MPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 11 of 100

Correct — option (2), India for Indians. Chittaranjan Das, the Calcutta barrister who would later be remembered as Deshbandhu, delivered a run of major speeches in October 1917 — a Hindu-Mahomedan mass meeting at Calcutta on 7 October, a public meeting at Mymensingh, a great meeting at Dacca on 11 October, and a Home Rule meeting at Barisal on 14 October — arguing for Hindu-Muslim unity and self-government in the language of shared Indian nationhood. These four speeches were gathered and published together as India for Indians in November 1917, with a foreword by Motilal Ghose, editor of the Amrita Bazar Patrika, praising Das's unselfish commitment to the national cause. The book proved influential enough to go through a second edition in 1918 and a considerably enlarged edition in 1921 — folding in later speeches from the Non-Co-operation years — but the original volume this question describes is precisely the four-speech collection of late 1917.

• (1)Indians of India — A plausible-sounding near miss built by rearranging the actual title's words rather than naming a real, different publication. Das's book is titled India for Indians, not Indians of India, and no such alternative title is attached to this 1917 speech collection — the option works purely as a memory trap for a candidate who recalls the general shape of the title but not its exact wording.
• (3)India and Indians — Another word-order variant on the genuine title. Swapping 'for' to 'and' changes the sense of the title from an argument (India belongs to, or should be run for, Indians) to a mere pairing of two nouns, and it is not the title under which Das's speeches were actually published in 1917.
• (4)Indians for India — The closest-looking distractor of the three, reversing only the order of 'India' and 'Indians' from the real title. It reads almost identically to the correct answer, which is exactly why MPSC includes it — to test whether a candidate has the exact wording fixed in memory rather than a loose impression of it.

India for Indians belongs to a moment when Hindu-Muslim political cooperation looked genuinely achievable — the same climate that produced the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League in December 1916. C. R. Das's October 1917 speeches, delivered across Bengal in the months immediately following that Pact, argued the case for a shared Indian political future to mixed Hindu-Muslim audiences, and their publication as a single volume turned a set of platform speeches into a durable statement of his early political thought, well before his later, better-known role as a Swarajist leader in the 1920s.

MPSC's questions on freedom-movement literature often hinge on exact book titles rather than general awareness of who wrote what, and this item is a clean example: three of the four options are constructed by permuting the same three words that make up the real title. The safeguard against this style of trap is deliberate, exact memorisation of a short list of landmark titles, rather than a general sense of 'something about India and Indians.'

• India for Indians collects four speeches C. R. Das delivered in October 1917 — at Calcutta (Hindu-Mahomedan mass meeting, 7 October), Mymensingh, Dacca (11 October) and Barisal (14 October).
• The book was first published in November 1917 with a foreword by Motilal Ghose, editor of the Amrita Bazar Patrika.
• A second edition followed in 1918 and a considerably enlarged edition in 1921, adding later speeches from the Non-Co-operation period.
• The speeches argued for Hindu-Muslim political unity and Indian self-government, in the immediate aftermath of the December 1916 Lucknow Pact between Congress and the Muslim League.
• C. R. Das later became a central Swarajist leader in the 1920s and is remembered by the honorific Deshbandhu, 'Friend of the Nation'.

• Confusing the exact word order of a landmark book title with a plausible-sounding rearrangement of the same words
• Assuming a book title reflects a single speech rather than a compiled set of several
• Losing track of which edition (1917 original vs. the enlarged 1921 edition) a question is actually asking about

MPSC likes to test freedom-movement literature by exact title recall, often building its wrong options from permutations of the real title's own words rather than from unrelated names — precisely the trap this question sets. The safeguard is treating landmark titles as fixed strings to be memorised exactly, the same discipline used for match-the-column author questions.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  C. R. Das's four October 1917 speeches, later published as India for Indians, were delivered across which region?

  • (a)Punjab
  • (b)Bengal
  • (c)Madras Presidency
  • (d)United Provinces

  Answer(b) Bengal — the speeches were delivered at Calcutta, Mymensingh, Dacca and Barisal, all within Bengal, in the climate of Hindu-Muslim cooperation that followed the December 1916 Lucknow Pact.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  C. R. Das is remembered by which honorific title for his service to the national movement?

  • (a)Mahatma
  • (b)Lokmanya
  • (c)Deshbandhu
  • (d)Sardar

  Answer(c) Deshbandhu — 'Friend of the Nation'. Mahatma is associated with Gandhi, Lokmanya with Tilak, and Sardar with Vallabhbhai Patel.