Which one of the following pairs of books and their authors is not correctly matched?

Correct — C, Indian Unrest : Annie Besant. Indian Unrest was published in 1910 by Valentine Chirol, the foreign editor of The Times, and it was a hostile survey of Indian nationalism written from the imperial side. Its comments on Bal Gangadhar Tilak were sharp enough that Tilak brought a civil suit against Chirol in London, which he lost. Annie Besant wrote a great deal on India, edited New India and Commonweal and founded the Home Rule League in 1916, but this book is not hers. The other three pairs stand. Bandi Jiwan is by Sachindranath Sanyal, a founder of the Hindustan Republican Association, who wrote it out of prison. The Philosophy of the Bomb is credited to Bhagwati Charan Vohra and was the revolutionaries' answer to Gandhi's article condemning the cult of the bomb, with Chandrashekhar Azad and Yashpal associated with its drafting. Desher Katha, in Bengali, is by Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar, and it fed the Swadeshi movement by putting the economic case against colonial rule into the hands of ordinary readers.

• (a)Bandi Jiwan : Sachindranath Sanyal — Correctly matched, so it cannot be the answer to a question asking for the pair that is wrong. Sanyal founded the Hindustan Republican Association and wrote this prison memoir.
• (b)The Philosophy of the Bomb : Bhagwati Charan Vohra — Also correctly matched. The manifesto is credited to Bhagwati Charan Vohra, written as a reply to Gandhi's denunciation of revolutionary violence.
• (d)Desher Katha : Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar — Correctly matched. Deuskar's Bengali book of 1904 became one of the most widely read texts of the Swadeshi years.

Three of the four books here were written by Indians arguing for freedom, and the fourth was written by an English journalist arguing against them. That asymmetry is the whole question. Indian Unrest belongs to a colonial literature of explanation — books that set out to tell British readers why India was becoming difficult to govern — while Bandi Jiwan, The Philosophy of the Bomb and Desher Katha come from inside the movement.

Questions on books and authors reward two habits. The first is knowing which side a book was written from, since a title like Indian Unrest reads as an outsider's diagnosis rather than a nationalist's own words. The second is keeping the revolutionary writings apart from one another, because Sanyal, Vohra and Azad all belong to the same circle and their titles are easy to shuffle. Annie Besant's own bibliography is worth a line of its own, since she is the name most often attached to books she did not write: her India work runs through the newspapers New India and Commonweal and through the Home Rule League she founded in 1916.

• Indian Unrest was written by Valentine Chirol and published in 1910.
• Tilak sued Chirol for libel in London over the book's comments and lost the case.
• Bandi Jiwan is by Sachindranath Sanyal, a founder of the Hindustan Republican Association.
• The Philosophy of the Bomb is credited to Bhagwati Charan Vohra, written as the revolutionaries' reply to Gandhi's article against the cult of the bomb.
• Desher Katha, in Bengali, is by Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar and dates from 1904, the eve of the Swadeshi movement.
• Annie Besant edited New India and Commonweal and founded the Home Rule League in 1916.

• Attaching Indian Unrest to an Indian author because of the title.
• Shuffling the revolutionary titles between Sanyal, Vohra and Azad.
• Missing the word 'not' in the stem and choosing a pair that is correctly matched.

The negative book-and-author format, where three pairs are right and one intruder is planted; the same books also appear in list-matching questions with four authors and four titles.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The book Indian Unrest, published in 1910, was written by

  • (a)Annie Besant
  • (b)Valentine Chirol
  • (c)Lala Lajpat Rai
  • (d)William Digby

  Answer(b) Valentine Chirol — foreign editor of The Times, whose comments in the book led Tilak to sue him for libel in London.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Desher Katha, which circulated widely during the Swadeshi movement, was written in

  • (a)Marathi
  • (b)Bengali
  • (c)Hindi
  • (d)Gujarati

  Answer(b) Bengali — Sakharam Ganesh Deuskar published it in 1904, and its account of colonial economic exploitation reached readers through street plays and folk songs.