When was Bihar first separated from the Bengal Presidency under the British-ruled India?

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Correct — A, 1912. King-Emperor George V announced the change in person at the Delhi Durbar on 12 December 1911, promising 'the creation at as early a date as possible of a Governorship for the Presidency of Bengal, of a new Lieutenant-Governorship in Council administering the areas of Bihar, Chota Nagpur, and Orissa, and of a Chief Commissionership of Assam'. The announcement was then executed on a single day. Courtenay Ilbert, who as Law Member had drafted much of this statute book and who wrote the standard digest of it, records that three proclamations were notified together on 22 March 1912: the first carved 'a new province... out of the previous lieutenant-governorship of Bengal, was called Bihar and Orissa, and was placed under a lieutenant-governor'; the second delimited what would remain the Presidency of Fort William in Bengal; the third took Assam back under a chief commissioner. Each rested on a different Victorian section — Bihar and Orissa on section 46 of the Indian Councils Act, 1861, Bengal's new limits on section 47 of that Act together with section 4 of the Government of India Act, 1865, and Assam on section 3 of the Government of India Act, 1854 — and 'the territorial redistributions made by the proclamations of March 22 took effect on the following April 1'. Bihar accordingly observes 22 March as Bihar Diwas. The first of those proclamations, No. 289 in the Gazette of India Extraordinary, is worth reading for what it actually contains: it constitutes the Bhagalpur Division (Bhagalpur, Monghyr, Purnea and the Sonthal Parganas), the Patna Division (Gaya, Patna and Shahabad), the Tirhut Division (Champaran, Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur and Saran), the Chota Nagpur Division (Hazaribagh, Manbhum, Palamau, Ranchi and Singhbhum) and the Orissa Division (Angul, Balasore, Cuttack, Puri and Sambalpur) into one province, directs 'that the said Province shall be called the Province of Bihar and Orissa', and appoints Sir Charles Stuart Bayley its first Lieutenant-Governor, with effect from 1 April 1912. The new province ran to roughly 113,000 square miles with about 35 million people and its capital at Patna, while the reconstituted Bengal — under a Governor, Lord Carmichael, appointed by royal warrant the previous day — kept the five Bengali-speaking divisions, some 70,000 square miles and about 42 million people. Three days later, on 25 March 1912, an Act of the Governor-General in Council was pushed through all its stages as a measure of urgency to adapt the old laws and to constitute a board of revenue for Bihar and Orissa. Westminster then tidied up: the Government of India Act, 1912, which received the Royal Assent on 25 June 1912, declared the powers of the new Governor of Bengal and by section 2 authorised an executive council for Bihar and Orissa without the further reference to Parliament that the Indian Councils Act, 1909 would otherwise have required. That council was duly formed of the Maharaja of Darbhanga and two English members.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) A real separation, but pointing the other way. Section 289 of the Government of India Act, 1935 created two new provinces, Sind and Orissa: Orissa was to be separated from Bihar and Orissa and enlarged with areas taken from the Presidency of Madras and the Central Provinces, and the Act enacted that 'the Province formerly known as Bihar and Orissa shall be known as the Province of Bihar'. Note the change in machinery as well as in direction — where 1912 needed only an executive proclamation under an 1861 section, the 1935 Act required an Order in Council, and its section 290 obliged the Secretary of State to ascertain the views of the legislatures concerned before any future province could be made. The Order took effect on 1 April 1936, the day Odisha keeps as Utkal Divas, and it separated Orissa from Bihar — not Bihar from Bengal.  (c) By 1947 Bihar had been a separate province for thirty-five years, with its own Lieutenant-Governor since 1912, its own High Court at Patna and its own legislature. The Indian Independence Act, 1947 partitioned British India into the two Dominions of India and Pakistan and set 15 August 1947 as the appointed day; it detached Bihar from nothing. Bihar simply carried on, becoming a Part A State when the Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950. The year is in the option set because 1947 is the default date a candidate reaches for when a question about British India mentions any boundary at all.  (d) This would require all three listed years to be wrong. One of them is documented to the day: a proclamation notified on 22 March 1912, made under a named enabling section, appointing a named first Lieutenant-Governor, taking effect on a stated date, and recited afterwards in an Act of Parliament that received the Royal Assent on 25 June 1912. A residual option cannot stand against a chain of instruments that specific — and on a 'when was X' stem, 'none of the above' is worth choosing only when you can say what the right year actually is.

Concept: Provinces in British India were administrative creations, not constitutional entities, and until 1935 they could be made, unmade and redrawn by executive act under an enabling section of an old statute — no fresh legislation, no consultation, no vote. The Bengal Presidency was the largest of them, an inheritance of the Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa granted to the East India Company by Shah Alam II in 1765; at its widest it covered Bengal, Bihar, Chota Nagpur, Orissa and Assam under a single Lieutenant-Governor. That officer existed only because a power in section 16 of the Government of India Act, 1853 to appoint a full Governor for Fort William had been left unused: as Ilbert explains, the power 'remained in abeyance' for sixty years and 'was exercised in March 1912 when a governorship was substituted for a lieutenant-governorship of Bengal'. Lord Curzon split the presidency in October 1905 into Bengal and a new Eastern Bengal and Assam, provoking the Swadeshi movement. The 1911 Durbar reversed that split on a different principle: instead of dividing Bengalis it reunited the Bengali-speaking divisions under a Governor in Council and hived off the non-Bengali blocks — Bihar, Chota Nagpur and Orissa into one new province, Assam back to a Chief Commissioner. By 1935 the machinery had changed completely. The Government of India Act, 1935 listed eleven Governors' Provinces, created Sind and Orissa by its own section 289, and in section 290 required any future creation, enlargement, reduction or boundary change to be made by Order in Council after the Secretary of State had taken steps to ascertain the views of the Federal Legislature and of the provincial governments and legislatures affected. The distance between a proclamation in a gazette and a consulted Order in Council is the distance between 1912 and 1936.

State PCS 2023 Q80 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q80 — History PYQ with Answer