Which of the following books was published by combining four famous speeches delivered by Barrister Chittaranjan Das in 1917 ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2), India for Indians. Chittaranjan Das, the Calcutta barrister who would later be remembered as Deshbandhu, delivered a run of major speeches in October 1917 — a Hindu-Mahomedan mass meeting at Calcutta on 7 October, a public meeting at Mymensingh, a great meeting at Dacca on 11 October, and a Home Rule meeting at Barisal on 14 October — arguing for Hindu-Muslim unity and self-government in the language of shared Indian nationhood. These four speeches were gathered and published together as India for Indians in November 1917, with a foreword by Motilal Ghose, editor of the Amrita Bazar Patrika, praising Das's unselfish commitment to the national cause. The book proved influential enough to go through a second edition in 1918 and a considerably enlarged edition in 1921 — folding in later speeches from the Non-Co-operation years — but the original volume this question describes is precisely the four-speech collection of late 1917.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A plausible-sounding near miss built by rearranging the actual title's words rather than naming a real, different publication. Das's book is titled India for Indians, not Indians of India, and no such alternative title is attached to this 1917 speech collection — the option works purely as a memory trap for a candidate who recalls the general shape of the title but not its exact wording.  (c) Another word-order variant on the genuine title. Swapping 'for' to 'and' changes the sense of the title from an argument (India belongs to, or should be run for, Indians) to a mere pairing of two nouns, and it is not the title under which Das's speeches were actually published in 1917.  (d) The closest-looking distractor of the three, reversing only the order of 'India' and 'Indians' from the real title. It reads almost identically to the correct answer, which is exactly why MPSC includes it — to test whether a candidate has the exact wording fixed in memory rather than a loose impression of it.

Concept: India for Indians belongs to a moment when Hindu-Muslim political cooperation looked genuinely achievable — the same climate that produced the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League in December 1916. C. R. Das's October 1917 speeches, delivered across Bengal in the months immediately following that Pact, argued the case for a shared Indian political future to mixed Hindu-Muslim audiences, and their publication as a single volume turned a set of platform speeches into a durable statement of his early political thought, well before his later, better-known role as a Swarajist leader in the 1920s.

State PCS 2025 Q11 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q11 — History PYQ with Answer