MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 12 of 100

Correct — option (1), 'Pandit Motilal Nehru and D. J. Tendulkar'. The comparison of the Dandi march to Rama's march on Lanka is Motilal Nehru's: he said of Gandhi's walk to the sea that, like the historic march of Ramachandra to Lanka, the march to Dandi would be remembered. The remark is preserved in the great documentary biography of Gandhi, the eight-volume Mahatma by D. G. Tendulkar — the paper prints the second initial as J. in the English column and as G. in the Marathi one, and D. G., for Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar, is the correct form. That is why the option names two men rather than one: Motilal Nehru made the remark and Tendulkar is the source through whom it comes down. The comparison itself was well judged. Gandhi left the Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 with seventy-eight chosen volunteers and walked some 240 miles through the villages of Gujarat to the coast at Dandi, where on 6 April he picked up salt from the shore and broke the salt law, opening the Civil Disobedience movement. What made the march extraordinary was not the distance but the deliberate slowness — twenty-four days of village meetings, newspaper attention gathering with every stage, and a target chosen so that the poorest household could see the injustice in it. An epic march undertaken to right a wrong, watched by an entire country as it advanced, is exactly what Motilal Nehru's phrase captures. Note also that the printed English gives the remark without quotation marks and after a stray comma, while the Marathi column encloses it in double quotation marks.

• (2)P. C. Ray and D. P. Mishra — Prafulla Chandra Ray was a chemist of the first rank — the founder of Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works and the author of A History of Hindu Chemistry — and a nationalist of strong views on Indian industry and self-help, but the remark about the Dandi march is not his. D. P. Mishra belongs to Congress politics in the Central Provinces and later to the politics of Madhya Pradesh, and he too wrote, but not this. The option works by pairing two genuinely eminent names from different fields, which is a common MPSC device: a candidate who cannot place the quotation may reason that a scientist and a politician together sound like a plausible pair of commentators, when in fact the question is asking about one specific remark and its recorded source.
• (3)Shankarrao Dev and G. V. Ketkar — This option pairs two Maharashtra names in the hope that a state commission's paper must have a Maharashtra answer. Shankarrao Dev was a Gandhian worker of Maharashtra prominent in Congress organisation and later in the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation, and G. V. Ketkar was a Marathi journalist and editor. Neither is the author of the comparison in the stem, and neither is the biographer through whom it is preserved. The instinct that MPSC always answers with a local figure is one of the most expensive habits a candidate can carry into the examination hall: the Commission draws its all-India questions from all-India material, and here the quotation belongs to the president of the Congress and the biography to a chronicler of Gandhi.
• (4)Appasaheb Patwardhan and Suhasini Nambiyar — Appasaheb Patwardhan was a Gandhian constructive worker of the Konkan, and Suhasini Nambiar — Suhasini Chattopadhyay, the sister of Sarojini Naidu — was one of the earliest Indian women communists, so the pair does contain two real figures of the nationalist decades. But neither made the remark about the Dandi march, and neither wrote the biography in which it is recorded. This is the option for a candidate who recognises the second name only through her family and infers that a relative of Sarojini Naidu must be connected with the salt satyagraha, in which Naidu herself was so conspicuous. Family connections are not evidence of authorship, and the question asks who made a particular remark.

The Dandi march is the most carefully designed political action of Gandhi's career, and the reason it produced remarks like Motilal Nehru's is that it was built to be watched. The choice of the salt law as the point of attack answered an objection that had dogged the Congress since Lahore: what could a national movement do that would engage the poorest? Salt was taxed, its manufacture was a state monopoly, and every household bought it, so a law broken by stooping to the shore was intelligible without explanation. Gandhi left Sabarmati on 12 March 1930 with seventy-eight inmates of the ashram, walked about 240 miles in twenty-four days, spoke at village after village, and broke the law at Dandi on 6 April. Civil disobedience then spread far beyond salt — to the boycott of foreign cloth and liquor, to the refusal of revenue in Gujarat, to the frontier under Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and to Dharasana in May, where the beating of unresisting volunteers was reported abroad. The march's memory was carried into print by D. G. Tendulkar, whose eight-volume Mahatma assembled Gandhi's life largely from documents and contemporary reporting, and it is from such compilations that quotations of this kind reach a syllabus.

