Who was the founder of newspaper ‘Samata’?
- (a)Hariprasad Tamta
- (b)Shrikrishna Tamta
- (c)Ramprasad Tamta
- (d)Jayanand Bharti
Correct — A, Hariprasad Tamta.
Hariprasad Tamta, born in 1887 and based at Almora, started the Hindi weekly Samta in 1934, its stated purpose being to put the problems of the Shilpkar community into public print. The paper is produced from the Tamta Printing Press at Hari Niwas, Thana Bazaar, Almora.
The paper came late in a long campaign, not at its start. Tamta had founded the Tamta Sudhar Sabha at Almora in 1905, which was renamed the Kumaon Shilpkar Sabha in 1914 and which he presided over for years before the weekly appeared.
Carry away the pairing rather than the surname: Samta is an Almora paper and Hariprasad Tamta's paper. When Gandhi was presented a copy of Samta, he remarked on the beauty of the title.
- (b)Shrikrishna Tamta — The surname is what makes this look safe, and the surname is exactly what the item does not settle.
The Tamta name recurs across this Almora family and its politics — Hariprasad lost his father in childhood and came under the protection of his maternal uncle Krishna Tamta, a trader and social worker of the town.
Sharing a surname does not carry the newspaper with it. The founding of Samta in 1934, the press it is printed on and its editorial line are all recorded for Hariprasad Tamta.
- (c)Ramprasad Tamta — Same pull, a different given name. The surname narrows the field to three of the four options and then stops working — the given name is the whole discriminator here.
So anchor Samta to a person with a date and a place attached: Almora, 1934, Hariprasad Tamta. A name that does not come with that record is not the founder the stem is after.
- (d)Jayanand Bharti — Bharti belongs to the same struggle but the other half of the state. He is the figure to name for the Dola-Palki movement, the agitation in Pauri Garhwal against the bar on Shilpkar brides and grooms travelling by palanquin at their weddings.
Attaching Samta to him merges two stories that ran in parallel: Bharti's platform was the Garhwal agitation, while the 1934 weekly belongs to Tamta's Almora circle in Kumaon.
A social movement in colonial India typically acquired a newspaper of its own, because the existing press spoke for other constituencies. The paper then becomes the movement's public record — its demands, its meetings, its quarrels.
Such a paper is identified by four things: founder, language, town of publication, and the group it spoke for. Samta answers all four for the Shilpkar movement of Kumaon.
Uttarakhand's anti-untouchability movement had two centres. In Kumaon it worked through Hariprasad Tamta's sabhas at Almora, through petitions to the colonial government over the community's name and over land, and through Samta.
In Garhwal it worked through Jayanand Bharti and the Dola-Palki agitation. A question on a hill newspaper therefore sits at the join between freedom-struggle press history and this regional caste-reform history.
- Hariprasad Tamta started the Hindi weekly Samta in 1934 to give the problems of the Shilpkar community a public platform.
- The paper is produced from the Tamta Printing Press at Hari Niwas, Thana Bazaar, Almora.
- Tamta founded the Tamta Sudhar Sabha at Almora in 1905; it was renamed the Kumaon Shilpkar Sabha in 1914, with Tamta as its president.
- Lakshmi Devi Tamta, Hariprasad Tamta's niece, worked as an editor of Samta.
- Tamta was given the title of Rai Sahab on 3 June 1933.
- Gandhi was presented a copy of Samta and remarked on the beauty of the title.
- Hariprasad Tamta was born on 26 August 1887 and died on 23 February 1960.
- Jayanand Bharti led the Dola-Palki movement in Pauri Garhwal against the bar on Shilpkar use of the marriage palanquin.
Left column names a paper, a body or a campaign; right column names the person or place it belongs to. The Samta row is Kumaon; the Dola-Palki row is Garhwal.
- Three of the four options end in Tamta, so the surname leaves three names standing; only the given name separates them.
