BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 73 of 150

Correct — C, Har Dayal. Lala Har Dayal Mathur (14 October 1884, Delhi – 4 March 1939, Philadelphia) is the only man on this list who was both a trained scholar and on the American Pacific coast in 1911. He took a BA in Sanskrit at St Stephen's College, Delhi and an MA in Sanskrit at Punjab University, won two Oxford awards in 1905 — the Boden Scholarship and a Casberd Exhibition at St John's College — and gave up both, having already turned his back on a career in the Indian Civil Service. He moved to the United States in 1911, the year the question names, and was offered a post teaching Indian philosophy in California. On one point, however, this card will not pretend to more certainty than the sources allow. WHICH university it was is genuinely disputed. The Commission's own published remark on this question says Berkeley — 'Professor of Sanskrit and Philosophy at the Berkeley University (California)' — citing the Dictionary of National Biography vol. II (ed. S. P. Sen, Calcutta, 1973, p. 142) and noting that Berkeley is a campus of the University of California. Much modern writing, including Wikipedia's account of the Ghadar Party, instead says Stanford: 'Dayal secured a job teaching Indian philosophy at Stanford University but got into trouble with the university after expressing anarchist views and overplaying his connection to Stanford.' The two readings are not interchangeable, because Stanford is a private university at Palo Alto and is not a campus of the University of California — so the stem's own wording works only on the Commission's version. What is not in dispute is the answer, and that is what the mark turns on: none of the other three names was in California at all, and the Berkeley connection is real on either account, since the Ghadar circle of Indian students formed at Berkeley and Har Dayal recruited among them. The appointment, whichever campus it was, did not last. Within about two years he was secretary of the San Francisco branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, founder of the Bakunin Institute of California at Oakland — 'the first monastery of anarchism', on six acres of donated land — and the founding general secretary of the Ghadar Party.

• (a)Sohan Singh Bhakna — He was on the same coast at the same time, which is what makes him plausible, but not in a lecture room. Born on 4 January 1870 near Amritsar and schooled in his village gurdwara, Bhakna sailed in February 1909, reached Seattle on 4 April 1909 and worked as a labourer in a timber mill. He became the founding president of the Ghadar Party and served sixteen years of a life sentence after the Lahore Conspiracy trial. He held no degree and no chair.
• (b)Virendranath Chattopadhyay — 'Chatto' (1880-1937), the brother of Sarojini Naidu, was academically the closest match — Oxford in 1902 while preparing for the Indian Civil Service, then the Middle Temple — but his whole revolutionary life is European. He moved from Shyamji Krishna Varma's India House in London to lead the Berlin Committee during the First World War, went to Moscow in 1920 and was executed there in the Great Purge on 2 September 1937. He never held an American post.
• (d)Shyamji Krishna Varma — The scholar-revolutionary the question is really baiting you with. A Balliol College graduate and Sanskrit scholar who had served as Diwan of Indian princely states, he founded the Indian Home Rule Society, India House and The Indian Sociologist in London in 1905. But he was a generation older, and after 1907 he operated from Paris and later Geneva to avoid prosecution. His base was never America, and by 1911 he was in European exile, not Californian academia.

Indian revolutionary activity abroad ran on three separate circuits, and knowing which man belonged to which is what these questions actually test. The London circuit began in 1905, when Shyamji Krishna Varma founded the Indian Home Rule Society, the journal The Indian Sociologist and India House at 65 Cromwell Avenue, Highgate — the hostel through which Savarkar, Madan Lal Dhingra and Virendranath Chattopadhyay passed; after Dhingra shot Curzon Wyllie in 1909 the centre broke up and shifted to Paris, where Madame Bhikaji Cama's circle continued it. The Berlin circuit formed during the First World War as the Berlin Committee, later the Indian Independence Committee, working with the German Foreign Office in what American prosecutors later called the Hindu-German conspiracy. The Pacific circuit was different in kind: it was built on labour migration, roughly ten thousand South Asians reaching North America between 1903 and 1913, overwhelmingly Punjabi and largely Sikh, many of them former soldiers driven out of Canada by discriminatory immigration law. Their Hindustani Association of the West Coast was founded at Portland in 1912 with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and Har Dayal as general secretary, and was formally constituted as the Ghadar Party on 15 July 1913, with the Yugantar Ashram at 436 Hill Street, San Francisco as headquarters and the weekly Ghadar appearing in Urdu from 1 November 1913 and in Punjabi from 9 December 1913. About nine-tenths of the membership were Punjabi Sikh men, half of them British Indian Army veterans — which is exactly why the party's small band of university intellectuals, clustered around Berkeley, mattered so much to it.

