Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Most of the early nationalists considered British rule as an act of providence destined to

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Most of the early nationalists considered British rule as an act of providence destined to bring modernisation.
Reason (R) : They complained only against “Un-British rule” in India.
Select the correct answer from the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). The Assertion states the settled reading of the early nationalists — the Moderates who led the Congress from 1885 to about 1905. Men like Dadabhai Naoroji, M.G. Ranade, Pherozeshah Mehta, Surendranath Banerjea and Gopal Krishna Gokhale held that the British connection had, whatever its abuses, broken open a stagnant social order and brought railways, a modern press, English education, the rule of law and a single administrative framework; several of them wrote of it in frankly providential terms, as something that had come to India for its modernisation. The Reason states the form their criticism took, and that form follows directly from the belief. If British rule is in principle a civilising force, then everything wrong with it in practice — the drain of wealth, the exclusion of Indians from the higher services, the crushing land revenue, the suppression of the press — can only be a betrayal of Britain's own standards, and the charge to bring is not that the rule is British but that it is un-British. That is exactly the charge Dadabhai Naoroji brought when he gathered his papers on the drain into Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, published in 1901: the indictment is framed as an appeal to British ideals of liberty and justice against British conduct in India. So the Assertion supplies the premise and the Reason describes the conclusion that necessarily follows from it — the two are welded together, and (c) is the answer rather than (a).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The designed trap, and it is wrong because the link between the two statements is not accidental. A candidate who reads (R) as merely another fact about the Moderates will pick this. But an 'un-British rule' complaint is unintelligible unless you first grant that British rule as such is a good thing that is being betrayed — the whole rhetorical force of the word lies in holding Britain to its own professed standards. The belief in the Assertion is what makes the complaint in the Reason the only complaint available to them.  (b) It denies the Assertion, but the Assertion is the least controversial thing in the question. The Moderates' faith in the British connection is documented in their own writings and in their method — petitions, memorials, deputations to London, appeals to British public opinion and to Parliament — a method that presupposes a government one expects to be persuadable and fundamentally well-intentioned.  (d) It rejects the Reason, but 'Un-British' is not an examiner's invention — it is the early nationalists' own vocabulary, and Dadabhai Naoroji put it in the title of his best-known book, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901). The one word in the Reason worth pausing over is 'only'; the Moderates did also criticise particular Indian social evils and did press for wider reform, but as regards the colonial state itself their critique was consistently framed as a complaint against un-British administration rather than against British rule as such.

Concept: The early nationalist or Moderate phase of the Congress, roughly 1885 to 1905, rested on a theory of the British connection that its own leaders later abandoned. The theory had two halves. First, British rule was historically progressive: it had ended internal warfare, unified the subcontinent administratively, introduced modern education, law and communications, and would in time carry India to self-government on the colonial model. Second, the actual administration had strayed from that mission — it drained India's wealth, ruined its handicrafts, taxed its peasantry beyond endurance and reserved the higher services for Englishmen. Holding both halves at once produced the characteristic Moderate demand: not the end of British rule, but its reform to match Britain's own principles. Their weapons followed from the theory — prayer, petition, memorials, press campaigns and propaganda in England — and so did the most damaging thing they produced, the economic critique of colonialism.

State PCS 2024 Q135 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q135 — History PYQ with Answer