- Samta and Jayanand Bharti sit in different halves of the state. Pairing the Garhwal leader with the Almora weekly collapses two parallel movements into one.
- The 1934 date is late in Tamta's career. Reading the paper as the beginning of his work reverses the order — the sabha of 1905 came first, and the weekly was a later instrument of it.
- The title is transliterated both as Samta and as Samata; the same Almora weekly is meant, so the spelling difference is not a sign that a different paper is being asked about.
The founder-to-publication link turns up in a few standard shapes: a direct 'who founded X', a match-list pairing papers with founders or with places of publication, and an odd-one-out over four founder-paper pairs.
For Uttarakhand material the same names also come back through the movement rather than the paper — the sabha, the conference or the agitation a leader is attached to, and the district he worked in.
UPSC_2007_GS1_Q582007The same device exactly — four personal names, one named newspaper, pick the founder. What differs is the field: Shome Prakash sits in nineteenth-century Bengal's reform press, while Samta is a 1934 Kumaon weekly of the Shilpkar movement, so the UKPSC item needs regional rather than national recall.
UPPSC_2022_PRE_GSI_Q1172022The same press landscape approached on a different axis: it matches newspapers to their places of publication, and Almora — the town Samta belongs to — is one of the listed places. That item tests the town; this one tests the founder.
CDS_GK_2025_II_Q522025The same founder-to-journal device, but in match-list form across four titles at once, and its List-II pairs titles with founders, editors and authors rather than founders alone. The UKPSC item runs the pairing just once, on a district-level Dalit weekly, where the given name shared with two other options is what decides it.
MPPSC_2022_PRE_PaperI_Q982022The state-commission version of the same pairing, run in the opposite direction: it names the man and asks for his paper, while this item names the paper and asks for the founder. Both reward knowing the regional press by the person behind it.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Hindi weekly 'Samta', started in 1934 to voice the grievances of the Shilpkar community, was published from:
- (a)Almora
- (b)Pauri
- (c)Nainital
- (d)Dehradun
Answera — Samta belongs to Almora, the town where Hariprasad Tamta's Shilpkar sabha had been working since 1905, and the paper is produced from the Tamta Printing Press at Hari Niwas, Thana Bazaar, Almora.Pauri is the Garhwal district identified with Jayanand Bharti's Dola-Palki agitation, not with this weekly. Nainital and Dehradun are hill administrative centres, but the paper and its founder's base were both at Almora.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Dola-Palki movement, against the bar on Shilpkar brides and grooms travelling by palanquin, is associated with:
- (a)Hariprasad Tamta
- (b)Jayanand Bharti
- (c)Badri Datt Pandey
- (d)Govind Ballabh Pant
Answerb — Jayanand Bharti led the Dola-Palki agitation in Pauri Garhwal, pressing the demand that Shilpkar marriage processions be allowed the palanquin the upper castes reserved for themselves.Hariprasad Tamta's work ran in Kumaon, through the Shilpkar sabha at Almora and through Samta. Badri Datt Pandey is identified with the Coolie-Begar movement at Bageshwar in 1921, and Govind Ballabh Pant with Congress politics in the United Provinces.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The organisation founded by Hariprasad Tamta at Almora in 1905, and renamed the Kumaon Shilpkar Sabha in 1914, was:
- (a)Tamta Sudhar Sabha
- (b)Kumaon Parishad
- (c)All India Depressed Classes League
- (d)Arya Pratinidhi Sabha
Answera — Tamta founded the Tamta Sudhar Sabha at Almora in 1905 as an organisation for the Shilpkar community there; it took the wider name Kumaon Shilpkar Sabha in 1914, with Tamta as its president.The Kumaon Parishad was a separate regional political body of the hills. The Depressed Classes League and the Arya Pratinidhi Sabha are bodies outside this Almora lineage, so only one option carries the 1905 founding and the 1914 renaming the stem describes.