NDA (II) 2017 General Ability Test · Question 54 of 150

Correct — C, Subhash Chandra Bose. The Indian Struggle, 1920-1934 is Subhas Chandra Bose's own history of the national movement in the years he had lived through it, written during his enforced stay in Europe after his release from detention and published in London in 1935. It is a participant's account rather than a memoir — Bose narrates the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements, sets out his disagreements with the Gandhian leadership over the withdrawal of mass campaigns, and argues for a more radical and organised push for complete independence. The Government of India banned its circulation in the country. A second part covering 1935 to 1942 was added later, and the two are often printed together as one volume.

• (a)Maulana Abul Kalam — Maulana Abul Kalam Azad's best-known book is India Wins Freedom, his account of the years leading to Partition, dictated in the 1950s. He also edited the journals Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh, but he did not write The Indian Struggle.
• (b)Jayprakash Narayan — Jayaprakash Narayan wrote Why Socialism? in 1936 and, much later, A Plea for Reconstruction of Indian Polity. In 1934, the year this book closes with, he was busy founding the Congress Socialist Party rather than writing the movement's history.
• (d)Manabendra Nath Roy — M. N. Roy's writings include India in Transition and his Memoirs, and he came at Indian politics from a Communist and later radical-humanist position. The Indian Struggle is not his.

Several leaders of the freedom movement wrote its history while making it, and examiners use those books as a compact way of testing both authorship and political position. Bose's The Indian Struggle belongs to this group along with Nehru's The Discovery of India and An Autobiography, Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth and Hind Swaraj, Azad's India Wins Freedom and Surendranath Banerjea's A Nation in Making.

Anchor each book to something specific about its author rather than to the title alone. The Indian Struggle carries dates in its title, 1920 to 1934, which are exactly the years of Bose's rise from Calcutta Corporation politics to the leadership of the Congress left, and it was written abroad and banned at home — both facts fit Bose and nobody else on the list. The paper prints the name as Subhash Chandra Bose; he is more usually written Subhas Chandra Bose, and the same man is the Netaji who formed the Azad Hind government at Singapore in 1943.

• The Indian Struggle, 1920-1934 was written by Subhas Chandra Bose and published in London in 1935.
• The British Indian government banned the book's circulation in India.
• A continuation covering 1935 to 1942 was written later and is usually bound with the first part.
• Maulana Abul Kalam Azad wrote India Wins Freedom; Jayaprakash Narayan wrote Why Socialism?; M. N. Roy wrote India in Transition.
• Bose was elected Congress president at Haripura in 1938 and again at Tripuri in 1939, then resigned and founded the Forward Bloc.

• Attaching India Wins Freedom to Bose or The Indian Struggle to Azad — the two are frequently swapped.
• Assuming a book with 1920-1934 in the title must be an autobiography; this one is a political history.
• Reading the paper's spelling Subhash as a different person from Subhas Chandra Bose.

NDA asks author-and-title in a single line, so the reliable preparation is a short list of the movement's famous books tied to one identifying fact each.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The book India Wins Freedom was written by

  • (a)Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
  • (b)Subhas Chandra Bose
  • (c)Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
  • (d)Rajendra Prasad

  Answer(a) Maulana Abul Kalam Azad — his account of the years leading up to Partition, published in 1959.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Subhas Chandra Bose founded which organisation after resigning the Congress presidency in 1939?

  • (a)The Forward Bloc
  • (b)The Swaraj Party
  • (c)The Servants of India Society
  • (d)The Congress Socialist Party

  Answer(a) The Forward Bloc — formed in 1939 to gather the radical left within the Congress after the Tripuri crisis.