Among the following Newspapers of Bihar, which was the first one to get published?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Patna Harkara. This is one of the few items on the paper where the Commission had to defend its key in writing, and the defence is worth reading because it tells you what kind of evidence settles a question like this. Candidates objected, and BPSC answered in the Remarks column of the final revised key published on 31 October 2025 with a named scholarly citation: Syed Ahmad Qadri, 'Urdu Sahafat Bihar mein' (Patna, 2005), at page 65, which records Patna Harkara as the first newspaper published from Bihar. The Commission then dealt with the specific objection that had been raised — that Patna Harkara was a JOURNAL rather than a NEWSPAPER, a distinction that would disqualify it — by pointing to Qazi Abdul Wadood, who reproduced scanned copies of some of its issues; the Commission's position is that those issues show on their face that it was a newspaper. So the key rests on a history of Urdu journalism in Bihar plus physical evidence of the paper itself, not on a textbook assertion. Two things a careful student should hold alongside that. FIRST, and this is the whole trap of the question: Bihar Bandhu, launched in 1872 by Keshav Ram Bhatta, is very widely described as the beginning of Bihar's press — but the claim, correctly stated, is that it was the first HINDI newspaper published in Bihar. Drop the word 'Hindi' and a true statement becomes a false one, and that single missing adjective is what makes option (a) the wrong answer this item is designed to attract. Patna Harkara belongs to the Urdu press, which in Bihar preceded the Hindi press, and the two claims sit together without contradiction. SECOND, an honest warning about revision: no founding year for Patna Harkara can be traced to any primary or scholarly source, and the Commission's own remark gives none. A launch year of 1830 circulates widely on coaching sites; it is not sourced anywhere that can be checked, and you should not commit it to memory or write it in an answer. What is defensible is the ranking the Commission gives and the citation behind it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The designed trap, and a half-truth rather than a falsehood. Bihar Bandhu was launched in 1872 by Keshav Ram Bhatta, a Maharashtrian Brahmin settled at Biharsharif, and it is genuinely a landmark — but as the first HINDI newspaper of Bihar. The qualifier is the whole answer. Coaching material routinely quotes the claim with 'Hindi' deleted, which converts an accurate statement about one language's press into a false statement about Bihar's press as a whole.  (c) A real Urdu title from Bihar's press, and plausible for exactly that reason — a candidate who has correctly worked out that Bihar's earliest papers were Urdu may pick it on language alone. But the Commission's key and its cited authority place Patna Harkara first, and no primary or scholarly source could be found giving a founding year for Akhbar-e-Bihar. Reason from the key here, and do not memorise a date for this title from any secondary list.  (d) An English-language title, and the option a candidate reaches for on the assumption that colonial-era journalism must have begun in English — as it did in Calcutta, where Hicky's Bengal Gazette appeared in 1780. Bihar's own sequence does not follow Calcutta's. As with Akhbar-e-Bihar, no verifiable founding date could be established for the Bihar Herald, so treat the Commission's ordering as the answer and carry no invented year with it.

Concept: Bihar's print history has to be read against two facts about the province. First, Bihar had no separate administration for most of the nineteenth century — it was part of the Bengal Presidency until it was carved out as Bihar and Orissa in 1912 — so its early papers grew up inside an information world whose capital was Calcutta, where India's first newspaper, Hicky's Bengal Gazette, had appeared in 1780. Second, the working language of administration, courts and the educated public in Bihar through that period was Urdu and Persian, not Hindi. Hindi's rise as a print and administrative language in Bihar is a later, deliberately fought campaign — the movement for Devanagari in the courts, in which Bihar was a leading theatre, belongs to the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Put those two facts together and the shape of the answer follows: an Urdu newspaper from Patna precedes a Hindi one, and a Hindi paper of 1872 can be a genuine first without being THE first. That is why the scholarly authority the Commission cites is a history of URDU journalism in Bihar, and why Patna is the place — the city held the province's Urdu-Persian learned establishment, the tradition that produced the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, opened to the public on 29 October 1891 with 4,000 manuscripts and made an Institution of National Importance by Act of Parliament on 26 December 1969.

State PCS 2025 Q99 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q99 — History PYQ with Answer