Who remarked about the 'Dandi Yatra' as, Rama's Historical March to Lanka ?

Question

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Correct — option (1), 'Pandit Motilal Nehru and D. J. Tendulkar'. The comparison of the Dandi march to Rama's march on Lanka is Motilal Nehru's: he said of Gandhi's walk to the sea that, like the historic march of Ramachandra to Lanka, the march to Dandi would be remembered. The remark is preserved in the great documentary biography of Gandhi, the eight-volume Mahatma by D. G. Tendulkar — the paper prints the second initial as J. in the English column and as G. in the Marathi one, and D. G., for Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar, is the correct form. That is why the option names two men rather than one: Motilal Nehru made the remark and Tendulkar is the source through whom it comes down. The comparison itself was well judged. Gandhi left the Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 with seventy-eight chosen volunteers and walked some 240 miles through the villages of Gujarat to the coast at Dandi, where on 6 April he picked up salt from the shore and broke the salt law, opening the Civil Disobedience movement. What made the march extraordinary was not the distance but the deliberate slowness — twenty-four days of village meetings, newspaper attention gathering with every stage, and a target chosen so that the poorest household could see the injustice in it. An epic march undertaken to right a wrong, watched by an entire country as it advanced, is exactly what Motilal Nehru's phrase captures. Note also that the printed English gives the remark without quotation marks and after a stray comma, while the Marathi column encloses it in double quotation marks.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Prafulla Chandra Ray was a chemist of the first rank — the founder of Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceutical Works and the author of A History of Hindu Chemistry — and a nationalist of strong views on Indian industry and self-help, but the remark about the Dandi march is not his. D. P. Mishra belongs to Congress politics in the Central Provinces and later to the politics of Madhya Pradesh, and he too wrote, but not this. The option works by pairing two genuinely eminent names from different fields, which is a common MPSC device: a candidate who cannot place the quotation may reason that a scientist and a politician together sound like a plausible pair of commentators, when in fact the question is asking about one specific remark and its recorded source.  (c) This option pairs two Maharashtra names in the hope that a state commission's paper must have a Maharashtra answer. Shankarrao Dev was a Gandhian worker of Maharashtra prominent in Congress organisation and later in the Samyukta Maharashtra agitation, and G. V. Ketkar was a Marathi journalist and editor. Neither is the author of the comparison in the stem, and neither is the biographer through whom it is preserved. The instinct that MPSC always answers with a local figure is one of the most expensive habits a candidate can carry into the examination hall: the Commission draws its all-India questions from all-India material, and here the quotation belongs to the president of the Congress and the biography to a chronicler of Gandhi.  (d) Appasaheb Patwardhan was a Gandhian constructive worker of the Konkan, and Suhasini Nambiar — Suhasini Chattopadhyay, the sister of Sarojini Naidu — was one of the earliest Indian women communists, so the pair does contain two real figures of the nationalist decades. But neither made the remark about the Dandi march, and neither wrote the biography in which it is recorded. This is the option for a candidate who recognises the second name only through her family and infers that a relative of Sarojini Naidu must be connected with the salt satyagraha, in which Naidu herself was so conspicuous. Family connections are not evidence of authorship, and the question asks who made a particular remark.

Concept: The Dandi march is the most carefully designed political action of Gandhi's career, and the reason it produced remarks like Motilal Nehru's is that it was built to be watched. The choice of the salt law as the point of attack answered an objection that had dogged the Congress since Lahore: what could a national movement do that would engage the poorest? Salt was taxed, its manufacture was a state monopoly, and every household bought it, so a law broken by stooping to the shore was intelligible without explanation. Gandhi left Sabarmati on 12 March 1930 with seventy-eight inmates of the ashram, walked about 240 miles in twenty-four days, spoke at village after village, and broke the law at Dandi on 6 April. Civil disobedience then spread far beyond salt — to the boycott of foreign cloth and liquor, to the refusal of revenue in Gujarat, to the frontier under Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and to Dharasana in May, where the beating of unresisting volunteers was reported abroad. The march's memory was carried into print by D. G. Tendulkar, whose eight-volume Mahatma assembled Gandhi's life largely from documents and contemporary reporting, and it is from such compilations that quotations of this kind reach a syllabus.

State PCS 2023 Q12 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q12 — History PYQ with Answer