan under Mohammad Wali Hasan Purainvi; the option's spelling 'Mohd. Wali Hassan' is a transliteration of the same name, not a different person. That transliteration gap is the only softness in the answer, and it is small — no source of any kind attaches this pamphlet to the other three names.

• Garib (Gharib) Hindustan was an Urdu pamphlet by Muhammad Wali Hasan of Puraini, Bhagalpur, printed at the Rahmani Press, Patna, and forfeited by the Government of Bihar and Orissa on 19 June 1930
• The source is the Government of Bihar's own official history — K. K. Datta (ed.), History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar, Vol. II (1957), p. 104, which lists the publications forfeited in 1929-30
• June 1930 sits inside the Civil Disobedience Movement: the Dandi march ran 12 March to 6 April 1930, and the government answered the movement's literature with mass forfeitures
• In 1930 the province was Bihar and Orissa, created in 1912 when Bihar was separated from the Bengal Presidency; Orissa became a separate province only on 1 April 1936
• The colonial press-law sequence to memorise: Vernacular Press Act 1878 (Lytton) repealed 1882 (Ripon); Indian Press Act 1910, repealed 1922; Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act 1931

• Splitting on the shared surname — both option (a) and option (d) end in 'Hassan', and only Wali Hasan is the recorded author
• Confusing this ban with press regulation generally; a pamphlet was forfeited by notification, which is not the same as a newspaper's security being demanded under a Press Act
• Assuming a 1930 ban in 'Bihar' means a Bihar government of the present shape — the notifying authority was the Government of Bihar and Orissa

BPSC's Bihar-history questions run on named local particulars — a pamphlet, a press, a cook, a district — and the examiner expects you to have read a Bihar-specific source rather than a national textbook, because a national textbook simply will not contain them. UPSC almost never asks who wrote a single provincial pamphlet; it asks the structural version instead — which Act controlled the vernacular press, who repealed it, which journal a named leader brought out — so the same syllabus area is tested through legislation and famous titles rather than through provincial forfeiture lists.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Urdu pamphlet Garib Hindustan, forfeited by the Government of Bihar and Orissa in 1930, was printed at

  • (a)the Rahmani Press, Patna
  • (b)the Khadgvilas Press, Bankipore
  • (c)the Newal Kishore Press, Lucknow
  • (d)the Hitaishi Press, Muzaffarpur

  Answer(a) the Rahmani Press, Patna — the forfeiture entry in the Government of Bihar's History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar names the Rahmani Press of Patna as its printer and dates the forfeiture 19 June 1930.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which Act, passed while the Civil Disobedience Movement was at its height, gave the colonial government fresh powers to demand securities from presses and forfeit publications ?

  • (a)The Vernacular Press Act, 1878
  • (b)The Indian Press Act, 1910
  • (c)The Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act, 1931
  • (d)The Rowlatt Act, 1919

  Answer(c) The Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act, 1931 — the 1878 Act was repealed in 1882, the 1910 Act was repealed in 1922, and the Rowlatt Act dealt with detention and trial, not the press.