Consider the following events and arrange them in correct chronological order.
1. Acquisition of Awadh by the British
2. Ilbert Bill Controversy
3. Indigo Revolt
4. Second Anglo-Afghan War
Select the

Question

Consider the following events and arrange them in correct chronological order.
1. Acquisition of Awadh by the British
2. Ilbert Bill Controversy
3. Indigo Revolt
4. Second Anglo-Afghan War
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, 1, 3, 4, 2. Put a year against each item and the code follows. Item 1, the acquisition of Awadh, is 1856: on 7 February 1856 Lord Dalhousie deposed Nawab Wajid Ali Shah and annexed the kingdom, the stated ground being chronic misgovernment rather than the Doctrine of Lapse, since the Nawab was not without heirs. Item 3, the Indigo Revolt or Nil Bidroha, broke out in March 1859 in Nadia district of Bengal and ran through 1860, when the ryots led by Digambar Biswas and Bishnucharan Biswas refused to sow indigo for the planters. Item 4, the Second Anglo-Afghan War, began on 21 November 1878 after Lord Lytton's Forward Policy demanded that Sher Ali Khan receive a British mission, and its fighting phase closed in 1880 with Abdur Rahman Khan installed at Kabul. Item 2, the Ilbert Bill controversy, belongs to 1883: the Bill was introduced on 9 February 1883 under Viceroy Lord Ripon and provoked a furious European agitation, so that the amended measure that finally passed in January 1884 was a shadow of the original. Arranged earliest to latest, that is Awadh 1856, Indigo 1859, the Afghan war 1878, and Ilbert 1883 — 1, 3, 4, 2, which is option (a). One reassurance about item 1: even a candidate who reads 'acquisition of Awadh' as the earlier Treaty of 1801, under which Wellesley's pressure stripped Rohilkhand, the Lower Doab and Gorakhpur from the Nawab, still places the item first. Either reading gives the same code.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) It gets the second half right but opens with the Indigo Revolt ahead of the acquisition of Awadh. The revolt began in March 1859, three years after the annexation of February 1856, and the two are in fact linked by that interval: the discontent bred by the annexation of Awadh fed the sepoy rising of 1857, and the Indigo Revolt followed in the unsettled Bengal countryside two years after it. A candidate marks this when 'peasant movement' feels older than 'annexation' — a chronological instinct, not a date.  (c) This carries both possible errors at once. It puts the Indigo Revolt of 1859 before the annexation of Awadh in 1856, and it also puts the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883 before the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-80. The second slip is the one that matters more, because the two events sit either side of a change of Viceroy: the Afghan war belongs to Lytton, who left in 1880, and the Ilbert Bill to his successor Ripon.  (d) The most tempting wrong answer, because it gets the opening pair exactly right — Awadh 1856 then Indigo 1859 — and then reverses the closing pair. The Ilbert Bill controversy is 1883; the Second Anglo-Afghan War began on 21 November 1878 and its fighting was over by 1880. The tell is the Viceroy: Lytton launched the Afghan war and was recalled in 1880, and Ripon, who replaced him, is the Viceroy of the Ilbert Bill. If Ripon follows Lytton, the Ilbert Bill must follow the war.

Concept: The four items are drawn from three different strands of the same three decades, and holding the strands apart is what makes the sequence easy. Item 1 belongs to territorial expansion: the last major annexation before the Revolt of 1857, carried out by Dalhousie in 1856. Item 3 belongs to agrarian resistance: the Indigo Revolt of 1859-60, in which Bengal's cultivators refused a crop that ruined them, and which produced the Indigo Commission of 1860, the Indigo Act of 1862 and Dinabandhu Mitra's play Nil Darpan. Item 4 belongs to frontier policy: Lytton's Forward Policy, adopted in reaction to Russian advances in Central Asia, which produced the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878-80 and the Treaty of Gandamak of 1879 by which Afghanistan surrendered control of its foreign relations. Item 2 belongs to the politics of race and law: the Ilbert Bill of 1883, which proposed to let Indian magistrates in the districts try European subjects, and whose defeat by an organised European agitation taught educated Indians the value of organisation — two years later the Indian National Congress was founded.

State PCS 2025 Q128 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q128 — History PYQ with Answer