MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 9 of 100

The Maharashtra Public Service Commission cancelled this question, so it carries no keyed choice and this card nominates none — nothing below should be read as a reconstruction of what the Commission might have intended. One feature of the printed item can be stated because it is visible on the page: the option set contains two pairs of identical choices. Option (1) reads '(a) and (c) correct' and option (3) reads '(c) and (a) correct', which name the same two statements in reverse order; option (2) and option (4) stand in the same relation to each other. What the question was reaching for is the safety-valve theory about the founding of the Indian National Congress. Allan Octavian Hume, who served in the Indian Civil Service from 1849 to 1882 and rose to be Secretary in the Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce before Lytton removed him from the Secretariat in 1879, wrote an open letter in March 1883 to the graduates of Calcutta University asking for fifty good and true men to found a national body; the first session met at Bombay from 28 to 31 December 1885. The safety-valve theory holds that Hume's purpose was to give the discontent building up in Indian society a constitutional outlet, so that it should not break out in another rising — that the Congress was, in the phrase, a safety valve for the escaping steam. The theory was given currency by the early Congress historian Pattabhi Sitaramayya and rests on an account of secret official reports said to have been shown to Hume. It has since been strongly challenged, on the ground that the seven volumes of secret report were not what they were represented to be and that the story was shaped by William Wedderburn to present Hume as a British patriot rather than a subversive. The four names the paper prints are worth knowing on their own account. Sir William Wedderburn, printed here as Wederburn, entered the Bombay civil service in 1860, retired in 1887 as acting Chief Secretary, presided over the Congress twice, in 1889 and at Allahabad in 1910, chaired the British Committee of the Congress from 1890 and wrote the memoir of Hume published in 1912. Sir Henry Cotton joined the Bengal service in 1867, was Chief Commissioner of Assam from 1896 to 1902, wrote New India, or India in Transition in 1885, presided over the twentieth Congress session at Bombay in 1904 during the agitation against the partition of Bengal, and later sat as a Liberal member of the House of Commons. Mountstuart Elphinstone, printed here as Elphinstine, belongs to a much earlier generation: he was Governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827 and died in 1859. The fourth name, printed as Slegal, does not correspond to a readily identifiable figure of the period and could not be traced for this card.

The safety-valve debate is really a debate about what the early Congress was for, and it has three positions worth holding separately. The first, associated with Pattabhi Sitaramayya's history, treats the Congress as a device conceived by a retired official and blessed by Lord Dufferin to give educated Indian discontent a harmless channel. The second, the nationalist reading, argues that the Congress was the product of a long process of Indian political organisation — the British Indian Association, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha of 1870, the Indian Association of 1876, the Madras Mahajana Sabha and the Bombay Presidency Association of 1885 — and that Hume was useful to Indians as a lightning conductor with the government rather than the other way around. The third, the position associated with later scholarship, holds that the documentary basis of the safety-valve story does not survive examination. All three can be argued from the same handful of facts, which is why the topic is a favourite in examinations: it asks a candidate to distinguish between what a source says, who said it, and whether it has been sustained.

MPSC asks about the founding of the Congress in more than one register — the plain factual register of dates, sessions and presidents, and the interpretive register of why it was founded and what the early leadership hoped for. It has a particular appetite for the Englishmen inside the movement, because they are easy to confuse: Hume the founder, Wedderburn and Cotton who each presided over sessions, George Yule who was the first non-Indian president in 1888, and Annie Besant much later in 1917. Distinguishing them is the exact skill a question of this shape tests. The wider habit worth taking away is source-consciousness. A statement of the safety-valve kind should always prompt three questions: who is being quoted, who reported the quotation, and has the report held up. That habit is what separates a candidate who can handle interpretive questions from one who can only recall dates, and it also protects against reproducing in an answer a claim that scholarship has abandoned.

• Allan Octavian Hume served in the Indian Civil Service from 1849 to 1882; his open letter of March 1883 to the graduates of Calcutta University called for fifty good and true men to found a national body, and the first Congress session met at Bombay from 28 to 31 December 1885.
• The safety-valve theory was given currency by the early Congress historian Pattabhi Sitaramayya and has been challenged on the ground that the seven volumes of secret report on which it rests were not what they were represented to be.
• Sir William Wedderburn, in the Bombay civil service from 1860 and retiring in 1887, presided over the Congress in 1889 and again at Allahabad in 1910, chaired its British Committee from 1890 and published the memoir of Hume in 1912.
• Sir Henry Cotton joined the Bengal civil service in 1867, was Chief Commissioner of Assam from 1896 to 1902, published New India, or India in Transition in 1885, and presided over the twentieth Congress session at Bombay in 1904.
• Mountstuart Elphinstone was Governor of Bombay from 1819 to 1827 and died in 1859, a generation before the Congress was founded; the English column prints his name as Elphinstine and prints a fourth name, Slegal, which could not be traced.

• Treating the safety-valve theory as settled history; it is a contested interpretation whose documentary basis has been challenged, and the examinable point is often the challenge rather than the claim
• Confusing the Englishmen associated with the early Congress with one another, when Hume, Yule, Wedderburn, Webb, Cotton and Besant all belong to different years and different roles
• Placing Mountstuart Elphinstone in the Congress era; he governed Bombay from 1819 to 1827 and died in 1859, and the Elphinstone institutions named after him are what usually carry his name into a modern-history paper
• Assuming that two answer choices which name the same statements in a different order must be different choices

The founding of the Congress is asked about every year somewhere in a state services paper, most often as a factual item — the year, the city, the first president, the number of delegates, who convened it — and less often as an interpretive one about the safety-valve reading. When the interpretive form appears it usually takes the shape of a statement to be judged true or false, or of an attribution question asking who advanced a particular view. The reliable preparation is a short table of the Englishmen in the early Congress with their years and roles, plus a one-line statement of the safety-valve claim together with a one-line statement of the objection to it, so that whichever side the paper puts in the stem, the other side is available.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which retired civil servant, who had served in the Indian Civil Service from 1849 to 1882, issued the open letter of March 1883 to the graduates of Calcutta University that led to the founding of the Indian National Congress ?

  • (a)Sir Henry Cotton
  • (b)Allan Octavian Hume
  • (c)Sir William Wedderburn
  • (d)George Yule

  Answer(b) Allan Octavian Hume — his letter asked for fifty good and true men to come forward as founders, and the first session followed at Bombay from 28 to 31 December 1885. Cotton, Wedderburn and Yule were all Englishmen closely associated with the Congress and each presided over a session, but the founding appeal of 1883 was Hume's.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Sir Henry Cotton, formerly Chief Commissioner of Assam and author of New India, presided over which session of the Indian National Congress ?

  • (a)The Bombay session of 1904
  • (b)The Calcutta session of 1906
  • (c)The Surat session of 1907
  • (d)The Allahabad session of 1910

  Answer(a) The Bombay session of 1904 — the twentieth session, held while the agitation against the partition of Bengal was building. The Calcutta session of 1906 was presided over by Dadabhai Naoroji, Surat in 1907 by Rash Behari Ghosh, and Allahabad in 1910 by Sir William Wedderburn, which is the pairing most often confused with this one.