EPFO EO/AO 2023 General Ability Test · Question 61 of 120

Correct — A, (a) Rayanna. The man the stem describes is Sangolli Rayanna (1798–1831), named after his village of Sangolli in the present Belagavi district of Karnataka, who rose to be a senior commander in the army of the small state of Kittur. The rising the question refers to began in 1824. Chennamma's husband Raja Mallasarja had died in 1816 and her son in 1824, and she adopted Shivalingappa and declared him her heir. The East India Company refused to recognise the adoption and ordered Shivalingappa's expulsion — Kittur fell under the Dharwad collectorate of St John Thackeray, with Chaplin as commissioner, and neither would accept the regent's authority. Kittur beat off the first Company assault, in which Thackeray was killed, but a second and much larger force took the fort at the end of 1824. Chennamma was captured and imprisoned in Bailhongal, where she died in 1829. This whole quarrel over a refused adoption is usually taught as a forerunner of the Doctrine of Lapse that Dalhousie formalised only in 1848. Rayanna fought in that 1824 rising, was arrested by the Company and released. What makes him the answer is what he did next. His lands were confiscated as punishment for 1824 and what was left of them heavily taxed, and from 1829 he built an insurgency out of the local peasantry with the declared aim of putting Shivalingappa on the Kittur throne. Having no means to raise a regular army, he kept his men constantly on the move, striking Company administrative buildings, British detachments and local treasuries, and funding the rising from levies on landlords and from plundered treasuries; the Siddi leader Gajaveera fought alongside him. He was taken with Shivalingappa in April 1830, tried, and hanged in January 1831. That sequence — a commander of the Rani's who survived her capture and carried the fight on for years afterwards — is exactly what the stem asks for, and none of the other three names belongs to Kittur at all.

• (b)Tipu Garo — Wrong theatre and wrong movement. The figure of this period whose name is linked with the Garos is Tipu Shah, the second leader of the mystic Pagal Panthi order in Mymensingh in eastern Bengal, which his father Karim Shah had founded and whose following was drawn largely from the Garo, Hajong and Hudi tribes. Tipu Shah led the peasantry against the zamindars who collected the Company's revenue, briefly ran an independent administration in the Sherpur tract with a mud fort as his capital, was tried in January 1825 and died in jail in 1852. That is roughly a thousand miles from Kittur and has nothing to do with Chennamma.
• (c)Jagbandhu — This is Bakshi Jagabandhu Bidyadhara Mohapatra, commander — Buxi — of the forces of the Raja of Khurda in Odisha, and the leader of the Paika rebellion of 1817. His grievance was the Company's revenue settlement, which stripped the Paikas of the rent-free service tenures they had held by inheritance and cost Jagabandhu his own estate, aggravated by the rise in the price of salt. The Paika rising is seven years earlier than Kittur and belongs to a different region, a different ruler and a different cause; the only thing the two share is that both were armed risings against the Company before 1857.
• (d)Dukaribala Devi — Wrong century. Dukaribala Devi was a Bengali revolutionary born in 1887 at Jhaupara in the Birbhum district, drawn into the movement through her nephew Nibaran Ghatak. She is remembered as the first Indian woman to be convicted and imprisoned under the Arms Act, arrested in 1917 for concealing Mauser pistols taken in the Rodda arms heist of August 1914, and released in December 1918. She was born more than sixty years after Chennamma's capture, so she could not have been a companion of the Rani on any reading of the stem.

