MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 13 of 100

Correct — option (2), Lokmanya Tilak. The Swadeshi Vastu Pracharini Sabha was a body for propagating the use of indigenous goods, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak headed it; the Ministry of Culture's own district repository carries a record titled Swadeshi Wastu Pracharini Sabha and Tilak, and the compilations on the Swadeshi movement place the Sabha in 1905. Tilak also opened cooperative stores as part of the same effort, which is the practical half of what a propagation society had to do — telling people to buy Indian goods is useless unless Indian goods are on a shelf within reach. Placing the Sabha with Tilak follows from the shape of his politics rather than from memory alone. Tilak is the leader who built organisations that carried an abstract political demand into everyday practice: the Ganapati festival from 1893 and the Shivaji festival from 1895 turned worship and commemoration into public assembly at a time when political meetings were watched, the newspapers Kesari in Marathi and Mahratta in English carried the argument into print, and swadeshi was the fourth of the four pillars of the Extremist programme along with boycott, national education and passive resistance. When the partition of Bengal in 1905 made swadeshi and boycott the national programme, the leaders of the Extremist wing set about giving them institutional form outside Bengal too, and a sabha for propagating indigenous goods in the Deccan is exactly what that looks like. The lasting importance of the swadeshi idea is that it changed the target of nationalist activity from petitioning the government to organising Indian society, a shift that Gandhi later took much further with khadi and the charkha, but which begins in these years and with bodies of this kind.

• (1)Mahatma Gandhi — Gandhi is ruled out by the calendar. He was in South Africa through the whole period of the Swadeshi and Boycott agitation, engaged with the struggle of the Indian community there, and he returned to India only in January 1915, a decade after the partition of Bengal. He then spent his first year travelling the country at Gokhale's advice before taking up Champaran in 1917. His own swadeshi programme, built around khadi, the charkha and the boycott of foreign cloth, belongs to the Non-Cooperation years from 1920 onward and is a later and different development. He is offered here because swadeshi is the word most strongly associated with his name, which is precisely why the chronological check has to come first.
• (3)Justice M.G. Ranade — Mahadev Govind Ranade died in January 1901, four years before the partition of Bengal set off the Swadeshi movement, so he cannot have headed a body founded in its wake. He is a genuinely attractive distractor because he had argued for Indian industrialisation long before swadeshi became a slogan — his Essays on Indian Economics made the case for state-assisted industry and against applying free-trade doctrine to a colonial economy, and he was associated with early industrial exhibitions in Poona. But the ideas and the organisation belong to different decades, and Ranade also belonged to the Moderate school that Tilak's wing was in the process of displacing. Dating a leader's death is one of the cheapest and most reliable filters available in modern-history questions.
• (4)Dr. Munje — B. S. Moonje, printed here as Dr. Munje, was a Nagpur physician who became a leading figure of the Hindu Mahasabha, and his best-remembered work is the founding of the Bhonsala Military School at Nashik in 1937 as part of a programme of militarising Hindu youth. His prominence belongs to the 1920s and 1930s, well after the Swadeshi years, and his line of activity was communal organisation and military training rather than the promotion of indigenous manufactures. He appears in this option set because he is a Maharashtra name of the right general period, which is the reflex the commission is testing; a candidate should ask what the man is actually known for before letting regional familiarity settle the answer.

Swadeshi began as an economic argument and became a political method. The economic argument was the older of the two and belonged to the Moderates: Dadabhai Naoroji's drain theory, R. C. Dutt's economic history and Ranade's essays all held that India was being deindustrialised and drained by a colonial trading relationship, and that the remedy lay in Indian manufacture. The political method arrived with the partition of Bengal announced in 1905, when boycott of British goods was adopted as a weapon and swadeshi as its positive counterpart. The Calcutta session of the Congress in 1906 adopted swadeshi, boycott, national education and self-government, and the Extremist wing under Lal, Bal and Pal pressed for extending the programme beyond Bengal. In practice the movement produced textile mills and soap works, national schools, volunteer corps, bonfires of foreign cloth, and societies for propagating indigenous goods of the kind this question names. Its weaknesses were equally instructive — Indian substitutes were often dearer and scarcer than the imports they replaced, which is why cooperative stores and propagation societies mattered.