Solve this one by geography before you touch the university. Three of the four names have addresses that are demonstrably not California. Shyamji Krishna Varma is London until 1907 and Paris or Geneva after it. Virendranath Chattopadhyay is London, then Berlin, then Moscow. Sohan Singh Bhakna is on the Pacific coast from April 1909, so he passes the geography test, but he arrived as a timber-mill labourer educated in a village gurdwara, and no version of his life includes a professorship. That leaves Har Dayal, and the fit is exact on two independent counts: he reached the United States in 1911, the year in the stem, and he was the only man in the set with a Sanskrit MA and an Oxford scholarship behind him. So the discriminating fact is the CV, not the campus — the stem asks for a professor of Indian philosophy, and only one of these four had ever been an academic. Now the caveat a student deserves. The campus is contested. BPSC's remark names Berkeley and cites the Dictionary of National Biography (Calcutta, 1973); much modern writing names Stanford, which is private and not part of the University of California, so on that reading the question's own wording is wrong. Both accounts can be quoted; neither should be memorised as settled fact. In an exam this changes nothing — the name is what is marked — but on a general-studies answer sheet or an interview, saying 'the standard accounts differ, Berkeley or Stanford' is a stronger answer than picking one.

• Har Dayal Mathur (14 October 1884, Delhi – 4 March 1939, Philadelphia) took a BA in Sanskrit at St Stephen's College, Delhi and an MA in Sanskrit at Punjab University, and won the Boden Scholarship and a Casberd Exhibition at St John's College, Oxford in 1905, giving them up in protest against British rule after having already turned away from the Indian Civil Service.
• He moved to the United States in 1911 — the year named in this question — served as secretary of the San Francisco branch of the Industrial Workers of the World, and founded the Bakunin Institute of California at Oakland on six acres of donated land, calling it 'the first monastery of anarchism'.
• The campus is contested and should be quoted as such: BPSC's published remark places the 1911 chair at Berkeley, a campus of the University of California, citing the Dictionary of National Biography vol. II (ed. S. P. Sen, Calcutta, 1973, p. 142), while much modern writing places it at Stanford — a private university at Palo Alto that is not part of the University of California.
• The Ghadar Party grew out of the Hindustani Association of the West Coast, founded at Portland in 1912 with Sohan Singh Bhakna as president and Har Dayal as general secretary; it was formally constituted on 15 July 1913, ran the Yugantar Ashram at 436 Hill Street, San Francisco, and published the weekly Ghadar in Urdu from 1 November 1913 and in Punjabi from 9 December 1913.
• Har Dayal was arrested by United States immigration authorities on 16 March 1914 for deportation as an undesirable alien; he jumped bail, escaped to Switzerland and then to Berlin, where he helped form the Berlin Committee, and he published 'Forty-Four Months in Germany and Turkey' in London in 1920.

• Treating the university as settled. BPSC's own remark says Berkeley, on a 1973 Dictionary of National Biography citation; much modern writing says Stanford, which is not part of the University of California at all.
• Confusing Sohan Singh Bhakna with Har Dayal because both founded the Ghadar Party. Bhakna was its president and a mill labourer; Har Dayal was its general secretary and the Oxford-trained Sanskritist.
• Placing Virendranath Chattopadhyay in America. His circuit is London, then Berlin, then Moscow — he was executed there in 1937, and never worked in the United States.

BPSC asks the overseas revolutionaries as flat person-to-fact recall — who got the chair, who founded which party — and, as here, will happily print a detail that the sources dispute, because the mark rides on the name and not on the detail. UPSC asks the same network structurally: what the Ghadar was and where its headquarters stood (2014), who among a list was actually associated with the Ghadar Party (2022), which revolutionary ran which journal abroad (1999). For UPSC, revise the network as a map of cities; for BPSC, memorise the names attached to each.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who was the founding General Secretary of the Ghadar Party, formed on the Pacific coast of the United States in 1913?

  • (a)Sohan Singh Bhakna
  • (b)Har Dayal
  • (c)Taraknath Das
  • (d)Kartar Singh Sarabha

  Answer(b) Har Dayal — Sohan Singh Bhakna was the president and Har Dayal the general secretary, a division carried over from the Hindustani Association of the West Coast founded at Portland in 1912. Taraknath Das and Kartar Singh Sarabha were members, not office-bearers of that first executive.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The journal 'The Indian Sociologist' and India House in London were both founded in 1905 by

  • (a)V. D. Savarkar
  • (b)Madame Bhikaji Cama
  • (c)Shyamji Krishna Varma
  • (d)Virendranath Chattopadhyay

  Answer(c) Shyamji Krishna Varma — he founded the Indian Home Rule Society, India House and The Indian Sociologist in London in 1905, and moved to Paris in 1907. Savarkar and Chattopadhyay were residents of India House, and Cama brought out The Talwar from Europe.