MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 4 of 100

Correct — option (3), Nanasaheb. The uprising of 1857 threw up a different leader in each centre, and the standard table pairs Kanpur with Nana Saheb. He was Dhondu Pant, the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, and he lived at Bithur near Kanpur on the strength of his father's arrangement with the Company. When Baji Rao II died in 1851 the Company refused to continue the pension to an adopted son, and Nana Saheb's petitions — including a mission to London — failed. That grievance is why Kanpur had a ready-made claimant when its sepoys rose in early June 1857: the mutinous regiments turned to him, and he was proclaimed Peshwa. Under his leadership the rebels besieged the entrenchment where General Hugh Wheeler had gathered the European garrison and their families, and the siege ended in the two episodes that fixed Kanpur in British memory — the killings at Satichaura Ghat in late June as the garrison was evacuating under a promise of safe passage by river, and the killing of the surviving women and children at the Bibighar in mid-July as British relief columns approached. Kanpur was retaken by Havelock's force in July 1857 and became the site of exemplary reprisals. Nana Saheb was never captured; after the collapse of the rebellion in the Ganga valley he disappeared, and the general belief is that he escaped towards Nepal. The other three names in the option list are all genuine 1857 figures, and one of them fought at Kanpur itself, so the question is really asking whether the candidate knows who was proclaimed the leader there rather than who was present.

• (1)Tatya Tope — Tatya Tope is the most defensible wrong answer on the page, because he really did command at Kanpur — as Nana Saheb's general. Ramchandra Pandurang Tope was Nana Saheb's close associate at Bithur and led his forces in the field, including the attempt to retake Kanpur later in 1857. But he was the commander, not the leader in whose name the revolt at Kanpur was raised; the sepoys proclaimed Nana Saheb as Peshwa. Tatya Tope's own reputation rests on what he did afterwards — his march to join Rani Lakshmibai, the seizure of Gwalior in June 1858, and the long guerrilla campaign in central India that ended with his capture and execution in April 1859.
• (2)Azimulla — Azimullah Khan was Nana Saheb's diwan and political adviser, and he is the reason the Kanpur grievance was so sharply articulated: he was sent to England to press Nana Saheb's claim to the Peshwa's pension before the Company's directors, and returned unsuccessful and embittered. He is a genuine and important Kanpur figure, and is often credited with the diplomacy and correspondence of the rising there. But he acted for Nana Saheb, not in his own name, and no account presents him as the leader of the Kanpur uprising — the distinction between the adviser and the proclaimed leader is exactly what this option tests.
• (4)Maulavi Ahmedulla — Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah of Faizabad belongs to a different centre of the revolt. He was one of the outstanding leaders of the rising in Awadh, prominent in the fighting around Lucknow, and he was among the very few rebel commanders the British acknowledged as a serious military mind; he was killed in June 1858. Placing him in an option list about Kanpur tests whether the candidate has the 1857 centres mapped — Delhi under Bahadur Shah Zafar with Bakht Khan commanding, Lucknow under Begum Hazrat Mahal with the Maulvi of Faizabad, Jhansi under Rani Lakshmibai, Bareilly under Khan Bahadur Khan, Bihar under Kunwar Singh, and Kanpur under Nana Saheb.

The revolt of 1857 had no single command, and its leadership in each centre came from a person with a specific pre-existing grievance against Company policy — which is why the centres can be learnt as a table rather than memorised as a list of names. Kanpur is the clearest case of a leader supplied by the pension question: the refusal to continue Baji Rao II's pension to his adopted son gave Nana Saheb both a claim and a reason. Jhansi is the clearest case of the doctrine of lapse, Awadh of outright annexation on grounds of misgovernment in 1856, Delhi of the decision to end the Mughal title. The pattern matters more than the individual names, because it explains why the rising was strongest in a belt from Delhi through the Doab into Awadh and Bundelkhand, and weak where such dispossessed claimants did not exist.

MPSC asks 1857 as a mapping exercise: a place in the stem, four leaders in the options, or the reverse. What makes the Kanpur version harder than most is that two of its four options — Nana Saheb and Tatya Tope — were both at Kanpur, so the candidate has to know the relationship between them rather than merely associate a name with a city. The reliable preparation is a centre-by-centre table carrying the leader, the commander where they differ, the grievance and the date the centre fell, kept together with the leaders' fates, because MPSC also asks who escaped, who was executed and when. Adding the Maharashtra connection is worth doing here: Nana Saheb, Tatya Tope and Rani Lakshmibai all belong to the Peshwa's world at Bithur, which is why a Maharashtra commission returns to them regularly. Because the 1857 chapter is also examined through causes and consequences, it is worth attaching to the Kanpur story both the policy that produced it — the refusal to recognise adoption for the purposes of pension and title — and the consequence that followed the revolt, the transfer of Indian government from the Company to the Crown by the Act of 1858.

• Nana Saheb (Dhondu Pant) was the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, and lived at Bithur near Kanpur; the Company's refusal to continue his father's pension to an adopted son was his central grievance.
• The sepoys who rose at Kanpur in June 1857 proclaimed Nana Saheb as Peshwa and besieged the entrenchment of General Hugh Wheeler's garrison.
• The siege ended in the killings at Satichaura Ghat during the evacuation and at the Bibighar in July 1857; Kanpur was retaken by Havelock's relieving force in July 1857.
• Tatya Tope, Nana Saheb's general, went on to campaign in central India, took Gwalior with Rani Lakshmibai in June 1858, and was captured and executed in April 1859.
• Nana Saheb was never captured; after the collapse of the revolt in the Ganga valley he is believed to have escaped towards Nepal.

• Choosing Tatya Tope because he fought at Kanpur — he was Nana Saheb's commander, while Nana Saheb was the leader proclaimed there
• Mixing the Awadh leadership, including Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah and Begum Hazrat Mahal, into a question about Kanpur
• Treating Azimullah Khan's role as adviser and emissary as leadership of the rising

Questions on 1857 in MPSC papers are almost always one-to-one matching — a centre and its leader, a leader and his fate, a date and the event that fell on it — and the difficulty is manufactured by putting two people from the same centre into the same option list. Expect follow-up items that ask who was proclaimed emperor or Peshwa as against who commanded the troops, and items that pair a leader with the year of his death. Because so much of the 1857 leadership has a Maharashtra origin, a state commission returns to Nana Saheb, Tatya Tope and Rani Lakshmibai more often than to the Awadh or Bihar figures.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Tatya Tope, the commander of Nana Saheb's forces during the revolt of 1857, was finally captured and executed in which year ?

  • (a)1857
  • (b)1858
  • (c)1859
  • (d)1861

  Answer(c) 1859 — Tatya Tope carried on a guerrilla campaign in central India after the fall of Gwalior in June 1858 and was captured and executed in April 1859. The Rani of Jhansi had died in the fighting at Gwalior in June 1858, and the revolt in the Ganga valley had largely been suppressed by then.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  During the revolt of 1857, the leadership at Lucknow in Awadh was associated with which of the following ?

  • (a)Begum Hazrat Mahal
  • (b)Khan Bahadur Khan
  • (c)Kunwar Singh
  • (d)Nana Saheb

  Answer(a) Begum Hazrat Mahal — she led the revolt at Lucknow in the name of her son Birjis Qadr after the annexation of Awadh, with Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah of Faizabad prominent in the fighting. Khan Bahadur Khan led at Bareilly, Kunwar Singh in Bihar at Jagdishpur, and Nana Saheb at Kanpur.