MPSC likes Tilak questions and asks them from many directions: his newspapers, his festivals, the sedition trials of 1897 and 1908, his six years at Mandalay, the Home Rule League of 1916, the Lucknow Pact, and the organisations he founded or led. The commission's favourite device on this topic is to place three other real leaders in the option set, at least two of them from Maharashtra, so that a candidate cannot narrow the field by region. That is exactly what happens here, with Ranade and Moonje standing beside Tilak. The defence is a two-stage filter: first check dates, which disposes of Ranade, who died in 1901, and of Gandhi, who was abroad until 1915; then ask what the surviving names are actually known for. A candidate who applies those two filters in order will find that most who-founded questions collapse quickly, without needing to have memorised the particular body the question names.

• The Swadeshi Vastu Pracharini Sabha, a body for propagating the use of indigenous goods, was headed by Bal Gangadhar Tilak; the compilations on the Swadeshi movement date it to 1905, and Tilak also opened cooperative stores.
• Swadeshi, boycott, national education and passive resistance were the four planks of the Extremist programme adopted in the years after the partition of Bengal was announced in 1905.
• Tilak founded the Marathi weekly Kesari and the English weekly Mahratta, and began the public Ganapati festival in 1893 and the Shivaji festival in 1895.
• Mahadev Govind Ranade died in January 1901, before the Swadeshi movement began; Gandhi was in South Africa until his return to India in January 1915.
• B. S. Moonje, printed in this paper as Dr. Munje, was a Nagpur physician and Hindu Mahasabha leader who founded the Bhonsala Military School at Nashik in 1937.

• Attaching any question containing the word swadeshi to Gandhi; his swadeshi programme belongs to the 1920s, and he was in South Africa throughout the movement of 1905 to 1908
• Overlooking the death dates of Moderate leaders — Ranade died in 1901 and Gokhale in 1915, which removes them from many questions about later events
• Assuming that a Maharashtra name in a Maharashtra paper must be the answer; three of the four choices here are Maharashtra figures
• Confusing the economic argument for swadeshi, which the Moderates made from the 1870s, with the political movement of boycott and swadeshi that began in 1905

Who founded or headed a named body is one of the most reliably recurring question types in MPSC Paper-I, and the commission builds the option set from leaders of overlapping periods so that nothing can be eliminated on grounds of ideology alone. The most productive preparation is a table of organisation against founder with a year attached, covering the reform societies, the political associations, the swadeshi and national education bodies, the newspapers and the later parties. Alongside it keep a short list of death dates for the major leaders, because chronology kills more distractors than recall does. Tilak in particular will keep appearing, so his list of foundations and his sequence of dates from 1881 to 1920 is worth being able to recite.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The four planks of the programme adopted by the Extremist wing of the Congress in the years following the partition of Bengal were swadeshi, boycott, passive resistance and which fourth ?

  • (a)Separate electorates
  • (b)National education
  • (c)Simultaneous civil service examinations
  • (d)Permanent settlement of land revenue

  Answer(b) National education — the four together were swadeshi, boycott, national education and passive resistance, and they were adopted at the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1906. National education produced institutions built outside the government-affiliated system, of which the Bengal National College is the best remembered, and the plank is what connects the Swadeshi years to the national schools of the Non-Cooperation era.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Bal Gangadhar Tilak began which two public festivals in the 1890s as a means of turning religious and commemorative occasions into political assembly ?

  • (a)The Ganapati festival and the Shivaji festival
  • (b)The Ganapati festival and the Rathayatra
  • (c)The Shivaji festival and the Holi festival
  • (d)The Ramnavami festival and the Shivaji festival

  Answer(a) The Ganapati festival and the Shivaji festival — begun in 1893 and 1895 respectively. Both let large crowds gather lawfully at a time when overtly political meetings were closely watched, and both fed the same audience that Tilak's newspapers Kesari and Mahratta were addressing in print, which is why examiners pair the festivals with the papers.