Fort William College at Calcutta was established in

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Correct — B, 1800 CE to train civil servants in Indian languages. Fort William College was founded at Calcutta in 1800 by the Governor-General, Lord Wellesley, and its purpose was practical and administrative. The East India Company recruited its junior civil servants — known as writers — as teenagers in England and sent them out to govern districts whose languages, laws and customs they knew nothing about. Wellesley's view was that men who could not speak the vernaculars could not govern, and the College was his remedy: a training institution at the seat of government where new arrivals would study Bengali, Persian, Urdu, Sanskrit, Arabic and later other Indian languages, along with Hindu and Muslim law, revenue administration and Indian history, before being posted. Option (b) states exactly that. The date is equally fixed at 1800 — the order establishing the College was issued in July of that year, though Wellesley dated its foundation to the previous 4 May, the anniversary of the fall of Seringapatam, which gives the institution a characteristically imperial birthday. What the College actually produced went far beyond its brief. To teach Indian languages it had to have textbooks, and to have textbooks it employed Indian scholars — pandits and munshis such as Mrityunjay Vidyalankar, Ramram Basu, Lallu Lal and Sadal Mishra — alongside the Baptist missionary William Carey. Their prose primers, written to be readable by beginners rather than ornamental, are the starting point of modern Bengali prose and of Khari Boli Hindi prose. An institution built to make British administration workable became, incidentally, one of the nurseries of modern Indian literature.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The right year with the wrong object, and the most dangerous option on the page because half of it is correct. The students were the Company's young British writers, not Indians. Indians were not admitted to the covenanted civil service at all in 1800 — that came only after the Charter Act of 1833 in principle and the competitive examination of the 1850s in practice. Indians were present at Fort William College as teachers, not as trainees.  (c) Wrong on both counts. The year is 1800, not 1802; and while the College certainly deepened British knowledge of Indian culture, that was a by-product rather than its founding purpose. The institution set up specifically to study Indian culture and antiquities was the Asiatic Society, founded at Calcutta in 1784 by William Jones — a different body with a different aim.  (d) Wrong year again, and wrong purpose again. Fort William College was a training school for administrators, not a research institute. The confusion is understandable, because the College's scholars did produce grammars, dictionaries, translations and printed editions in quantity — but those were teaching materials for civil servants, not the object of the enterprise.

Concept: British educational policy in India passed through three phases and Fort William College belongs to the first. Until the 1810s the Company's interest was in equipping its own officers and in conciliating Indian learned opinion, which produced the Calcutta Madrasa founded by Warren Hastings in 1781, the Sanskrit College at Benares founded by Jonathan Duncan in 1791, and Fort William College in 1800 — the Orientalist approach. The Charter Act of 1813 then set aside a sum for education and created the General Committee of Public Instruction in 1823, opening the Orientalist–Anglicist controversy over whether that money should support classical Indian learning or English education. Macaulay's Minute of 1835 settled it for English. The third phase begins with Wood's Despatch of 1854, which laid out a complete system from vernacular primary schools to universities, recommended English as the medium of higher instruction, stressed female education and grants-in-aid, and led to the founding of the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857.

State PCS 2025 Q24 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q24 — History PYQ with Answer