The book critical of the British Policies Gharib Hindustan was banned in Bihar in 1930 by the British was written by

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Mohd. Wali Hassan. This one can be settled from the provincial government's own record rather than from a list of names. K. K. Datta's official three-volume History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar, prepared for the Government of Bihar and published in 1957, prints in Volume II the schedule of publications forfeited by the Government of Bihar and Orissa during 1929-30. Item (d) of that schedule reads: 'A pamphlet in Urdu, entitled Garib Hindustan, by Muhammad Wali Hasan, Puraini, Bhagalpur, and printed at the Rahmani Press, Patna (forfeited on the 19th June, 1930).' Every element of the stem is in that one line — the title, the language, the province, the year, and the fact of the ban — and the author it names is the man printed as option (a), with the transliteration loosened from 'Muhammad Wali Hasan' to 'Mohd. Wali Hassan' in the way BPSC habitually loosens Urdu names. The date matters as much as the name: 19 June 1930 falls in the middle of the Civil Disobedience Movement, weeks after the Dandi march of April 1930, when the colonial administration was forfeiting nationalist pamphlets across the provinces. Note the two locational details in the record, because they are what make the identification specific rather than a guess: the author is placed at Puraini in the Bhagalpur division, and the pamphlet was printed at the Rahmani Press in Patna. None of the other three names appears anywhere in that forfeiture schedule.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) A plausible-sounding name of the same Urdu literary milieu, which is exactly its function on the paper — the examiner needs three names a candidate cannot confidently rule out. It does not appear in the Bihar and Orissa forfeiture schedule for 1929-30 that records Garib Hindustan, and no source attributes the pamphlet to him.  (c) Again a name of the right period and register, and again absent from the record of proscribed publications that names this pamphlet's author. Candidates who half-remember 'a Bihari Muslim writer banned in 1930' have no way to separate this from the answer except by having met the actual forfeiture entry.  (d) The most dangerous distractor because it shares the surname element 'Hassan' with the correct option, so a candidate who has stored only half the name — 'Hassan, something Hassan' — has a fifty-fifty guess left. The recorded author is Wali Hasan of Puraini, not Badrul Hassan.

Concept: Book-banning in colonial India was done by forfeiture: a provincial government issued a notification declaring every copy of a named publication forfeited to the Crown, after which possessing or circulating it was an offence and the police could seize copies and, in serious cases, the press that printed it. Because each notification had to name the work, its author, its language and often its printer, the proscription registers are now one of the richest sources for the history of nationalist publishing — they preserve the existence of pamphlets whose copies were destroyed. The legislative frame moved in waves: the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 under Lytton, aimed specifically at Indian-language papers and repealed by Ripon in 1882; the Indian Press Act of 1910, which demanded security deposits and was repealed in 1922; and the Indian Press (Emergency Powers) Act of 1931, passed as Civil Disobedience peaked. Bihar's own proscribed literature of this period is overwhelmingly Urdu and Hindi pamphlet material, cheap, short and locally printed, because that is what the movement actually read.

State PCS 2024 Q72 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q72 — History PYQ with Answer