UPPSC 2024 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 134 of 150

Correct — C, A-3, B-2, C-1, D-4. All four titles are landmark general works on Indian history, and each belongs to a different school, which is the real content of the question. A. Hindu Polity — 3, K.P. Jayaswal (1881-1937), the Patna lawyer-historian whose Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times argued that ancient India possessed genuine republican and representative institutions, the ganas and sanghas; it is a founding text of the nationalist school. B. The Wonder That Was India — 2, A.L. Basham, whose survey of Indian culture down to the coming of the Muslims was first published in 1954 and remains the best-loved single-volume introduction in English. C. An Introduction to the Study of Indian History — 1, D.D. Kosambi, first published in 1956, the book that introduced a materialist method to Indian history and insisted that a historian must combine Sanskrit texts with coins, tools and fieldwork. D. The Early History of India — 4, Vincent Arthur Smith, whose The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest appeared in 1904 and who also wrote The Oxford History of India; he is the standard representative of the colonial or imperialist school. Only option (c) carries all four pairings.

• (a)A-3, B-2, C-4, D-1 — The closest wrong answer, and the one the item is really built to catch — it gets Jayaswal and Basham right and then swaps the last two, handing An Introduction to the Study of Indian History to Vincent Smith and The Early History of India to Kosambi. That is chronologically impossible in both directions: Smith's Early History appeared in 1904, decades before Kosambi began writing, and Kosambi's Introduction of 1956 is a self-consciously modern, materialist book that reads as a reply to exactly the sort of dynastic narrative Smith wrote.
• (b)A-1, B-2, C-4, D-3 — It keeps Basham correctly with The Wonder That Was India but scrambles the other three, giving Hindu Polity to Kosambi and The Early History of India to Jayaswal. Hindu Polity is a constitutional history of ancient India written in the nationalist idiom, not a Marxist work; and Jayaswal, who died in 1937, wrote on ancient Indian polity and on the period 150-350 A.D., not a general early history.
• (d)A-1, B-2, C-3, D-4 — This one gets Basham and Vincent Smith right, so it survives a quick check on the two most familiar names, but it hands Hindu Polity to Kosambi and An Introduction to the Study of Indian History to Jayaswal — an exact exchange of the two Indian historians. Note the guard: match the pairs you are certain of first, then see which option is still standing.

Indian history-writing since the nineteenth century falls into recognisable schools, and this question is really a test of whether you can place four authors within them. Vincent Smith wrote from inside the colonial administration and produced the classic imperialist narrative, organised around dynasties, invasions and a supposed Indian incapacity for self-government. K.P. Jayaswal answered him from the nationalist side, using Sanskrit and Pali sources to argue that representative institutions were indigenous to India. A.L. Basham, writing from London and later Canberra, produced a humane cultural survey that made ancient India accessible to the general reader. D.D. Kosambi, a mathematician by profession, brought historical materialism, numismatics and field archaeology to bear and redefined what counted as evidence. Learn the four names as four positions, not as four titles.

Match-the-list questions are answered by elimination, not by recall of all four pairs. Here B is a giveaway: every option pairs The Wonder That Was India with Basham, so B carries no information and can be ignored. That leaves A, C and D. Two options, (a) and (c), agree on A-3 (Jayaswal); they differ only on whether C goes to Kosambi and D to Smith, or the reverse. So the entire question reduces to one decision: who wrote An Introduction to the Study of Indian History? Once you know that is Kosambi, option (c) is forced. The examiner has built the item so that a candidate who knows only Basham gains nothing, and a candidate who knows Kosambi gains everything.

• K.P. Jayaswal (27 November 1881 - 4 August 1937) wrote Hindu Polity: A Constitutional History of India in Hindu Times, the work credited with showing that ancient India had republics organised on principles of representation. (Editions are variously dated; the material grew out of his earlier essays, so quote the author rather than a year.)
• A.L. Basham's The Wonder That Was India: A Survey of the Culture of the Indian Sub-Continent Before the Coming of the Muslims was first published in 1954 by Sidgwick & Jackson. The companion volume covering the Muslim period to the British Raj was written by S.A.A. Rizvi and published in 1987 — it is not Basham's.
• D.D. Kosambi's An Introduction to the Study of Indian History was first published in 1956 by Popular Prakashan. Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi (1907-1966) was a mathematician and Marxist historian, and is not to be confused with his father Dharmanand Kosambi, the Buddhist scholar and Pali specialist.
• Vincent Arthur Smith wrote The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904; a revised fourth edition of 1924 was edited by Stephen Edwardes) and also The Oxford History of India. He served in the Indian Civil Service in the North-Western Provinces before turning to history.

• Confusing D.D. Kosambi, the mathematician-historian who wrote An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, with his father Dharmanand Kosambi, the Buddhist and Pali scholar.
• Assuming Basham wrote both volumes of The Wonder That Was India. Volume 2, on the period from the coming of the Muslims to the Raj, was written by S.A.A. Rizvi.
• Reading Hindu Polity as a work of religion. It is a constitutional history — the argument is about assemblies, republics and law, not about Hinduism.

UPPSC returns to book-and-author lists every year, in both the match-the-list and the 'which is NOT correctly matched' forms, and mixes medieval Persian chronicles with modern historians in the same paper. UPSC asks it as a single identification — 'who wrote X' — or embeds the author in a statement-based question. Either way, store each title with its author and one line on what the book argued.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, the work that introduced a materialist method to the writing of Indian history, was written by

  • (a)R.S. Sharma
  • (b)D.D. Kosambi
  • (c)Romila Thapar
  • (d)Irfan Habib

  Answer(b) D.D. Kosambi — first published in 1956. R.S. Sharma, Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib all worked in the tradition Kosambi opened, but the book itself is his.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following pairs is correctly matched?

  • (a)The Early History of India — A.L. Basham
  • (b)Hindu Polity — Vincent A. Smith
  • (c)The Oxford History of India — Vincent A. Smith
  • (d)The Wonder That Was India — D.D. Kosambi

  Answer(c) The Oxford History of India — Vincent A. Smith, who also wrote The Early History of India. Hindu Polity is by K.P. Jayaswal and The Wonder That Was India by A.L. Basham.