BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 98 of 150

Correct — B, 3-1-2-4. Put a year on each item and the sequence is forced. (3) BATTLE OF WANDIWASH, 22 January 1760: Sir Eyre Coote's Company force beat the Comte de Lally in the Third Carnatic War at Wandiwash, today Vandavasi in Tamil Nadu. It was decisive rather than merely large — the French were driven back on Pondicherry, which surrendered on 22 January 1761 after an eight-month defence, and the collapse of the French position in India helped push France to the Treaty of Paris in 1763. (1) DEATH SENTENCE TO RAJA NAND KUMAR, hanged 5 August 1775. Nandakumar, a Bengal revenue collector, had accused Warren Hastings of taking bribes, and the charge was entertained by Philip Francis and the other members of the Supreme Council. Hastings overrode the Council; charges of document forgery were then brought against Nandakumar, and he was tried before Sir Elijah Impey — India's first Chief Justice and a friend of Hastings — convicted, and hanged at Calcutta. The episode has been called a judicial murder ever since, and it is the standard illustration of the collision between the new Supreme Court and the Governor-General's Council created by the Regulating Act of 1773. (2) TREATY OF SALBAI, signed 17 May 1782 at Salbai near Gwalior between Warren Hastings and Mahadji Shinde, closing the First Anglo-Maratha War: the Company kept Salsette and Broach, Raghunath Rao was pensioned off, Madhavrao II was recognised as Peshwa, and the Marathas undertook to help recover the Carnatic from Haidar Ali and to bar the French from their territories. (4) DEATH OF TIPU SULTAN, 4 May 1799, killed defending Seringapatam in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War. So the order runs 1760 → 1775 → 1782 → 1799, which is 3-1-2-4. The fastest route in the hall skips three of the four dates entirely: ask only which event is EARLIEST. Wandiwash, 1760, is the only eighteenth-century item that predates the Company's Bengal administration, so the sequence must begin with 3 — and that alone kills options (a) and (c), both of which open with the 1782 treaty. Two options remain, (b) 3-1-2-4 and (d) 3-2-1-4, differing on one question: did Nand Kumar's hanging come before or after Salbai? 1775 before 1782, so 1 precedes 2, and (b) stands.

• (a)2-3-4-1 — Opens with the Treaty of Salbai (1782) and closes with Nand Kumar's execution (1775) — the sequence is almost exactly inverted at both ends. It only appeals to a candidate who has no date for any of the four and is choosing by the look of the string. Wandiwash (1760) must come first and Tipu's death (1799) must come last in any correct ordering.
• (c)2-4-1-3 — The worst of the four: it places Salbai (1782) first and Wandiwash (1760) last, reversing a gap of twenty-two years, and puts Tipu's death (1799) second. It is the option a candidate reaches for on the assumption that a 'treaty' must precede the 'battles' — but Salbai closed a war that began in 1775, fifteen years after Wandiwash was fought.
• (d)3-2-1-4 — The real contender, and the one that separates a prepared candidate from a lucky one. It gets both anchors right — Wandiwash first, Tipu's death last — and fails on the single middle swap, putting Salbai (1782) before Nand Kumar's execution (1775). The whole mark turns on knowing that Nandakumar was hanged in 1775, the same year the First Anglo-Maratha War began, seven years before the treaty that ended it.

The four items span the four decades in which the East India Company stopped being one competitor among several and became the paramount power, and each belongs to a different front of that transformation. The EUROPEAN front closed first: the Carnatic Wars between the English and French Companies ended with Wandiwash in 1760 and the fall of Pondicherry in 1761, after which the Treaty of Paris of 1763 left the French with trading posts and no political ambition in India. The CONSTITUTIONAL front opened next: the Regulating Act of 1773 was Parliament's first attempt to control the Company, creating a Governor-General of Fort William in Bengal — the presidency that administered Bengal, Bihar and Orissa under the Diwani won after Buxar in 1764 — with a Council of four, and a Supreme Court at Calcutta with judges appointed by the Crown. Warren Hastings could be, and repeatedly was, outvoted three to one by his own Council; the Nandakumar trial of 1775 is where that structural conflict turned lethal. The MARATHA front ran from 1775 to 1782 and ended in stalemate at Salbai, buying roughly two decades of peace with the Marathas until Wellesley reopened it in 1803. The MYSORE front ran through four wars from 1767 to 1799 and ended with Tipu Sultan's death at Seringapatam. Read together, they explain why the Company that lost battles in 1760 was dictating terms across the subcontinent by 1799.

