MPSC 2022 Prelims Paper-I · Question 99 of 100

Correct — option (2), Bengal. The Battle of Plassey was fought on 23 June 1757 at Palashi on the bank of the Hooghly, some hundred and fifty kilometres north of Calcutta and south of Murshidabad, between the East India Company under Robert Clive and Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, with his French allies. The Company won not by strength of arms but by arrangement: Mir Jafar, the Nawab's own commander in chief, had agreed beforehand to hold his troops out of the fighting, and a large part of the Bengal army was in any case not available, having been committed earlier against the Afghan invasion of Ahmad Shah Durrani. After the battle Siraj-ud-Daulah was captured and killed, and Mir Jafar was placed on the masnad as Nawab of Bengal — the first Nawab who held his position by the Company's support rather than by his own power, which is why he is described as the first dependent Nawab of Bengal and why Plassey is treated as the beginning of British political dominion in India. What followed shows how little the title was now worth. Mir Jafar could not meet the Company's demands for money, and when Clive's successors found him dealing with the Dutch at Chinsurah he was replaced in 1760 by his own son-in-law Mir Qasim. Mir Qasim proved too independent, moved his capital to Munger, abolished the inland duties that gave the Company's servants their private advantage, and was driven out; Mir Jafar was restored, and died on 5 February 1765. Mir Qasim meanwhile allied with Shuja-ud-Daulah of Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II and was defeated at Buxar in Bihar on 22 and 23 October 1764. By the Treaty of Allahabad of 16 August 1765 Shah Alam II granted the Company the diwani — the right to collect the revenue — of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, in return for an annual tribute and the districts of Kora and Allahabad. Note the exact title asked for. The Nawab's authority in fact extended over the three provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and the Nawabs are sometimes described in that longer form; but the title by which the office is known, and the one the question asks for, is Nawab of Bengal, with the capital at Murshidabad. The answer to be marked is option (2).

• (1)Madras — Madras belongs to a different theatre of the Company's expansion and to a different kind of office. It was the seat of one of the Company's three presidencies and the base from which it fought the Carnatic wars against the French between 1746 and 1763; the ruler whose succession was contested there was the Nawab of the Carnatic, seated at Arcot, and the Company's protege in that contest was Muhammad Ali Khan Walajah, whose rival Chanda Sahib was backed by Dupleix. Madras itself was a Company settlement built around Fort St George, not a nawabi. The confusion the option invites is between two parallel stories — the Carnatic in the south, where the Company and the French fought through Indian claimants, and Bengal in the east, where the Company made and unmade nawabs directly after 1757 — and the two are worth keeping side by side, since Plassey follows the Carnatic wars and applies their method in a richer province.
• (3)Bihar — Bihar was part of the territory the Nawab of Bengal administered, but it was never a separate nawabi with its own nawab appointed by the British in 1757. The Nawabs of Bengal, seated at Murshidabad, were the de facto independent rulers of the three provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and they are sometimes described in exactly that form; the office, however, is the nizamat of Bengal, and Bihar was governed under it through a deputy. Bihar's own importance in this story comes later and in a different way: it is where the Battle of Buxar was fought in October 1764, at a fortified town on the Ganges about a hundred and thirty kilometres west of Patna, and it is one of the three provinces whose diwani the Company obtained from Shah Alam II in 1765. The option therefore names a real component of the Nawab's dominion and the wrong title for the office.
• (4)Orissa — Orissa fails for the same reason as Bihar and for one more. It too was part of the dominion of the Nawabs of Bengal and it too appears in the phrase 'Bengal, Bihar and Orissa' that describes the grant of diwani in 1765, but there was no Nawab of Orissa to whom the British could appoint Mir Jafar. Orissa in this period had in addition been the theatre of the Maratha incursions from Nagpur that harassed Bengal through the 1740s under Alivardi Khan, and a large part of it had been ceded to the Marathas by the settlement that ended those raids. A candidate who chooses between options (2), (3) and (4) by asking which province the Company was interested in has missed the real discriminator, which is that the question asks for the name of an office and only one of the three names ever formed part of that office's title.

The Nawabs of Bengal were originally Mughal subahdars of the Bengal subah who became hereditary and, in the eighteenth century, effectively independent, ruling the three provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa from Murshidabad while continuing to strike coin in the Mughal emperor's name. Bengal was the richest province of the empire and contributed the largest share of the imperial revenue, which is precisely why control of it transformed the East India Company from a trading concern into a territorial power. Alivardi Khan, who ruled for sixteen years, spent much of his reign resisting Maratha raids from Nagpur; his successor Siraj-ud-Daulah quarrelled with the Company over the fortification of Calcutta and the abuse of the Company's trading privileges, took Calcutta in 1756, and was defeated at Plassey on 23 June 1757 after Mir Jafar's betrayal. The eight years that followed established the pattern of indirect rule: Mir Jafar was installed and then replaced by Mir Qasim in 1760, Mir Qasim resisted and was defeated at Buxar in October 1764, Mir Jafar was restored and died in February 1765, and by the Treaty of Allahabad of 16 August 1765 the Company obtained the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa from Shah Alam II. That grant created the arrangement known as the dual government, in which the Company held the revenue and the Nawab retained the nizamat — the responsibility for law, order and administration — without the means to discharge it; it was ended by Warren Hastings in 1772.

