MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 90 of 100

Correct — option (2), Bhendi Bazar and Wadala. Begin with the structure of the options, because it does half the work. Wadala appears in all four, so the question does not turn on Wadala at all; it turns on which of the four other names belongs beside it, and the candidate's task is to test C.S.M.T., Bhendi Bazar, Charni Road and Panvel one by one. Wadala's own credentials are not in doubt and are worth knowing for their own sake. The north-eastern part of Wadala is covered by salt pans lying along the shores of Thane creek, and salt has been made on that shoreline since long before the British; under the Salt Act of 1882 the colonial government held a monopoly on the manufacture and collection of salt, restricted its handling to government salt depots and taxed it, and a violation of the Act was a criminal offence. That is what made Wadala politically important: during the Civil Disobedience Movement the Wadala salt works were raided on 1 June 1930 by about fifteen hundred Congress volunteers responding to an appeal published in the Congress Bulletin the previous day, and the authorities detained a number of them, among them eleven women. Wadala is therefore the fixed half of the pair, and the answer is decided by the other half. Bhendi Bazar is the keyed partner. It is one of the old market quarters of the island city, lying in South Mumbai between Mohammed Ali Road and Khetwadi, in the belt of bazaars that also holds Crawford Market — now Mahatma Jotiba Phule Market — Chor Bazaar and Nul Bazaar, and it grew in the British period as a dense quarter of trade and of housing for the labour that worked the port and the city. A market quarter of that kind, close to the docks and to the wholesale trades, is the natural place for the sale of a commodity whose manufacture was concentrated on the eastern shore at Wadala, and the pairing in the key is of the place where salt was made with the place where it was traded. The other three options fail for reasons that can be stated without any knowledge of salt at all, and those reasons are set out against each of them below. The answer to be marked is option (2).

• (1)C.S.M.T. and Wadala — C.S.M.T. is a railway station, not a market, and it is younger than the trade the question asks about. The terminus was designed by Frederick William Stevens from an initial design by Axel Haig, begun in 1878 to the south of the old Bori Bunder station and completed in 1887, the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, and opened to the public on 20 May 1888. It was called Victoria Terminus until March 1996, when it became Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, and it was renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in 2017; it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the headquarters of the Central Railway. Its neighbourhood does contain the great colonial market of Crawford Market, now the Mahatma Jotiba Phule Market, and that association is probably what makes the option feel plausible. But the option names the terminus, and a terminus, however grand, is not a salt market; it is the piece of infrastructure that carried goods away from one.
• (3)Charni Road and Wadala — Charni Road is a neighbourhood of South Mumbai on the western side of the island, served by the station of the same name on the Western line, and its name records grazing rather than trade. The accepted account is that when the government raised a tax on cattle grazing at the Azad Maidan, Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy bought grasslands near Thakurdwar and opened them to the people to graze their cattle free of charge; the Marathi word for grazing is charne, the area became Charni and the road beside it Charni Road. An alternative account derives the name from Chendni in the Thane-Koliwada area, from which people migrated to this part of the city. Either way the area is associated with the Girgaum and Chowpatty side of the island, with chawls, the diamond trade of Opera House and the Girgaon festivals, and not with the salt trade of the eastern shore, which lay across the island on the harbour side.
• (4)Panvel and Wadala — Panvel fails on the plainest ground available: the stem asks for two places in Mumbai, and Panvel is not in Mumbai. It lies across the harbour on the mainland, in what is now Raigad district, at the head of the creek that separates the mainland from Trombay and Salsette, and it has long been a market town and a junction on the route inland to Pune. Its position on a tidal creek does place it in the same coastal geography of creeks and marshes in which salt was made along this coast, and that is exactly why the option is offered — it is the plausible-sounding name for a candidate who is thinking about salt but not about the boundary of the city. The discipline the option rewards is the one every question about places demands: read the geographical qualifier in the stem, here 'in Mumbai', and apply it before considering anything else.

Salt is one of the threads that ties the physical geography of Bombay to its politics. The island city and its eastern suburbs sit against a coastline of tidal creeks and low marshy flats, and such flats are ideal for making salt by solar evaporation: sea water is admitted at high tide into shallow pans, allowed to concentrate, and the crystallised salt is scraped and carried away. Wadala, on the harbour side, has been a salt-making area of exactly this kind, its northern flats running to the shores of Thane creek. The British made salt an instrument of revenue: the Salt Act of 1882 gave the government a monopoly of manufacture and collection, confined lawful handling to government salt depots and levied a tax, so that even those living beside the sea were required to buy salt from the government. That is the law Gandhi chose as the first target of satyagraha in 1930, breaking it at Dandi on 6 April 1930 and setting off a year of civil disobedience; in Bombay the movement fastened on the Wadala salt works, which about fifteen hundred volunteers raided on 1 June 1930. Alongside the making of salt there was the selling of it, and that belonged to the city's market quarters — the belt of bazaars behind the docks that includes Crawford Market, Chor Bazaar, Nul Bazaar and Bhendi Bazar, quarters that grew in the colonial period as trade and labour concentrated around the harbour.