MPSC likes the quotation question, and it asks it in two forms — who said this of that, and who wrote the work in which it is recorded. Both are recall items with no reasoning available, so the only preparation is to hold a short list of famous descriptions with their authors attached: the standard examples include the characterisation of the Dandi march as a march to Lanka, Gandhi's own remark that the Cripps offer was a post-dated cheque, Jinnah's naming of a day of deliverance, and the various epithets attached to the Congress by its critics. What makes this particular item answerable even for a candidate who has not memorised the remark is the second name in each option: Tendulkar's Mahatma is a work every serious student of the period has heard of, and it is the only publication named anywhere in the four options. Reading option sets for the one verifiable element, rather than for the whole pairing, is the technique that rescues such questions. The card also notes a genuine paper-side discrepancy: the same man's initials are printed differently in the two language columns.

• Motilal Nehru compared Gandhi's walk to the sea with the historic march of Ramachandra to Lanka, saying that the march to Dandi would be remembered in the same way.
• The remark is preserved in Mahatma, the eight-volume documentary life of Gandhi compiled by D. G. Tendulkar; the English column of this paper prints the initials as D. J. and the Marathi column as D. G., and D. G. is the correct form.
• Gandhi left the Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 with seventy-eight volunteers and reached the coast at Dandi after about 240 miles and twenty-four days of walking.
• He broke the salt law at Dandi on 6 April 1930, opening the Civil Disobedience movement, which then spread to the boycott of foreign cloth and liquor and to no-revenue campaigns.
• Suhasini Nambiar, named in option (4), was Suhasini Chattopadhyay, a sister of Sarojini Naidu and one of the earliest Indian women communists — a real figure of the period, but not the author of this remark.

• Assuming that a Maharashtra state commission must want a Maharashtra name; all-India questions in MPSC papers draw on all-India material
• Treating an eminent name from another field, such as P. C. Ray in chemistry, as evidence that he must also be a commentator on political events
• Inferring authorship from a family connection, as with Suhasini Nambiar and her sister Sarojini Naidu's part in the salt satyagraha
• Ignoring the one checkable element in an option set; here only one option names a work of scholarship that can be independently placed

Quotation and attribution questions are a fixed part of MPSC's modern-history section, and they usually pair the speaker with the source, exactly as this question does. Because there is no way to reason to the answer, the Commission is effectively testing reading rather than analysis: the candidate who has read a standard account of the Civil Disobedience movement will have met both Motilal Nehru's comparison and Tendulkar's biography, while one who has learnt only dates and outcomes will not. The Commission also prints Indian names in inconsistent transliteration and, as here, with initials that differ between the two language columns, so recognition has to be tolerant of spelling. It is worth keeping a page of remembered phrases from the movement with a name attached to each, since the same handful recurs across papers and across state commissions.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Gandhi began the Dandi march from the Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 accompanied by how many volunteers, and broke the salt law on which date ?

  • (a)Seventy-eight volunteers; 6 April 1930
  • (b)Fifty volunteers; 6 April 1930
  • (c)Seventy-eight volunteers; 21 May 1930
  • (d)One hundred volunteers; 12 April 1930

  Answer(a) Seventy-eight volunteers; 6 April 1930 — Gandhi left Sabarmati with seventy-eight inmates of the ashram, walked about 240 miles over twenty-four days and broke the salt law at Dandi on 6 April, opening the Civil Disobedience movement. 21 May 1930 is the date of the Dharasana satyagraha, which came after Gandhi's arrest and is often confused with the march itself.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The eight-volume documentary biography of Gandhi entitled Mahatma was compiled by which author ?

  • (a)D. G. Tendulkar
  • (b)Louis Fischer
  • (c)Pyarelal Nayyar
  • (d)B. R. Nanda

  Answer(a) D. G. Tendulkar — Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar assembled the eight volumes of Mahatma largely from documents and contemporary reports, and it is one of the standard sources for remarks made about Gandhi by his contemporaries. Louis Fischer, Pyarelal and B. R. Nanda all wrote important lives of Gandhi as well, which is why they make plausible distractors.