MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 14 of 100

Correct — option (2), which reads (a)-(ii), (b)-(i), (c)-(iv), (d)-(iii): Adhuria of Khandesh Yaval, Pandu Bhorji of Nagar, Dharma Subhan of Pandharpur and Dhondi Birbal of Nashik. This is a pure recall item and it should be recognised as one. The four names are ordinary men from the Deccan whose places of residence are preserved in the convict records of the transportation to the Andamans, not public figures whose lives are written up anywhere a candidate could reason from; there is no principle, no chronology and no thematic link that will yield the pairing to someone who has not read the list. It is worth saying that plainly, because the wrong response to an item like this is to spend three minutes constructing a rationalisation, and the right response is to give it the fifteen seconds it deserves and move on. What can be learnt from it is the paper-craft. Look at how the four choices are built. Option (1) and option (2) agree on two of their four rows — both give Adhuria to Khandesh Yaval and Dhondi Birbal to Nashik — and separate only on whether Pandu Bhorji belongs to Nagar and Dharma Subhan to Pandharpur, or the reverse pairing with Pandharpur and Nagar exchanged. Of the remaining two, option (3) is a permutation that shares no row with the key at all, while option (4) agrees on the third row only. So a candidate who has any recollection of the first and last rows is left facing a straight two-way choice, and one who has none is facing a four-way guess on a paper that deducts a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer. The real content the question is attached to is the Andaman penal settlement itself: the place of transportation to which the rebels of 1857 and, half a century later, the political prisoners of the revolutionary movement were sent, and the reason kala pani entered the language as a name for the worst punishment short of death. That subject is examinable in a hundred ways that do not require this list, and it is where preparation should go.

• (1)(a) - (ii), (b) - (iv), (c) - (i), (d) - (iii) — This is the near-twin of the key and the only choice a prepared candidate is likely to be weighing against it. It agrees that Adhuria belongs to Khandesh Yaval and that Dhondi Birbal belongs to Nashik, and it differs only in exchanging the other two, giving Pandharpur to Pandu Bhorji and Nagar to Dharma Subhan. Because it shares half the key's rows, partial recall does not distinguish it and the two must be separated on the middle pair alone. The structural lesson is worth carrying to every matching question in this paper: before committing, compare the surviving choices row by row and identify exactly which row is doing the work, because that is the only fact you actually need to recall.
• (3)(a) - (iv), (b) - (iii), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i) — This choice shares no row with the key. It moves Adhuria to Pandharpur, Pandu Bhorji to Nashik, Dharma Subhan to Khandesh Yaval and Dhondi Birbal to Nagar — a complete re-permutation. Choices of this kind exist in a matching option set to absorb candidates who are guessing, and they are worth recognising as such, because a set of four choices in which two are near-twins and two are unrelated permutations is telling you where the examiner thinks the difficulty lies. If you find yourself drawn to one of the outlying permutations without a specific reason, that is a sign you are guessing rather than recalling, and on a paper with negative marking that is information about whether to attempt the question at all.
• (4)(a) - (iii), (b) - (ii), (c) - (iv), (d) - (i) — This choice is the other unrelated permutation, giving Nashik to Adhuria, Khandesh Yaval to Pandu Bhorji, Pandharpur to Dharma Subhan and Nagar to Dhondi Birbal. It agrees with the key on one row only, the third. Notice that this means a candidate who happens to recall just the Dharma Subhan pairing is left with two choices rather than one, and would still have to decide between this and the key on other grounds — a reminder that on a four-row match the number of choices a single remembered row eliminates varies from none to three, and that it pays to check which of your recollections is the most discriminating before you use it.

The Andaman Islands became a penal settlement because of 1857. The colonial government needed somewhere remote to send the rebels it had captured and did not intend to hang, and Port Blair was reoccupied for the purpose; the first batch of two hundred convicts reached the islands on 10 March 1858 under Dr J. P. Walker. Over the eighty years that followed, something on the order of eighty thousand Indian prisoners were shipped there, and most never came back. Transportation across the sea carried a second penalty beyond the physical one, because crossing the kala pani, the black water, was held to break caste and sever a man from his community, so the sentence destroyed a convict's social existence as well as his liberty. The settlement began as an open penal colony with convict labour clearing forest and building, and hardened at the turn of the century into the Cellular Jail, built between 1896 and 1906, with some seven hundred single cells in seven wings radiating from a central watchtower, designed so that no prisoner could see or communicate with another. Its later inmates included the revolutionaries of the twentieth-century movement, among them V. D. Savarkar, transported in 1911.

