CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 65 of 120

Correct — A, Lokmanya Tilak. Bal Gangadhar Tilak started two weeklies together on 4 January 1881 — Kesari in Marathi and Mahratta in English — and used the Marathi paper to reach an audience that the English press could not touch. Kesari carried the writing that twice took him to prison for sedition, including the articles after the killing of Rand in 1897 and the pieces of 1908 that earned him six years in Mandalay. Both papers are still brought out by the Kesari Mahratta Trust in Pune.

• (b)Vallabhbhai Patel — Vallabhbhai Patel came to public life through the Kheda and Bardoli campaigns and later the integration of the princely states; he founded no newspaper of his own.
• (c)Lala Lajpat Rai — Lala Lajpat Rai wrote for and ran papers in Punjab, among them the Punjabee, and later The People and the Urdu Vande Mataram, but Kesari was not his and he did not write Marathi.
• (d)Mahatma Gandhi — Gandhi's papers were Indian Opinion in South Africa, then Young India, Navajivan and from 1933 Harijan. He took over Young India in 1919; he did not start Kesari.

The vernacular press was the engine of early nationalist politics because it carried argument beyond the English-educated few. Tilak's pairing of a Marathi and an English weekly was deliberate — the English paper spoke to the government and the educated public, the Marathi one to the Maharashtrian countryside and small towns. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 had already shown how much the colonial state feared exactly this, and Tilak's sedition trials in 1897 and 1908 were fought over Marathi prose.

Three of the four names here are national figures with no Marathi paper to their credit, so the question is really asking whether you can place a leader in his linguistic region. Kesari means lion, and its English twin was called Mahratta, which is the second half of the answer worth carrying — a match-list will often give one and ask for the other. Tilak's Kesari is also the paper on which the 1908 conviction rested, so the same fact serves questions on press laws and on the Swadeshi years.

• Kesari was started by Bal Gangadhar Tilak on 4 January 1881, in Marathi.
• Its English companion weekly, launched at the same time, was Mahratta.
• Both are published today by the Kesari Mahratta Trust.
• Tilak was tried for sedition over his writings in 1897 and again in 1908, when he was transported to Mandalay for six years.
• Gopal Krishna Gokhale's paper of the same milieu was Sudharak, and Agarkar was Kesari's first editor before parting company with Tilak.

• Pairing Tilak with Mahratta and someone else with Kesari; both were his, launched on the same day.
• Assuming every major leader founded a newspaper — Patel did not.
• Reading Kesari as a Hindi paper because of the name; it is Marathi.

Usually as a newspaper-to-founder pairing, sometimes framed as which pair is not correctly matched.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The English-language weekly started by Bal Gangadhar Tilak alongside Kesari was known by which one of the following names?

  • (a)The Hindu
  • (b)Mahratta
  • (c)Bengalee
  • (d)Sudharak

  Answer(b) Mahratta — the English twin of the Marathi Kesari, both launched by Tilak in 1881.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs of newspaper and founder is correctly matched?

  • (a)Amrita Bazar Patrika — Dadabhai Naoroji
  • (b)Al-Hilal — Abul Kalam Azad
  • (c)Kesari — Gopal Krishna Gokhale
  • (d)Bengalee — Bipin Chandra Pal

  Answer(b) Al-Hilal — Abul Kalam Azad, started in 1912; Kesari belongs to Tilak and Bengalee to Surendranath Banerjea.