Who wrote “New Lamps For The Old” ?

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Correct — B, Aurobindo Ghosh. 'New Lamps for Old' was a series of nine articles that Aurobindo Ghosh published in the Indu Prakash of Bombay between 7 August 1893 and 6 March 1894, preceded by a separate piece, 'India and the British Parliament', in the same newspaper on 26 June 1893 — dates recorded in the editorial note to his Complete Works. He was twenty-one, newly returned from a long education in England, and had just entered the service of the Baroda State. The series is an attack on the Indian National Congress, then only eight years old, for the mildness of its politics, and the first article opens by turning a gospel line against the organisation: 'If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch? ... very few Indians will be found to admit — certainly I myself two years ago would not have admitted — that it can truthfully be applied to the National Congress.' The preliminary article had already put the charge at its bluntest, arguing that Indians 'must no longer hold out supplicating hands to the English Parliament, like an infant crying to its nurse for a toy'. Even the title carries the argument. It alludes to the Aladdin story, in which the magician walks the streets offering new lamps for old and takes away the one thing of real value — which is exactly what Aurobindo accused the Congress of doing, trading self-reliance for the glitter of constitutional reform. Written in 1893, this is the earliest sustained statement of what would later be called the Extremist position, more than a decade before the Surat split of 1907.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Surendranath — that is, Surendranath Banerjea, the leading Bengal Moderate, founder of the Indian Association and twice President of the Congress. His own famous book is his autobiography, A Nation in Making. The option is instructive rather than merely wrong: Banerjea belonged to precisely the school of constitutional agitation that 'New Lamps for Old' was written to demolish, so he is closer to being the target of the series than its author.  (c) Motilal Ghosh — present on this list because he shares a surname with the right answer, which is the oldest trick in the option-writer's book. He was a figure of the Calcutta press, long associated with the Amrita Bazar Patrika, one of the great nationalist newspapers of the period. But the Patrika was a Calcutta paper, and 'New Lamps for Old' appeared in the Indu Prakash of Bombay, written by a very different Ghosh.  (d) More than one of the above — correct only if at least two of the three preceding attributions were true at once, which is impossible in the ordinary case of a single titled work with a single author. Run the count anyway: option (a) is false, option (c) is false, option (b) is true. One true attribution is not more than one, so the option fails on its own terms before any historical question arises.

Concept: The Indian National Congress of its first two decades practised what its critics called mendicancy — petitions, prayers, resolutions and appeals to British public opinion, on the assumption that British rule was fundamentally just and needed only to be informed of Indian grievances. Its great intellectual achievement was the economic critique of empire, the drain theory argued by Dadabhai Naoroji and R. C. Dutt, but its method never went beyond constitutional agitation. Against that, from the 1890s onward, a second current rose that held the assumption itself to be false: Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo Ghosh argued for swadeshi, boycott, national education and passive resistance, and for self-reliance rather than appeal. The two currents broke apart at the Surat session in 1907. 'New Lamps for Old' matters because it states the second position fourteen years before that split, at a moment when almost nobody was saying it. Aurobindo went on to write for the nationalist newspaper Bande Mataram between 1906 and 1908, was tried in the Alipore Bomb Case, and in 1910 withdrew from politics to Pondicherry, where his later philosophical works including The Life Divine were written.

State PCS 2024 Q22 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q22 — History PYQ with Answer