CDS (II) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 15 of 120

Correct — B, the Muslim League. The Holwell Monument was an obelisk Lord Curzon had put up in 1901 at the corner of Dalhousie Square in Calcutta, on what was said to be the site of the Black Hole of 1756, replacing an earlier tablet erected by John Zephaniah Holwell himself. By 1939 it had become a nationalist grievance, and Subhas Chandra Bose — freshly out of the Congress presidency and at odds with Gandhi over the war — chose it as the issue for a mass campaign in Calcutta. What made the agitation formidable was that the Congress and the Muslim League joined forces on it, which in Bengal meant working with Fazlul Huq's ministry. Bose was jailed and released after a seven-day hunger strike. The monument was removed from Dalhousie Square in July 1940 and re-erected in the graveyard of St John's Church, where it still stands.

• (a)The Communist Party of India — Bose worked with the left through his own Forward Bloc, but the alliance on the Holwell Monument was with the Muslim League, whose Bengal support was what made the campaign a mass one.
• (c)The Hindu Mahasabha — The Mahasabha was politically opposed to Bose in Bengal in these years, and an anti-monument campaign that turned on Siraj-ud-Daulah's reputation was not one it would lead with him.
• (d)The Unionist Party — The Unionist Party was a Punjab party of landed interests led by Sikandar Hayat Khan. It had no presence in Bengal and no part in a Calcutta agitation.

In June 1756 Siraj-ud-Daulah's forces took Fort William, and Holwell, the survivor who wrote the account, claimed that of 146 prisoners confined overnight in a small room only 23 came out alive. Historians have long doubted the numbers, and some doubt the account itself; Holwell's own narrative acquits the Nawab of ordering it. What matters politically is that the episode became a founding story of British rule in Bengal, and the monument to it was read by nationalists as a standing insult to the last independent Nawab of Bengal.

The item rewards knowing why the alliance made sense rather than simply which party it was. The monument commemorated British deaths at the hands of a Muslim ruler of Bengal, so removing it appealed to Bengali Muslim opinion and to Bengali nationalist opinion at once, and Bose built a joint front on exactly that overlap. It is also a reminder that party alignments in 1939 and 1940 were not the frozen blocks of 1946: Bose and the Bengal Muslim League cooperated on a provincial issue while the national argument between Congress and the League was hardening. The monument was not destroyed, only moved, which is why the question's word destroy describes the campaign's aim rather than its outcome.

• The monument was first raised by Holwell, disappeared at an uncertain date, and was replaced by Lord Curzon in 1901 at Dalhousie Square, now B. B. D. Bagh.
• Bose organised mass protests in Calcutta for its removal in 1939-40, was imprisoned, and was released after a seven-day hunger strike.
• The Congress and the Muslim League joined forces in the anti-monument movement.
• The monument was removed in July 1940 and re-erected in the graveyard of St John's Church, Calcutta.
• Bose escaped from house detention in Calcutta in January 1941, months after the campaign.

• Assuming Bose's ally must have been on the left because of his own politics. On this issue it was the Muslim League.
• Placing the Unionist Party in Bengal. It was a Punjab party.
• Thinking the monument was destroyed. It was removed from its prominent site and re-erected elsewhere in the city.

As a who-allied-with-whom item on Bose's Calcutta years, or as a question on the Black Hole episode and the memorial it produced.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Holwell Monument, whose removal Subhas Chandra Bose campaigned for, commemorated an episode connected with which one of the following rulers?

  • (a)Mir Jafar
  • (b)Siraj-ud-Daulah
  • (c)Alivardi Khan
  • (d)Mir Qasim

  Answer(b) Siraj-ud-Daulah — the Black Hole episode followed the fall of Fort William to his forces in June 1756.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Forward Bloc was founded in 1939 by which one of the following?

  • (a)Jawaharlal Nehru
  • (b)Subhas Chandra Bose
  • (c)Rajendra Prasad
  • (d)Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

  Answer(b) Subhas Chandra Bose — he formed it after resigning the Congress presidency, in the same period as the Holwell Monument agitation.