BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 84 of 142

Correct — A, i iv ii iii. Each attribution is independently settled, so the code follows from four separate facts rather than from any process of elimination. V. D. Savarkar wrote the nationalist history of the revolt published in 1909 as The Indian War of Independence, 1857 and reissued in later editions under the wording List-II uses — so a matches (i). S. N. Sen, that is Surendra Nath Sen, wrote Eighteen Fifty-Seven, published in 1957 by the Publications Division of the Ministry of Information as the Government of India's official centenary history of the revolt — so b matches (iv). Eric Stokes wrote The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, published by Cambridge University Press, the work that recast 1857 as a set of local agrarian revolts rather than one movement — so c matches (ii). S. B. Chaudhuri wrote Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857-1859, published in 1957 — so d matches (iii). The sequence is therefore i, iv, ii, iii, which is code (a). One printed oddity should be noted and not corrected: List-II entry (iii) reads 'Civil Rebellion and in the Indian Mutinies', with a stray 'and' that the actual title does not contain. That is what the booklet prints, and it does not create a second possible match, because no other book on the list resembles it.

• (b)iv ii i iii — Swaps the first three attributions in the most damaging way: it gives Savarkar the official Government of India centenary history and gives S. N. Sen the Cambridge agrarian study. Those two authors sit at opposite ends of the historiography — one a revolutionary nationalist writing in exile in 1909, the other a professional historian commissioned by the state in 1957 — so the pairing inverts the entire point of the list.
• (c)ii iii i iv — Gives Savarkar Eric Stokes's book and S. N. Sen the Chaudhuri title, then hands Sen's own Eighteen Fifty-Seven to S. B. Chaudhuri. Only the third pairing survives by accident. It is the option a candidate lands on by matching the lists in printed order rather than by knowing any of the four authors.
• (d)None of the above — This escape would be right only if all three codes failed, and code (a) reproduces every attribution correctly. Note the one thing that might tempt a careful reader towards it — the stray 'and' in List-II entry (iii), which makes the printed title differ from the real one. A misprinted title is not a wrong match: the book is still uniquely identifiable, and no other entry competes for it.

How 1857 has been written about is itself an examinable subject, because the same events have carried four different names and four different explanations. The contemporary British view called it the Sepoy Mutiny — a military insubordination triggered by the greased cartridges — and that reading survives in the titles of Kaye and Malleson. The nationalist view, given its classic statement by Savarkar in 1909, called it the First War of Indian Independence and read the revolt as a planned, pan-Indian national uprising; the book was banned before publication and circulated underground, which is part of why it mattered. The official Indian assessment at the centenary, written by S. N. Sen at the government's request in 1957, was more measured — it accepted a genuine popular dimension while declining the claim of a single coordinated national plan. The later academic wave, of which Eric Stokes is the leading name, moved the question away from national politics altogether and towards agrarian society, arguing that the revolt was a variety of local movements driven by land revenue, indebtedness and dispossession rather than one movement with one cause. S. B. Chaudhuri belongs to the same widening of the lens, examining the civil rebellion that ran alongside the military mutiny.

Matching questions are won by fixing the pairs you are sure of and letting them eliminate codes, rather than by working through all four. Here the two easiest anchors are Savarkar with the war-of-independence title, which nearly every candidate knows, and S. N. Sen with Eighteen Fifty-Seven, whose bare-date title is unmistakable once you have met it. Those two alone kill codes (b) and (c), which leaves (a) against the escape. Then check the remaining pair rather than assuming it: Stokes is the peasant historian and Chaudhuri the civil-rebellion historian, and the titles say exactly that. The useful general habit is to hold each historian with a one-word label — Savarkar nationalist, Sen official, Stokes agrarian, Chaudhuri civil rebellion — because BPSC and UPSC both ask this list in several directions. And when a printed title looks slightly wrong, as List-II (iii) does here, treat it as a typographical fault of the paper rather than as evidence that the match is impossible.

• V. D. Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence, 1857 was first published in 1909 and gave the revolt its nationalist reading as a planned war of independence.
• S. N. Sen's Eighteen Fifty-Seven was published in 1957 by the Publications Division, Ministry of Information — the Government of India's official history for the revolt's centenary.
• Eric Stokes wrote The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India for Cambridge University Press; his posthumous The Peasant Armed: The Indian Revolt of 1857, edited by C. A. Bayly, appeared in 1986.
• S. B. Chaudhuri's Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857-1859 was published in 1957 — the booklet's List-II prints its title with a stray 'and', which is a misprint and not a different book.
• The four namings of the event — Sepoy Mutiny, First War of Independence, the 1857 Revolt and a set of agrarian rebellions — correspond to the four historiographical positions the list represents.

• Trying to 'correct' the printed title. List-II (iii) carries a stray 'and'; the book is still uniquely identifiable and the match is unaffected.
• Confusing Savarkar's 1909 nationalist history with S. N. Sen's 1957 official one. They take opposite positions on whether the revolt was a planned national war.
• Matching the lists in the order printed. In this question that produces code (c), which gets only one pairing right — a match question is never solved by position.

BPSC uses the match-the-pairs format for authors and books more than for anything else, and expects the historiography of 1857 specifically, because Bihar was a major theatre of the revolt through Kunwar Singh at Jagdishpur. UPSC has asked the same authors inside broader book-and-author lists, and otherwise prefers the interpretive question — who supported the revolt, who stayed neutral, what a contemporary observer said about it.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  'Eighteen Fifty-Seven', the Government of India's official centenary history of the revolt, was written by

  • (a)V. D. Savarkar
  • (b)S. N. Sen
  • (c)R. C. Majumdar
  • (d)Eric Stokes

  Answer(b) S. N. Sen — published in 1957 by the Publications Division of the Ministry of Information. R. C. Majumdar wrote his own, more sceptical account of the revolt in the same centenary year, but the official commission went to Sen.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Kunwar Singh, a leading figure of the Revolt of 1857, led the rising at

  • (a)Jagdishpur in Bihar
  • (b)Barrackpore in Bengal
  • (c)Bareilly in Rohilkhand
  • (d)Satara in the Deccan

  Answer(a) Jagdishpur in Bihar — the octogenarian zamindar of Jagdishpur in Shahabad district who took the field in 1857 and remains the revolt's central Bihari figure.