Who wrote the book ‘The Indian Musalmans’?
- (a)W. W. Hunter
- (b)Charles McMillan
- (c)Sir Syed Ahmad Khan
- (d)S. N. Roy
Correct — A, W. W. Hunter.
'The Indian Musalmans' appeared in 1871, written by W. W. Hunter, a Scottish officer of the Indian Civil Service. Its subtitle asks whether Indian Muslims were bound in conscience to rebel against the Queen — an official anxiety of the years when the Wahabi conspiracy cases were being prosecuted.
Hunter's answer cut both ways. He argued against the idea that rebellion was a standing religious obligation, and he pressed the government to attend to Muslim grievances, above all in education.
The idea to carry away: this is a British administrator's report on Muslim loyalty, not a Muslim leader's self-defence. The famous reply to it came separately, from Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.
- (b)Charles McMillan — The 1871 title page carries Hunter's name, so this surname has nothing to hold on to in this question.
The reasoning hazard is treating a plausible British name from the right century as evidence of authorship. If the name is pulling you towards the Macmillan publishing house, founded in the 1840s and stamped on many Victorian imperial titles, that is a memory of a publisher rather than of an author.
The safer test is whether you can attach the person to a second documented work. Hunter passes it — 'The Annals of Rural Bengal' is also his.
- (c)Sir Syed Ahmad Khan — Sir Syed did write about this book, which is exactly why the option is tempting. He published a Review on Dr Hunter's Indian Musalmans, disputing Hunter's equation of Wahabi-ism with rebellion and his portrait of Indian Muslims as a chronically disloyal and dangerous community.
Responding to a book in print is not writing it. Sir Syed is the right answer to items on 'Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind', his account of the causes of the 1857 revolt, on 'Athar-us-Sanadid' on Delhi's monuments, and on the Aligarh college he founded in 1875.
- (d)S. N. Roy — The name recorded on the 1871 book is Hunter's, and these initials do not match it.
If 'Roy' is what you half-remember, the figure worth fixing is M. N. Roy, who founded the émigré Communist Party of India at Tashkent in 1920 and wrote 'India in Transition'. He belongs to the twentieth century, roughly fifty years after Hunter's tract, and to a wholly different debate.
'The Indian Musalmans' belongs to a recognisable genre: the archive-based inquiry by a serving civil servant that treats an Indian community as an administrative problem to be described, measured and managed.
Hunter wrote with government access to the records but published on his own responsibility, and the question he took up was one of loyalty. That framing explains both halves of the book — its denial that rebellion was a religious duty, and its warning to the government about neglected grievances.
The book sits at the junction of two threads a syllabus usually keeps apart: the armed Wahabi movement of the nineteenth century, and the beginnings of modern Muslim education and politics in India.
It also opens a documented exchange. Hunter set out the government's suspicion; Sir Syed Ahmad Khan answered it in print, arguing for loyalty alongside English education. Reading the two as a pair is what makes either one stay in memory.
- W. W. Hunter published 'The Indian Musalmans' in 1871; its subtitle asks whether Indian Muslims were bound in conscience to rebel against the Queen.
- Hunter was a Scottish member of the Indian Civil Service who served in Bengal and directed the statistical survey work that produced the Imperial Gazetteer of India.
- 'The Annals of Rural Bengal' is also Hunter's.
- Sir Syed Ahmad Khan answered the book in print with a 'Review on Dr Hunter's Indian Musalmans'.
- Sir Syed's own writings include 'Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind' on the causes of the 1857 revolt and 'Athar-us-Sanadid' on the monuments of Delhi.
- The Indian Education Commission of 1882, appointed under Viceroy Ripon, is called the Hunter Commission after William Wilson Hunter.
- A different Hunter — Lord Hunter (William Hunter, Senator of the College of Justice in Scotland) — chaired the 1919 Disorders Inquiry Committee on the Jallianwala Bagh firing.
Two Hunters, and one reply: the book is Hunter's, the printed answer to it is Sir Syed's.
- Two Hunters share the syllabus: William Wilson Hunter of this book and the 1882 Education Commission, and Lord Hunter (William Hunter, Senator of the College of Justice in Scotland) of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh inquiry.
- Sir Syed wrote about this book, not this book; a reviewer's name drifts towards the title it answers.
- The date is 1871, which is before Sir Syed's Aligarh college of 1875, so later Muslim political organisation should not be read back into it.
- A British-sounding surname on its own settles nothing; anchor the author to a second work before committing to him.
The recall form is the one used here: a title, four names, a single line.
The same fact can be dressed as a matching set that pairs colonial officials with their books, or reversed so that Hunter is given and the work must be picked out of four titles.
It can also arrive sideways, inside a question on the Wahabi movement, where the book is offered as a British official's assessment of Muslim loyalty.
UKPSC_2021_PRE_GSI_Q1392021Same commission and the same one-line shape: a title, four names, name the author. What differs is the material — 'Khazain-ul-Futuh' is a Persian work of the Delhi Sultanate court, while this item sits in the administrative literature of the colonial 1870s.
UPSC_2007_GS1_Q652007Also a bare authorship item on a nineteenth-century tract rather than a narrative work. The vantage differs: 'Bahubivah' belongs to Bengali social-reform writing from within the society it addresses, whereas this book is a British official's inquiry into a community's loyalty.
UPSC_2006_GS1_Q512006What the two share is the bare one-line authorship recall: a work is named, and the author has to be picked out of four names with nothing else to go on. The distractor construction is not shared — there they are Durkheim, Owen and Weber, of whom only Owen stands near the Manifesto's subject — and the field is nineteenth-century European political thought instead of British-Indian administration.
- practice — not a real PYQ
'The Indian Musalmans' (1871) was written against the background of official concern about which movement?
- (a)The Wahabi movement
- (b)The Faraizi movement
- (c)The Khilafat movement
- (d)The Deoband seminary movement
Answera — The book was written while the government was prosecuting the Wahabi conspiracy cases, and its subject is precisely whether that movement's appeal placed Muslims generally under a duty to rebel.The Faraizi movement was Haji Shariatullah's earlier reform current in eastern Bengal. The Khilafat agitation belongs to the years after the First World War, decades later. Deoband, founded in 1866, is a seminary rather than an armed movement.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Which one of the following works is associated with Sir Syed Ahmad Khan?
- (a)Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind
- (b)The Annals of Rural Bengal
- (c)Khazain-ul-Futuh
- (d)India in Transition
Answera — 'Asbab-e-Baghawat-e-Hind', his account of the causes of the 1857 revolt, is Sir Syed's.'The Annals of Rural Bengal' is Hunter's. 'Khazain-ul-Futuh' is a Persian work of the Delhi Sultanate period by Amir Khusrau. 'India in Transition' is M. N. Roy's, from the 1920s.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Indian Education Commission appointed in 1882 is known as the Hunter Commission after its chairman. Who was he?
- (a)William Wilson Hunter
- (b)Lord Hunter (William Hunter, Senator of the College of Justice in Scotland)
- (c)Thomas Babington Macaulay
- (d)Charles Wood
Answera — The 1882 commission was chaired by William Wilson Hunter, the same civil servant who wrote 'The Indian Musalmans'.Lord Hunter (William Hunter, Senator of the College of Justice in Scotland) is the judge who headed the 1919 inquiry into the Jallianwala Bagh firing.
Macaulay's contribution to education policy is the Minute of 1835 and Charles Wood's is the Despatch of 1854, both a generation or more before 1882.