MPSC asks about the Andamans in two quite different registers. The first is the general one, shared with every other examination — the founding of the settlement, the Cellular Jail and its architecture, kala pani, the famous political prisoners, the hunger strikes, the Japanese occupation of the islands during the Second World War and the hoisting of the tricolour there by Subhas Chandra Bose in 1943. The second is the state-specific register that produces a question like this one: the Maharashtra men who were transported, drawn from district records and local histories. The second register is where a state commission can ask something no all-India compilation covers, and it does so deliberately, because it rewards candidates who have read Maharashtra's own historical literature rather than only national textbooks. A realistic preparation strategy accepts that the general register must be secure and that the state-specific one will always contain items that cannot be reached, and budgets attempt-or-skip decisions accordingly on a paper that penalises wrong answers.

• The penal settlement at Port Blair was re-established after the revolt of 1857; the first batch of two hundred convicts arrived on 10 March 1858 under Dr J. P. Walker.
• Roughly eighty thousand Indian prisoners were transported to the Andamans between 1857 and 1938, and most of them never returned.
• Kala pani, the black water, named the sea crossing that was held to break caste, so transportation carried a social penalty on top of the penal one.
• The Cellular Jail was built between 1896 and 1906, with about seven hundred single cells in seven wings radiating from a central tower, designed to prevent any communication between prisoners.
• This question's key pairs Adhuria with Khandesh Yaval, Pandu Bhorji with Nagar, Dharma Subhan with Pandharpur and Dhondi Birbal with Nashik; the names come from the records of transportation and not from any published biography.

• Spending disproportionate time on a pure recall item; the sensible response to a question that cannot be reasoned out is a quick decision about whether to attempt it at all
• Failing to compare the surviving choices row by row to identify which single row is actually deciding the question
• Assuming a matching question must be solvable from general knowledge; state commissions deliberately include items drawn from local records that no national compilation carries
• Ignoring the quarter-mark deduction when guessing between two near-twin choices on an item where you have no recall at all

The Andamans reach MPSC papers most often through the Cellular Jail and its famous prisoners, and through the vocabulary of transportation. Where the commission goes local, as here, it draws on the district-level record of who was sent from Maharashtra, which is material found in gazetteers and regional histories rather than in standard textbooks. Treat the two layers separately in preparation: make the national layer airtight, since it recurs every year and is fully documented, and treat the local layer as a bonus that will occasionally be reachable if you have read Maharashtra's own historical writing. The examination technique the local layer teaches is more valuable than the facts themselves — recognising quickly that an item is unreachable, and deciding on that basis rather than after three minutes of speculation.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Cellular Jail at Port Blair, built between 1896 and 1906, was designed on which architectural principle ?

  • (a)Large communal barracks with open courtyards
  • (b)Single cells in seven wings radiating from a central watchtower
  • (c)An underground complex beneath the harbour fortifications
  • (d)A double ring of cells around a central parade ground

  Answer(b) Single cells in seven wings radiating from a central watchtower — the arrangement gave a single guard sight of every wing and, because each wing faced the back of the next, ensured that no prisoner could see or communicate with another. The building held about seven hundred cells, and the deliberate isolation is what gave the jail its name and its reputation.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The penal settlement at Port Blair was re-established in the aftermath of which event, with the first batch of two hundred convicts arriving in March 1858 ?

  • (a)The Santhal rebellion of 1855
  • (b)The revolt of 1857
  • (c)The Indigo revolt of 1859
  • (d)The Deccan riots of 1875

  Answer(b) The revolt of 1857 — the government needed a remote place of confinement for the large number of rebels it had captured and did not intend to execute, and Port Blair was reoccupied for that purpose, the first two hundred convicts landing on 10 March 1858. Roughly eighty thousand prisoners were transported to the islands over the eighty years that followed.