Match the following and choose the correct answer.
Newspaper
I. Free Hindustan
II. Indian Opinion
III. Voice of India
IV. Bengalee
Editor
a. Mahatma Gandhi
b. Dadabhai Nauroji
c. Surendranath Banerjee

Question

Match the following and choose the correct answer.
Newspaper
I. Free Hindustan
II. Indian Opinion
III. Voice of India
IV. Bengalee
Editor
a. Mahatma Gandhi
b. Dadabhai Nauroji
c. Surendranath Banerjee
d. Taraknath Das

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, I – d, II – a, III – b, IV – c. Take the pairs one at a time. Free Hindustan was Taraknath Das's paper: funds sent from Calcutta by Jatindranath Mukherjee, 'Bagha Jatin', let him start the English journal in Vancouver, alongside a Gurmukhi edition, Swadesh Sevak; it has been described as the first South Asian publication in Canada, and after Das was expelled from Canada in 1908 it continued from Seattle, then from New York, with his own motto on the masthead — 'To protest against all tyranny is a service to humanity and the duty of civilization.' Tolstoy, Hyndman, Shyamji Krishnavarma and Madame Cama corresponded with him about it. Indian Opinion was established by Gandhi in South Africa; the first issue appeared on 4 June 1903, it was published in Gujarati, Hindi, Tamil and English, and in 1904 the press moved to his settlement at Phoenix near Durban. Gandhi's own verdict on it was that 'Satyagraha would have been impossible without Indian Opinion.' The Voice of India was published by Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi economist who had earlier founded the Gujarati fortnightly Rast Goftar in 1854, later became Congress President in 1886 and wrote Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1901. The Bengalee was founded in Calcutta in 1862 by Girish Chandra Ghosh, and Surendranath Banerjee served as its editor; it became the highest-circulating weekly of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, took the Moderate side after the Surat split, and declined after Banerjee's death in 1925. So the sequence is I-d, II-a, III-b, IV-c. Only option (a) carries it; each of the other three strings breaks at least two of these well-attested pairs.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Breaks every pair. It puts Surendranath Banerjee, a Calcutta moderate who never left India for revolutionary journalism abroad, in charge of an émigré paper printed in Vancouver and Seattle, and hands Gandhi's South African weekly to Taraknath Das. Nothing in it survives contact with a single known fact about any of the four men.  (c) The most dangerous option, because it gets two of the four right — Free Hindustan to Taraknath Das and Voice of India to Dadabhai Naoroji — and then simply swaps Gandhi and Surendranath Banerjee between the remaining two. A candidate who checks only the first pair and the pair he is surest of will stop here.  (d) Gets Indian Opinion right and everything else wrong, which is the mirror image of the previous trap. It assigns Free Hindustan to Surendranath Banerjee and, more absurdly, The Bengalee — a Calcutta weekly of the 1860s onward — to Dadabhai Naoroji, and it strands Taraknath Das with Voice of India, a paper of an entirely different generation and purpose.

Concept: The nationalist press was not one thing but three, and this question quietly samples all three. There was the constitutional press inside India, published in Calcutta and Bombay and aimed at educated Indian opinion and at sympathetic Englishmen — The Bengalee under Surendranath Banerjee is the model, moderate in tone, enormous in circulation, and closely tied to the Indian National Association he had founded before the Congress existed. There was the propaganda press aimed at Britain, of which Dadabhai Naoroji's Voice of India is an example: Naoroji spent much of his life in London, sat in the House of Commons, and worked on the theory that British opinion could be turned if it were shown what Indian rule actually cost, the argument he set out in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India. And there was the diaspora and revolutionary press abroad — Free Hindustan in Vancouver, Seattle and New York, the Indian Sociologist in London, Bande Mataram in Geneva — beyond the reach of Indian press law and consequently far more open in its language. Gandhi's Indian Opinion sits slightly apart from all three: it was published in South Africa for an Indian community abroad and was a working instrument of a campaign rather than a channel of opinion.

State PCS 2024 Q119 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q119 — History PYQ with Answer