The hundred years of Indian National Congress in Bihar was edited by

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, P. N. Ojha. The book the stem is describing is the centenary volume 'History of the Indian National Congress in Bihar, 1885-1985' — literally the hundred years of the Congress in Bihar, running from the party's first session in December 1885 to its centenary in 1985. It was edited by P. N. Ojha and published in 1985 by the Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute, Patna, and the attribution can be checked in ordinary library catalogue records rather than in exam material: the Google Books catalogue entry for the title gives 'Editor: P. N. Ojha, Publisher: Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute, 1985', and the WorldCat and HathiTrust records for the same title carry the same editor. The publisher matters as much as the editor here, because it tells you what kind of book this is. The Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute was established in October 1950 by the Government of Bihar, is run under the state's education department and is housed in the Patna Museum building; it exists to produce scholarly work on Bihar's history, archaeology and culture. A centenary history of the Congress in Bihar published from there in 1985 is therefore a state-sponsored research volume, not a party pamphlet — which is exactly why it is the kind of title a state commission expects its candidates to know. The three wrong options are all real and serious names, and the item is testing whether you can attach a specific volume to a specific editor rather than recognise a historian's name.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The strongest distractor by far, because K. K. Datta is the historian most associated with exactly this field — he edited the Government of Bihar's three-volume 'History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar', published from 1957, which remains the standard official account. But that is a different work, from nearly thirty years earlier, and not the centenary volume the question asks about.  (c) A genuine historian of modern India whose work on administration and social change is widely cited, which makes the name feel right in a list of this kind. He is not credited as the editor of this centenary volume in the library records that carry it.  (d) The odd one out on grounds a candidate can actually use. A. R. Desai was a Bombay-based Marxist sociologist, best known for 'Social Background of Indian Nationalism' — a national, theoretical study of the nationalist movement with no particular Bihar connection. A volume produced by a Patna research institute on the Congress in Bihar would not naturally be edited by him.

Concept: Bihar has an unusually well-developed body of state-sponsored historical writing, and BPSC draws on it directly. Three institutions and their products account for most of what the paper can ask. The Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute, set up by the Government of Bihar in October 1950 and named after the historian and lawyer K. P. Jayaswal, publishes research on Bihar's history and archaeology from the Patna Museum building; the centenary volume on the Congress in Bihar is one of its titles. The Government of Bihar's own freedom-movement project produced K. K. Datta's three-volume 'History of the Freedom Movement in Bihar' in the late 1950s, which prints the documentary record — including, for instance, the schedules of publications the provincial government forfeited in the 1930s. And the Congress's own institutional memory in the state is anchored at Sadaqat Ashram in Patna. The practical consequence for a candidate is that Bihar-specific history questions are answered from Bihar-specific books, and a national textbook will not contain them; the names of the standard volumes and their editors are part of the syllabus in practice, even though no syllabus says so.

State PCS 2024 Q84 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q84 — History PYQ with Answer