Which of the following events took place in the year 1911 ?
1. Partition of Bengal revoked
2. Transfer of capital from Calcutta to Delhi
3. Lucknow pact between Congress and Muslim League
Select the c

Question

Which of the following events took place in the year 1911 ?
1. Partition of Bengal revoked
2. Transfer of capital from Calcutta to Delhi
3. Lucknow pact between Congress and Muslim League
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, 1 and 2. Statements 1 and 2 are not merely two events that happen to share a year; they were announced in the same breath, from the same dais, on the same afternoon. On 12 December 1911 King George V, seated at the Coronation Durbar at Delhi — the third and last of the imperial durbars and the only one a reigning sovereign attended in person — proclaimed both that Lord Curzon's partition of Bengal was annulled and that the capital of British India would move from Calcutta to Delhi. The partition had been announced in July 1905 and had taken effect on 16 October 1905, splitting off a new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam with its capital at Dacca, and it had provoked six years of Swadeshi and Boycott agitation. The 1911 settlement reunited the Bengali-speaking districts, hived Bihar and Orissa off into a province of their own and returned Assam to a Chief Commissionership, the reorganisation taking effect from 1912. The move of the capital was the other half of the same calculation: concede on Bengal, and simultaneously withdraw the seat of government from Calcutta, which had become the headquarters of nationalist politics, to Delhi, a city the British could present as the historic imperial capital of India. The new city was laid out by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker and was formally inaugurated only in 1931. Statement 3 is the outlier: the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League was concluded in December 1916, five years later, at the Lucknow session where the two bodies met at the same time and the Congress accepted separate electorates and weightage for Muslims. So statements 1 and 2 belong to 1911 and statement 3 does not — option (a). Note, before you mark, that this booklet has moved 'Only 1' to option (d); the answer here is the pair at (a), but the layout is not the one most candidates have drilled.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The capital transfer is correctly placed in 1911, but the Lucknow Pact is not — it belongs to December 1916 — and this option also drops the annulment of the partition of Bengal, which was announced at the same Durbar on the very same day as the capital transfer. Since the two 1911 decisions were made in one proclamation, an option that keeps one and discards the other cannot be right. The Lucknow Pact sits in the entirely different context of the First World War years, alongside the Home Rule Leagues of 1916 and the reunion of the Moderates and Extremists at the same Lucknow session.  (c) This picks the single statement that is false and rejects the two that are true — a complete inversion. The Lucknow Pact of December 1916 is one of the most firmly dated events of the freedom struggle; it was the moment Tilak and Jinnah brought the Congress and the Muslim League to a common demand for constitutional reform, and it has no connection with 1911. Meanwhile both the annulment of the partition and the announcement of the shift of the capital are documented to 12 December 1911.  (d) The annulment of the partition is correctly placed, but the option wrongly excludes the transfer of the capital, which was announced in the same royal proclamation at the Delhi Durbar on 12 December 1911. The confusion usually comes from a real fact misremembered: the new imperial city was not finished for two decades, and New Delhi was formally inaugurated only on 13 February 1931. The decision and the announcement, however, belong to 1911; only the completion belongs to 1931.

Concept: The partition of Bengal and its reversal frame the first mass phase of Indian nationalism. Lord Curzon divided the unwieldy Bengal Presidency in 1905, ostensibly for administrative convenience but in practice along lines that separated a Muslim-majority east from a Hindu-majority west, and the measure detonated the Swadeshi and Boycott movement. Six years of agitation, boycott of British goods, and revolutionary activity in Bengal made the partition politically unsustainable. At the Coronation Durbar of December 1911 the government reversed itself and reunited Bengal on a linguistic basis — and in the same announcement moved the capital away from Calcutta to Delhi, trading a concession on Bengal for a strategic withdrawal from the city where the agitation was strongest.

State PCS 2025 Q140 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q140 — History PYQ with Answer