MPSC sets a small but steady number of questions on the historical topography of Mumbai — where a market stood, where a mill was, where a movement began, which locality carries which name and why — and they are among the hardest questions in the paper for a candidate from outside the city, because they cannot be reasoned out from principle. Two things make them manageable. The first is elimination: in this question a single name is repeated in all four options, which tells the candidate at once that the repeated name is not being tested and that the work lies entirely in the four alternatives. The second is a working knowledge of what each named place actually is — a terminus, a residential neighbourhood, a market quarter, a mainland town — because most wrong options in this format can be struck out on the category of the place rather than on any fact about the subject. Note also the geographical qualifier in the stem, 'in Mumbai', which alone disposes of Panvel; MPSC frequently plants an option that lies just outside the boundary named in the stem, and reading the qualifier deliberately is worth a mark on such questions more often than any amount of local knowledge.

• The north-eastern part of Wadala is covered by salt pans lying along the shores of Thane creek, and salt-making on those flats is the reason Wadala appears in every option of this question.
• The Salt Act of 1882 gave the British government a monopoly over the manufacture and collection of salt, confined its handling to government salt depots and levied a tax; violation was a criminal offence.
• During the Civil Disobedience Movement the Wadala salt works were raided on 1 June 1930 by about fifteen hundred Congress volunteers, following an appeal in the Congress Bulletin of 31 May; eleven women were among those detained.
• Bhendi Bazar is a market quarter of South Mumbai between Mohammed Ali Road and Khetwadi, one of the belt of colonial-era bazaars that also includes Crawford Market — now the Mahatma Jotiba Phule Market — Chor Bazaar and Nul Bazaar.
• Of the remaining names, C.S.M.T. is the railway terminus built between 1878 and 1887 and opened in 1888 as Victoria Terminus, Charni Road is a South Mumbai neighbourhood whose name derives from cattle grazing, and Panvel lies outside Mumbai on the mainland in Raigad district.

• Testing the name that appears in every option; Wadala is common to all four and therefore carries no information for the choice
• Ignoring the geographical qualifier 'in Mumbai', which by itself removes Panvel, a town on the mainland in Raigad district
• Confusing a railway terminus with a market because both stand in the same commercial quarter of the old city
• Assuming a locality's name records its trade; Charni Road's name records the grazing of cattle, not a bazaar

Questions on the local history and topography of Mumbai appear in MPSC papers in a fixed set of shapes: which locality is associated with a named event, which two places are linked by a named trade or institution, which building was called what before it was renamed, and where a named movement or mill or market stood. They reward reading about the city as much as reading about the syllabus, and they are best prepared through the renaming table — Victoria Terminus to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, Crawford Market to Mahatma Jotiba Phule Market, Elphinstone Road to Prabhadevi — and through the map of the eastern shore, where the docks, the mills and the salt pans lay. When such a question offers four options built on a repeated name, the repeated name is never the point; the Commission uses that construction to force the candidate to discriminate among the four alternatives, and the fastest route is to classify each alternative by what kind of place it is.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Wadala salt works in Bombay are remembered in the national movement for which event ?

  • (a)A raid by about fifteen hundred Congress volunteers on 1 June 1930 during the Civil Disobedience Movement
  • (b)The first session of the Indian National Congress in 1885
  • (c)The naval ratings' mutiny of February 1946
  • (d)The launch of the Quit India Movement in August 1942

  Answer(a) A raid by about fifteen hundred Congress volunteers on 1 June 1930 during the Civil Disobedience Movement. The action followed an appeal published in the Congress Bulletin of 31 May, and a number of volunteers were detained, among them eleven women. The salt monopoly under the Salt Act of 1882 made government salt works and depots natural targets once Gandhi had broken the salt law at Dandi on 6 April 1930. The Quit India Movement was launched from Gowalia Tank Maidan, and the naval mutiny of 1946 began aboard ships in the harbour.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following pairs of place and origin of its name is correctly matched ?

  • (a)Charni Road — a salt market of the colonial period
  • (b)Charni Road — grasslands opened for the free grazing of cattle
  • (c)Bhendi Bazar — the shipyard of the East India Company
  • (d)Wadala — the terminus of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway

  Answer(b) Charni Road — grasslands opened for the free grazing of cattle. The accepted account is that after the government raised a grazing tax on cattle brought to the Azad Maidan, Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy bought grasslands near Thakurdwar and threw them open for free grazing; charne is the Marathi word for grazing, so the area became Charni and the road beside it Charni Road. Wadala is associated with the salt pans along Thane creek, and the terminus of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway was Bori Bunder, later Victoria Terminus.