The sequence from Plassey to the diwani is one of the most heavily examined passages in Indian history, and MPSC tests it in the plainest way: the year, the place, the person, the title. Questions on this passage are decided by precision rather than by understanding, which is why a candidate should hold the chain as a dated list — 1757 Plassey, 1760 Mir Qasim, 1764 Buxar, 1765 Treaty of Allahabad and the diwani, 1772 the end of dual government — and attach the names to each link. The construction used in this item is a common one for testing a title: three of the four options name real territories that belonged to the same dominion, so the question cannot be answered by knowing where the events happened; it can only be answered by knowing what the office was called. Note also the printing of this question. The English column casts it as a sentence with a blank to be filled, ending in a full stop, while the Marathi column asks a direct question ending in a question mark. Fill-in-the-blank stems appear four times in this paper's English column where the Marathi is cast differently, and the difference of form does not change the answer.

• The Battle of Plassey was fought on 23 June 1757 at Palashi on the Hooghly between the East India Company under Robert Clive and Siraj-ud-Daulah, the last independent Nawab of Bengal, and was decided by the betrayal of Mir Jafar, the Nawab's commander in chief.
• After the battle Mir Jafar was installed as Nawab of Bengal with the Company's support and is described as the first dependent Nawab of Bengal; he was replaced by Mir Qasim in 1760, restored later, and died on 5 February 1765.
• The Nawabs of Bengal, seated at Murshidabad, were in practice the rulers of the three provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, but the office is titled the nawabi of Bengal.
• The Battle of Buxar was fought on 22 and 23 October 1764 in Bihar, where the Company's forces under Hector Munro defeated the combined armies of Mir Qasim, Shuja-ud-Daulah of Awadh and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II.
• By the Treaty of Allahabad of 16 August 1765 Shah Alam II granted the East India Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in return for an annual tribute and the districts of Kora and Allahabad.

• Choosing a province of the Nawab's dominion instead of the name of the office; Bihar and Orissa were governed under the nawabi of Bengal but were never separate nawabis in this sense
• Confusing the Bengal story with the Carnatic, where the Company's protege was the Nawab of the Carnatic seated at Arcot and the base was Madras
• Treating Plassey and Buxar as interchangeable; Plassey in 1757 made a dependent nawab, while Buxar in 1764 defeated an emperor and led to the grant of the diwani
• Assuming a fill-in-the-blank stem is a different kind of question from a direct one; in this paper the English and Marathi columns differ in form on four questions without differing in substance

The establishment of British power in Bengal is examined by every commission in a small number of fixed forms: the date and place of a battle, the name of a nawab and the manner of his accession, the terms of a treaty, and the meaning of an institutional term such as diwani, nizamat or dual government. MPSC asks these directly and sometimes as a fill-in-the-blank of the kind printed here. The whole topic can be covered by a dated chain of five links from 1757 to 1772 with the names attached, plus the definitions of the three institutional terms. When the options are all territories, as here, the question is almost always about the title of an office rather than about geography, and the correct method is to ask what the office was called rather than which territory was involved.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  By the Treaty of Allahabad of 1765, what did the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II grant to the East India Company ?

  • (a)The nizamat of Bengal alone
  • (b)The diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa
  • (c)The right to maintain an army in Awadh
  • (d)Full sovereignty over the Mughal empire

  Answer(b) The diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Signed on 16 August 1765 after the Company's victory at Buxar in October 1764, the treaty gave the Company the right to collect the revenue of the three provinces on the emperor's behalf, in return for an annual tribute of twenty-six lakh rupees and the districts of Kora and Allahabad for Shah Alam II. The nizamat, or responsibility for law and order, remained formally with the Nawab, producing the arrangement known as the dual government.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following statements about the Battle of Plassey is correct ?

  • (a)It was fought in 1764 between the Company and Mir Qasim
  • (b)It was fought on 23 June 1757 and was decided largely by the defection of Siraj-ud-Daulah's commander in chief
  • (c)It resulted in the grant of the diwani of Bengal to the Company
  • (d)It was fought near Patna in Bihar and led to the Treaty of Allahabad

  Answer(b) It was fought on 23 June 1757 and was decided largely by the defection of Siraj-ud-Daulah's commander in chief. Mir Jafar had agreed in advance to hold his troops back, and after the Company's victory he was installed as Nawab of Bengal. Option (1) and option (4) describe Buxar, fought in Bihar in October 1764 against Mir Qasim and his allies, and option (3) describes the Treaty of Allahabad of 1765 that followed that battle.