Chronology questions are not memory tests, they are elimination tests, and the discipline is to look at the OPTIONS before reconstructing the full order. Here the four options offer only two possible first events — 2 (Salbai) or 3 (Wandiwash) — so the entire first half of the work is a single question: which of those two is older? Wandiwash is 1760 and Salbai is 1782, so options (a) and (c) fall together, and half the paper's distractors have been cleared with one date. What remains is a two-way choice, (b) against (d), turning on a single pairwise comparison: Nand Kumar (1775) against Salbai (1782). The discriminating fact is therefore not a list of four years but one — 1775, the year Nandakumar was hanged, which is also the year the First Anglo-Maratha War began. Fix that one year and the item is finished. The trap the paper is actually setting is the assumption that a treaty must be older than a battle, or that events are listed in the stem in something close to their real order. Neither holds: the stem's numbering here is deliberately scrambled, and 'Treaty of Salbai' is placed second in the list precisely so that the string 2-... looks plausible. A candidate who cannot date anything should still anchor on Tipu — 1799 is the single best-known date of the four, and any option that does not end with 4 is already suspect.

• Battle of Wandiwash, 22 January 1760 — Sir Eyre Coote defeated the Comte de Lally in the Third Carnatic War; the French were confined to Pondicherry, which surrendered on 22 January 1761 after an eight-month siege, and France signed the Treaty of Paris in 1763.
• Maharaja Nandakumar (c. 1705 – 5 August 1775) accused Warren Hastings of taking bribes, was then charged with document forgery, tried before India's first Chief Justice Sir Elijah Impey, and hanged at Calcutta — the classic instance of the Supreme Court–Council conflict under the Regulating Act of 1773.
• Treaty of Salbai, 17 May 1782, signed at Salbai near Gwalior between Warren Hastings and Mahadji Shinde, ended the First Anglo-Maratha War (1775–1782): the Company retained Salsette and Broach, Raghunath Rao was pensioned, and Madhavrao II was acknowledged as Peshwa.
• Tipu Sultan died on 4 May 1799 at Seringapatam (Srirangapatna) in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War; he had become ruler of Mysore in 1782, the same year as the Treaty of Salbai.
• The chain of dates in order: 1760 Wandiwash · 1764 Buxar · 1765 Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa · 1773 Regulating Act · 1775 Nandakumar hanged and the First Anglo-Maratha War begins · 1782 Salbai · 1799 Tipu's death.

• Assuming the stem lists events in something near their real order — BPSC deliberately numbers them out of sequence, and here item 3 is the oldest
• Placing the Treaty of Salbai before Nand Kumar's execution — 1782 against 1775 is the single swap that separates option (d) from the key
• Confusing the First Anglo-Maratha War (1775–1782, ended at Salbai) with the Second (1803–1805, opened by the Treaty of Bassein in 1802)

BPSC's chronology items are pure sequence with no dates given and no 'select using the codes' scaffolding — four events, four permutations, and the marks go to whoever can place two of them and eliminate. UPSC asks the same skill but usually supplies a scaffold: a Match-the-year-with-the-war list, or a battles-in-chronological-order item where the four names themselves are the clue. Both reward the same drill — carry one hard date per decade rather than a loose narrative.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Treaty of Salbai (1782) was signed between the East India Company and which Maratha leader, ending the First Anglo-Maratha War ?

  • (a)Nana Fadnavis
  • (b)Mahadji Shinde
  • (c)Raghunath Rao
  • (d)Baji Rao II

  Answer(b) Mahadji Shinde — he signed with Warren Hastings on 17 May 1782 at Salbai near Gwalior. Raghunath Rao was the British protégé who was pensioned off under the treaty, and Madhavrao II was recognised as Peshwa; Baji Rao II belongs to the later Treaty of Bassein of 1802.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Raja Nand Kumar was hanged in 1775 after being tried before which authority ?

  • (a)The Supreme Court at Calcutta under Chief Justice Elijah Impey
  • (b)The Sadar Diwani Adalat at Murshidabad
  • (c)The Governor-General's Council at Fort William
  • (d)The Board of Control in London

  Answer(a) The Supreme Court at Calcutta under Chief Justice Elijah Impey — the court created by the Regulating Act of 1773, whose first Chief Justice was a friend of Warren Hastings, which is why the conviction has long been described as a judicial murder.