Match the following prisoners sent from Maharashtra to Andaman with their place of residence.
(a) Adhuria
(b) Pandu Bhorji
(c) Dharma Subhan
(d) Dhondi Birbal
(i) Nagar
(ii) Khandesh Yaval
(iii) Nashi

Question

Match the following prisoners sent from Maharashtra to Andaman with their place of residence.
(a) Adhuria
(b) Pandu Bhorji
(c) Dharma Subhan
(d) Dhondi Birbal
(i) Nagar
(ii) Khandesh Yaval
(iii) Nashik
(iv) Pandharpur

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), which reads (a)-(ii), (b)-(i), (c)-(iv), (d)-(iii): Adhuria of Khandesh Yaval, Pandu Bhorji of Nagar, Dharma Subhan of Pandharpur and Dhondi Birbal of Nashik. This is a pure recall item and it should be recognised as one. The four names are ordinary men from the Deccan whose places of residence are preserved in the convict records of the transportation to the Andamans, not public figures whose lives are written up anywhere a candidate could reason from; there is no principle, no chronology and no thematic link that will yield the pairing to someone who has not read the list. It is worth saying that plainly, because the wrong response to an item like this is to spend three minutes constructing a rationalisation, and the right response is to give it the fifteen seconds it deserves and move on. What can be learnt from it is the paper-craft. Look at how the four choices are built. Option (1) and option (2) agree on two of their four rows — both give Adhuria to Khandesh Yaval and Dhondi Birbal to Nashik — and separate only on whether Pandu Bhorji belongs to Nagar and Dharma Subhan to Pandharpur, or the reverse pairing with Pandharpur and Nagar exchanged. Of the remaining two, option (3) is a permutation that shares no row with the key at all, while option (4) agrees on the third row only. So a candidate who has any recollection of the first and last rows is left facing a straight two-way choice, and one who has none is facing a four-way guess on a paper that deducts a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer. The real content the question is attached to is the Andaman penal settlement itself: the place of transportation to which the rebels of 1857 and, half a century later, the political prisoners of the revolutionary movement were sent, and the reason kala pani entered the language as a name for the worst punishment short of death. That subject is examinable in a hundred ways that do not require this list, and it is where preparation should go.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This is the near-twin of the key and the only choice a prepared candidate is likely to be weighing against it. It agrees that Adhuria belongs to Khandesh Yaval and that Dhondi Birbal belongs to Nashik, and it differs only in exchanging the other two, giving Pandharpur to Pandu Bhorji and Nagar to Dharma Subhan. Because it shares half the key's rows, partial recall does not distinguish it and the two must be separated on the middle pair alone. The structural lesson is worth carrying to every matching question in this paper: before committing, compare the surviving choices row by row and identify exactly which row is doing the work, because that is the only fact you actually need to recall.  (c) This choice shares no row with the key. It moves Adhuria to Pandharpur, Pandu Bhorji to Nashik, Dharma Subhan to Khandesh Yaval and Dhondi Birbal to Nagar — a complete re-permutation. Choices of this kind exist in a matching option set to absorb candidates who are guessing, and they are worth recognising as such, because a set of four choices in which two are near-twins and two are unrelated permutations is telling you where the examiner thinks the difficulty lies. If you find yourself drawn to one of the outlying permutations without a specific reason, that is a sign you are guessing rather than recalling, and on a paper with negative marking that is information about whether to attempt the question at all.  (d) This choice is the other unrelated permutation, giving Nashik to Adhuria, Khandesh Yaval to Pandu Bhorji, Pandharpur to Dharma Subhan and Nagar to Dhondi Birbal. It agrees with the key on one row only, the third. Notice that this means a candidate who happens to recall just the Dharma Subhan pairing is left with two choices rather than one, and would still have to decide between this and the key on other grounds — a reminder that on a four-row match the number of choices a single remembered row eliminates varies from none to three, and that it pays to check which of your recollections is the most discriminating before you use it.

Concept: The Andaman Islands became a penal settlement because of 1857. The colonial government needed somewhere remote to send the rebels it had captured and did not intend to hang, and Port Blair was reoccupied for the purpose; the first batch of two hundred convicts reached the islands on 10 March 1858 under Dr J. P. Walker. Over the eighty years that followed, something on the order of eighty thousand Indian prisoners were shipped there, and most never came back. Transportation across the sea carried a second penalty beyond the physical one, because crossing the kala pani, the black water, was held to break caste and sever a man from his community, so the sentence destroyed a convict's social existence as well as his liberty. The settlement began as an open penal colony with convict labour clearing forest and building, and hardened at the turn of the century into the Cellular Jail, built between 1896 and 1906, with some seven hundred single cells in seven wings radiating from a central watchtower, designed so that no prisoner could see or communicate with another. Its later inmates included the revolutionaries of the twentieth-century movement, among them V. D. Savarkar, transported in 1911.

State PCS 2021 Q14 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q14 — History PYQ with Answer