Who first described the Revolt of 1857 as the ‘First Indian War of Independence’ ?

Question

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Correct — B, V. D. Savarkar. The phrase comes from a book, and the book has a title: Vinayak Damodar Savarkar's The Indian War of Independence, published in 1909. Savarkar wrote it in Marathi at India House in London, finishing the manuscript in 1907, and he wrote it as an answer — Britain had just marked the fiftieth anniversary of 1857 as the suppression of a mutiny, and Savarkar set out to recast the same events as a national uprising, working from records in the India Office archives with help from Madame Cama, V. V. S. Iyer and M. P. T. Acharya. Its reception proves how sharply the reframing landed. The Marathi edition was banned in British India before it had even been published. British printers were warned off by the Home Office on grounds of sedition, and the Foreign Office leaned on the French government to stop it appearing in Paris. It was finally printed in the Netherlands in 1909, a 451-page volume attributed to 'An Indian Nationalist', and copies were smuggled into India. The book kept moving: Rash Behari Bose brought out an edition in Japan that circulated among the Indian National Army, and the first freely published Indian edition appeared only in 1947. That is what the question means by 'first described'. Individual Britons had already called the rising a national revolt in passing, but no one before Savarkar had built an entire history on the claim that 1857 was India's first war of independence, and it is his framing — carried into the nationalist movement and eventually into official commemoration — that the phrase now belongs to. Because option (b) is right, the None-of-the-above option cannot be, and the two remaining names are attached to positions on 1857 that were quite different from Savarkar's.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The exact opposite of the answer, which is why it is the most instructive distractor. Majumdar was the principal member of the government's committee to write a history of the freedom struggle, fell out with the Education Minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad over how 1857 should be interpreted, left the job and published his own book, The Sepoy Mutiny and Revolt of 1857. He held that India's freedom struggle began not in 1857 but with the English-educated middle class and the anti-partition agitation of 1905.  (c) A plausible name in the right period and the wrong role. Tilak gave the nationalist movement the language of swaraj as a birthright and revived public festivals as political occasions, but the historical reframing of 1857 was not his work and he wrote no history of the revolt. He is offered because a candidate who remembers only that the claim came from the extremist wing will reach for its most famous figure.  (d) Fails because one of the named options is correct. A None-of-the-above answer is earned only by showing that each of the other three is wrong, and here the authorship of The Indian War of Independence is a matter of record — the book exists, it is dated 1909, and Savarkar wrote it.

Concept: How 1857 is named has always been an argument about what it was. The British official view called it the Sepoy Mutiny — a military insubordination triggered by the greased cartridge, contained and punished. Savarkar's 1909 book called it a planned national war of independence with Nana Sahib and the Mughal court at its centre. After Independence the debate continued among Indian historians: the centenary in 1957 produced both S. N. Sen's official history and R. C. Majumdar's dissent, and later writers described it variously as a feudal reaction, a peasant revolt with a sepoy spark, or a genuinely popular rising in particular regions. What is not in dispute is the scale and the aftermath. The rising began at Meerut on 10 May 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar was proclaimed at Delhi, and the fighting ran through Kanpur, Lucknow, Jhansi, Bareilly and, in Bihar, Jagdishpur — where Kunwar Singh of the Ujjainiya house, born in 1777 and by then in his late seventies, led the revolt until his death on 26 April 1858. When it was over, the Government of India Act 1858 ended Company rule and transferred the government of India to the Crown.

State PCS 2025 Q143 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q143 — History PYQ with Answer