Kittur was a small state in the Belagavi region ruled by the Desai family. Its 1824 rising is the standard textbook example of an armed resistance provoked not by taxation or religion but by the Company's refusal to accept a Hindu ruler's adopted heir — the principle that would later be systematised as the Doctrine of Lapse. Chennamma, widowed in 1816 and bereaved of her son in 1824, adopted Shivalingappa; the Company ordered his expulsion and demanded that Kittur accept British control. The first engagement went to Kittur and killed the Dharwad Collector, St John Thackeray. The second, in December 1824, ended the state's independence and put the Rani in Bailhongal fort, where she died in 1829. What the question tests is the half of the story that survives the fall of the fort. Popular resistance in these early risings usually outlived the ruler who began it, because it had passed from the court to the countryside: Rayanna's insurgency of 1829–30 was not a state army but peasants recruited from the villages, fighting a mobile campaign against treasuries and administrative buildings rather than pitched battles. He was hanged in 1831 and is commemorated at Sangolli; two Kannada films, in 1967 and 2012, are named after him.

Every EPFO EO/AO paper opens Part B with a block of modern Indian history, and this item shows the level it pitches at: not 'who led the Kittur rising' — everybody knows Chennamma — but who carried it on afterwards. The paper repeatedly asks for the second name in a story: the lieutenant, the successor, the member of the committee. The habit it rewards is learning each episode as a small cast rather than as a single hero, and knowing where and when each of the other names on the option list actually belongs, because the distractors here are all real figures from real risings placed in the wrong one.

• Kittur Chennamma (1778–1829) rose against the East India Company in 1824 after it refused to recognise her adopted son Shivalingappa as heir; she was captured after the second Company assault and died a prisoner at Bailhongal in 1829.
• Sangolli Rayanna (1798–1831) was a senior commander of Kittur's forces, fought in the 1824 rising, and from 1829 led a peasant insurgency to place Shivalingappa on the throne; captured April 1830 and hanged in 1831.
• St John Thackeray, Collector of Dharwad, was killed in the first engagement at Kittur in 1824 — the reason the Company returned with a much larger force.
• The Kittur quarrel over a refused adoption prefigures the Doctrine of Lapse, which Dalhousie formalised only from 1848; do not date the doctrine itself to 1824.
• Bakshi Jagabandhu led the Paika rebellion of 1817 in Khurda, Odisha, over the loss of rent-free service tenures and the salt price.
• Tipu Shah led the Pagal Panthi order in Mymensingh, eastern Bengal, drawing on Garo and Hajong tribesmen; tried in January 1825, he died in jail in 1852.
• Dukaribala Devi (born 1887, Birbhum) is remembered as the first Indian woman convicted under the Arms Act, arrested in 1917 in connection with the Rodda arms heist of 1914.

• Stopping at the leader. The stem gives you Chennamma and asks for the companion, so the answer is never the name in the question.
• Dating the Doctrine of Lapse to 1824. The Company's refusal of Chennamma's adoption anticipates it; Dalhousie formalised the doctrine from 1848.
• Reading 'Tipu' as Tipu Sultan of Mysore, who died at Srirangapatna in 1799 — a quarter of a century before this rising and on the other side of the argument.
• Assuming a rising ends when its leader is captured. Kittur's resistance ran on for six more years under Rayanna, and that gap is the whole question.

The EO/AO history block favours the associate rather than the principal, and builds its option lists out of real leaders drawn from other risings — a Paika leader, a Bengal revolutionary, an eastern-Bengal peasant leader — so that every wrong answer is a genuine name in the wrong place. Prepare each rising as a card carrying leader, lieutenant, region, year and provocation, and this whole family of questions collapses into a lookup.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Paika rebellion of 1817 in Khurda was led by whom among the following ?

  • (a)Bakshi Jagabandhu
  • (b)Sangolli Rayanna
  • (c)Tipu Shah
  • (d)Sidhu Murmu

  Answer(a) Bakshi Jagabandhu

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The immediate provocation for the Kittur rising of 1824 was :

  • (a)A rise in the price of salt
  • (b)The Company's refusal to recognise Chennamma's adopted heir
  • (c)The introduction of the Permanent Settlement in Kittur
  • (d)The disbanding of the Kittur army after the third Anglo-Maratha War

  Answer(b) The Company's refusal to recognise Chennamma's adopted heir