Match the List – I of authors with List – II of the books on 1857 and choose answers from the code given below :
List – I List – II
a. V. D. Savarkar i. The First War of Inde

Question

Match the List – I of authors with List – II of the books on 1857 and choose answers from the code given below :
List – I                    List – II
a. V. D. Savarkar        i. The First War of Independence
b. S. N. Sen        ii. The Peasant and the Raj
c. Eric Stokes        iii. Civil Rebellion and in the Indian Mutinies
d. S.B. Chaudhuri        iv. Eighteen Fifty-Seven
Code :
     a     b     c     d

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, i     iv     ii     iii. Each attribution is independently settled, so the code follows from four separate facts rather than from any process of elimination. V. D. Savarkar wrote the nationalist history of the revolt published in 1909 as The Indian War of Independence, 1857 and reissued in later editions under the wording List-II uses — so a matches (i). S. N. Sen, that is Surendra Nath Sen, wrote Eighteen Fifty-Seven, published in 1957 by the Publications Division of the Ministry of Information as the Government of India's official centenary history of the revolt — so b matches (iv). Eric Stokes wrote The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India, published by Cambridge University Press, the work that recast 1857 as a set of local agrarian revolts rather than one movement — so c matches (ii). S. B. Chaudhuri wrote Civil Rebellion in the Indian Mutinies, 1857-1859, published in 1957 — so d matches (iii). The sequence is therefore i, iv, ii, iii, which is code (a). One printed oddity should be noted and not corrected: List-II entry (iii) reads 'Civil Rebellion and in the Indian Mutinies', with a stray 'and' that the actual title does not contain. That is what the booklet prints, and it does not create a second possible match, because no other book on the list resembles it.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Swaps the first three attributions in the most damaging way: it gives Savarkar the official Government of India centenary history and gives S. N. Sen the Cambridge agrarian study. Those two authors sit at opposite ends of the historiography — one a revolutionary nationalist writing in exile in 1909, the other a professional historian commissioned by the state in 1957 — so the pairing inverts the entire point of the list.  (c) Gives Savarkar Eric Stokes's book and S. N. Sen the Chaudhuri title, then hands Sen's own Eighteen Fifty-Seven to S. B. Chaudhuri. Only the third pairing survives by accident. It is the option a candidate lands on by matching the lists in printed order rather than by knowing any of the four authors.  (d) This escape would be right only if all three codes failed, and code (a) reproduces every attribution correctly. Note the one thing that might tempt a careful reader towards it — the stray 'and' in List-II entry (iii), which makes the printed title differ from the real one. A misprinted title is not a wrong match: the book is still uniquely identifiable, and no other entry competes for it.

Concept: How 1857 has been written about is itself an examinable subject, because the same events have carried four different names and four different explanations. The contemporary British view called it the Sepoy Mutiny — a military insubordination triggered by the greased cartridges — and that reading survives in the titles of Kaye and Malleson. The nationalist view, given its classic statement by Savarkar in 1909, called it the First War of Indian Independence and read the revolt as a planned, pan-Indian national uprising; the book was banned before publication and circulated underground, which is part of why it mattered. The official Indian assessment at the centenary, written by S. N. Sen at the government's request in 1957, was more measured — it accepted a genuine popular dimension while declining the claim of a single coordinated national plan. The later academic wave, of which Eric Stokes is the leading name, moved the question away from national politics altogether and towards agrarian society, arguing that the revolt was a variety of local movements driven by land revenue, indebtedness and dispossession rather than one movement with one cause. S. B. Chaudhuri belongs to the same widening of the lens, examining the civil rebellion that ran alongside the military mutiny.

State PCS 2025 Q84 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q84 — History PYQ with Answer