When was the Patna College established ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, 1863. Patna College was established on 9 January 1863, during the British Raj, and it is the oldest institution of higher education in Bihar. The date is not an isolated fact — it sits at a precise point in a chain the paper expects a Bihar candidate to know. Wood's Despatch of 1854 laid down the framework of graded, government-aided education for India and recommended the founding of universities; the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras followed in 1857; and Patna College was created in 1863 as an affiliating-era college of that new system, teaching to a distant university's degree. The building itself is older than the college by two centuries. Its administrative block was a Dutch factory and an opium storehouse in the seventeenth century, standing on Ashok Rajpath by the Ganga, and the college simply moved into it; the western wing was added in 1871, the eastern in 1880, and the portico and the present BA lecture theatre in 1882. Almost the whole of higher education in Patna grew out of this one institution — Patna Law College, the Engineering College that is now the National Institute of Technology Patna, Patna Science College and Vanijya Mahavidyalaya all trace their roots to it. In 1917 the college became a constituent college of the newly created Patna University, established on 1 October 1917 by an Act of the Imperial Legislative Council passed that September — the first university in Bihar and the seventh oldest in the subcontinent in the modern era. Because 1863 is on the option list, the None-of-the-above option has nothing to catch, and the two wrong years are simply near misses on either side of the real one.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Two years early, and the kind of date that feels right because it falls in the same decade of institution-building that followed Wood's Despatch and the founding of the first three universities in 1857. There is nothing in the college's own record to attach to 1861; its foundation day, marked every year, is 9 January 1863.  (b) Two years late, and the mirror image of the same guess. It is also the more tempting error for a candidate who remembers only that Patna College was founded 'in the mid-1860s'. Nothing in the college's history begins in 1865; the earliest of its later additions, the western wing, dates from 1871.  (d) Correct only if the true year were absent from the list, and it is not — 1863 is printed as option (c). This is worth stating because the paper offers a None-of-the-above option on a large number of questions, and the discipline is the same each time: it earns the mark only when each of the other three can be shown to fail.

Concept: Modern higher education in Bihar begins with Patna College and radiates outward from it. The colonial sequence is worth holding whole, because BPSC returns to it. Wood's Despatch of 1854, often called the Magna Carta of English education in India, recommended a graded system from vernacular primary schools to affiliating universities, introduced grants-in-aid and created education departments in the provinces. The universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were set up in 1857 on the London model — examining and affiliating bodies rather than teaching ones. Colleges were then founded across the provinces to prepare students for those degrees, and Patna College, established on 9 January 1863, was Bihar's. For half a century its students took Calcutta degrees, until Bihar and Orissa, separated from Bengal in 1912, acquired their own university at Patna in 1917. The college's later offspring mark the widening of the curriculum: law, engineering, science and commerce each split off into an institution of its own, so that the history of Patna College is in effect the history of higher education in the state.

State PCS 2025 Q150 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q150 — History PYQ with Answer