NDA (I) 2017 General Ability Test · Question 135 of 149

Correct — B, Mysore. Three of the four names in this list are the same piece of India: Kathiawar is the peninsula of south-western Gujarat, and Bhavnagar and Junagadh were both princely states within it — 217 princely states of Kathiawar, Junagadh among them, were merged into Saurashtra in February 1948. That Gujarat cluster sat next to the heartland of the Civil Disobedience Movement, which Gandhi launched from Sabarmati in 1930. Mysore is the odd name out — a large southern state under the Wadiyar rulers, far from that theatre — and it is the one the official key marks as not supporting the Congress.

• (a)Bhavnagar — Bhavnagar was one of the leading princely states of the Kathiawar peninsula in Gujarat, inside the region where the Civil Disobedience Movement had its strongest hold, so it is not the state the key separates out.
• (c)Junagadh — Junagadh was likewise a Kathiawar state, and it is named in the group of 217 Kathiawar states merged to form Saurashtra in 1948. It belongs to the same Gujarat cluster as Bhavnagar.
• (d)Kathiawar — Kathiawar is not a single princely state at all but the peninsula that contained Bhavnagar, Junagadh and scores of others. Reading it as one state is precisely how a student ends up eliminating the wrong option.

About two-fifths of the subcontinent lay under princely rulers who had signed subsidiary treaties with the British. The Congress, through the 1920s and 1930s, held back from launching agitations directly inside these states, leaving political work there to local praja mandal bodies and to the All India States People's Conference founded in 1927. Where a state lay inside a region already in movement — Gujarat during Civil Disobedience is the clearest case — its people were drawn in anyway.

Be honest about this item's construction. It asks for a princely state and then lists Kathiawar, which is a region containing over two hundred princely states, alongside two of those very states; that is an incidental slip in the option set and it makes the item easier rather than harder, because the three Gujarat entries plainly hang together and only Mysore stands apart. Answer to the key here, and take the durable learning from the geography: Bhavnagar and Junagadh sit inside Kathiawar, and Mysore is a southern state with no part in the Gujarat theatre of 1930.

• Kathiawar is a peninsula of about 61,000 square kilometres in south-western Gujarat, not a single princely state.
• 217 princely states of Kathiawar, including Junagadh, were merged to form Saurashtra on 15 February 1948.
• Bhavnagar was among the larger Kathiawar states; its ruler acceded to India in 1948.
• Mysore was a major southern princely state ruled by the Wadiyar dynasty.
• The Civil Disobedience Movement began with the Dandi March of March 1930, which started from Sabarmati in Gujarat.

• Treating Kathiawar as a princely state rather than as the region containing them.
• Assuming princely states were uniformly loyal or uniformly nationalist — the picture varied by region.
• Mixing the 1947-48 accession story with the 1930-34 movement; Junagadh is famous for the former.

Princely-state items usually pair a region with the states inside it, or test the difference between Congress activity in British India and the praja mandal work inside the states.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Bhavnagar and Junagadh were princely states of

  • (a)The Kathiawar peninsula
  • (b)The Malabar coast
  • (c)Rohilkhand
  • (d)The Chhota Nagpur plateau

  Answer(a) The Kathiawar peninsula — the south-western peninsula of present-day Gujarat.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 217 princely states of Kathiawar were merged in 1948 to form

  • (a)Saurashtra
  • (b)Rajasthan
  • (c)Madhya Bharat
  • (d)Travancore-Cochin

  Answer(a) Saurashtra — merged on 15 February 1948 and later absorbed into Bombay State and then Gujarat.