BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 143 of 142

Correct — B, V. D. Savarkar. The phrase comes from a book, and the book has a title: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence, published in 1909. Savarkar wrote it in Marathi at India House in London, finishing the manuscript in 1907, and he wrote it as an answer — Britain had just marked the fiftieth anniversary of 1857 as the suppression of a mutiny, and Savarkar set out to recast the same events as a national uprising, working from records in the India Office archives with help from Madame Cama, V. V. S. Iyer and M. P. T. Acharya. Its reception proves how sharply the reframing landed. The Marathi edition was banned in British India before it had even been published. British printers were warned off by the Home Office on grounds of sedition, and the Foreign Office leaned on the French government to stop it appearing in Paris. It was finally printed in the Netherlands in 1909, a 451-page volume attributed to 'An Indian Nationalist', and copies were smuggled into India. The book kept moving: Rash Behari Bose brought out an edition in Japan that circulated among the Indian National Army, and the first freely published Indian edition appeared only in 1947. That is what the question means by 'first described'. Individual Britons had already called the rising a national revolt in passing, but no one before Savarkar had built an entire history on the claim that 1857 was India's first war of independence, and it is his framing — carried into the nationalist movement and eventually into official commemoration — that the phrase now belongs to. Because option (b) is right, the None-of-the-above option cannot be, and the two remaining names are attached to positions on 1857 that were quite different from Savarkar's.

• (a)R. C. Majumdar — The exact opposite of the answer, which is why it is the most instructive distractor. Majumdar was the principal member of the government's committee to write a history of the freedom struggle, fell out with the Education Minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad over how 1857 should be interpreted, left the job and published his own book, The Sepoy Mutiny and Revolt of 1857. He held that India's freedom struggle began not in 1857 but with the English-educated middle class and the anti-partition agitation of 1905.
• (c)Bal Gangadhar Tilak — A plausible name in the right period and the wrong role. Tilak gave the nationalist movement the language of swaraj as a birthright and revived public festivals as political occasions, but the historical reframing of 1857 was not his work and he wrote no history of the revolt. He is offered because a candidate who remembers only that the claim came from the extremist wing will reach for its most famous figure.
• (d)None of the above — Fails because one of the named options is correct. A None-of-the-above answer is earned only by showing that each of the other three is wrong, and here the authorship of The Indian War of Independence is a matter of record — the book exists, it is dated 1909, and Savarkar wrote it.

How 1857 is named has always been an argument about what it was. The British official view called it the Sepoy Mutiny — a military insubordination triggered by the greased cartridge, contained and punished. Savarkar's 1909 book called it a planned national war of independence with Nana Sahib and the Mughal court at its centre. After Independence the debate continued among Indian historians: the centenary in 1957 produced both S. N. Sen's official history and R. C. Majumdar's dissent, and later writers described it variously as a feudal reaction, a peasant revolt with a sepoy spark, or a genuinely popular rising in particular regions. What is not in dispute is the scale and the aftermath. The rising began at Meerut on 10 May 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar was proclaimed at Delhi, and the fighting ran through Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi, Bareilly and, in Bihar, Jagdishpur — where Kunwar Singh of the Ujjainiya house, born in 1777 and by then in his late seventies, led the revolt until his death on 26 April 1858. When it was over, the Government of India Act 1858 ended Company rule and transferred the government of India to the Crown.

Attribution questions are answered by attaching the claim to a document rather than to a reputation. Ask what object carries the phrase, and here it is a book with a title, a language, a year and a publication history — The Indian War of Independence, Marathi, 1909, printed in the Netherlands because nowhere in Britain or France would take it. Once the book is fixed, the author follows and the distractors sort themselves: Majumdar wrote the book that argues the other side, and Tilak wrote no book on 1857 at all. The wider habit is to hold historiography as pairs of name and position, because that is how both BPSC and UPSC test it — Savarkar for the war-of-independence reading, Majumdar for its rejection, S. N. Sen for the official centenary history, Sir John Seeley and the British administrators for the mutiny reading. It is also worth being precise about what 'first described' claims. It does not mean nobody had ever called the rising national; it means Savarkar's was the first sustained account written on that premise, and that is the claim the question is testing.

• Savarkar wrote The Indian War of Independence in Marathi at India House in London, finishing the manuscript in 1907, in response to British commemoration of the 50th anniversary of 1857
• The Marathi edition was banned in British India before publication; the Home Office warned off British printers and the Foreign Office pressed France to block a Paris printing
• The English version was printed in the Netherlands in 1909 as a 451-page book credited to 'An Indian Nationalist'; the first public Indian edition appeared in 1947
• Rash Behari Bose published an edition in Japan that circulated among members of the Indian National Army
• R. C. Majumdar wrote The Sepoy Mutiny and Revolt of 1857 after a disagreement with Education Minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and dated the freedom struggle from the 1905 anti-partition movement instead
• In Bihar the revolt was led by Kunwar Singh of Jagdishpur, of the Ujjainiya house, born 13 November 1777 and died 26 April 1858

• Confusing Majumdar with Savarkar — Majumdar wrote against the 'war of independence' reading, not for it
• Treating the phrase as an official or contemporary description; it comes from a banned 1909 book, not from any government or from 1857 itself
• Assuming Tilak, as the most prominent extremist, must be behind every nationalist reframing of the period

BPSC asks for the person and offers a rival historian, a contemporary politician and an escape option, so the item turns on knowing who wrote which book. UPSC prefers to embed the same title in a book-to-author matching list, where 'The First Indian War of Independence' sits beside Anand Math and The Life Divine and a single wrong pairing loses the whole question.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In which country was the English edition of Savarkar's 'The Indian War of Independence' first printed in 1909 ?

  • (a)France
  • (b)The Netherlands
  • (c)Germany
  • (d)The United States

  Answer(b) The Netherlands — British printers had been warned off and the Foreign Office had persuaded France to block a Paris printing, so the book was produced in the Netherlands and smuggled into India.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which historian, writing around the centenary of the revolt, rejected the description of 1857 as a war of independence and dated the freedom struggle from 1905 ?

  • (a)S. N. Sen
  • (b)R. C. Majumdar
  • (c)Bipan Chandra
  • (d)Tara Chand

  Answer(b) R. C. Majumdar — author of The Sepoy Mutiny and Revolt of 1857, written after he left the government's official history project.