Indian History Questions and Answers

Answer: A

EV Ramaswamy Periyar started the movement for a separate Dravida Nadu for the Dravidian people of the South, through the Self-Respect Movement and later the Dravidar Kazhagam. MG Ranade was a Maharashtra social reformer; A Ramaswamy Mudaliar was a Justice Party leader and administrator, not the founder of this demand; M Karunanidhi became prominent after Independence, so he cannot have started a pre-Independence movement.

Answer: A

Dadabhai Naoroji formulated the idea of a jail cost of living standard when estimating India's per capita income in his work on poverty under British rule, taking the cost of feeding prisoners as the minimum cost of living. Jawaharlal Nehru, Tilak and Gokhale are not credited with this criterion. The idea underlies his argument that the income of an average Indian was barely enough for subsistence, because even the diet given to a prisoner in jail cost more than the average income of a person outside.

Answer: B

The Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885 at Bombay, in the hall of the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, at a session presided over by W.C. Bonnerjee, with A.O. Hume, a retired civil servant, as its organiser, and 72 delegates attended. The years 1884, 1886 and 1887 are the distractors; the second session was held at Calcutta in 1886 under Dadabhai Naoroji. The answer is 1885, option (B). The Congress began as a body of educated Indians who met to put their wishes before the Government, and it became a mass movement later, in the twentieth century.

Answer: C

The British government announced in November 1927 that it would send a commission under Sir John Simon to review the working of the Government of India Act of 1919 and recommend constitutional changes. It had no Indian member and was boycotted by most Indian parties. So the decision was taken in 1927, option (C). The years 1928 and 1929 are when the commission toured India and the later years, and 1930 is the year of the Salt March.

Answer: C

Jyotirao Phule wrote Gulamgiri (Slavery) in 1873, a book on caste oppression and in praise of the work of Christian missionaries in the cause of the lower castes, so statement I is correct. The Satnami movement in central India, in the region now called Chhattisgarh, was founded by Ghasidas, so statement II is correct. Both statements are right, and the answer is Both I and II, option (C). The book was a sharp criticism of the caste system and of the Brahmin priesthood, and Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj in the same year, 1873.

Answer: A

Adhai din ka Jhonpra is the monument at Ajmer. It was built by Qutbuddin Aibak of the Delhi Sultanate in the late twelfth century, and it was made from an earlier building into a mosque, and it is known for its carved arches and calligraphy. It stands in Ajmer, close to the dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti.

Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque, Alai Darwaza and the Jamaat Khana Masjid are monuments in Delhi, not in Ajmer. The first option is the answer.

Answer: B

Kunwar Singh, an old zamindar of Jagdishpur near Arrah, joined the rebel sepoys in 1857 and fought the British for many months from Bihar. He was about eighty years old, and the rising in the Arrah region is linked with his name.

Bengal, Lucknow and Bareilly were other centres of the revolt with different leaders, such as the Begum of Awadh at Lucknow and Khan Bahadur Khan at Bareilly. The second option is the answer.

Answer: C

Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah of Faizabad fought in the Battle of Chinhat, near Lucknow, on 30 June 1857, in which the rebels defeated the British force under Henry Lawrence. He was one of the main leaders of the revolt in Awadh.

The Battle of Kanpur is linked with Nana Sahib, the Battle of Jhansi with Rani Lakshmibai, and the fighting at Arrah with Kunwar Singh, so those are not the battle in the question. The third option is the answer.

Answer: D

The opposing parties were the British and the French.

The Battle of Wandiwash was fought in January 1760 during the Third Carnatic War between the British East India Company, led by Sir Eyre Coote, and the French under Count de Lally. The British won and French power in India was broken.

The Tamils, Danes and others were not the main parties to the battle.

The battle at Wandiwash in Tamil Nadu on 22 January 1760 was the decisive battle of the Third Carnatic War. The British, under Sir Eyre Coote, defeated the French under Count de Lally and then took Pondicherry in 1761, ending French ambitions in India. The Tamils, Danes and others were not the opposing sides.

Answer: C

The Regulating Act appointed four council members.

The Regulating Act of 1773 made the Governor of Bengal the Governor General of Bengal and gave him a Council of four members to assist him, so the council had five members in all counting the Governor General. The four were Clavering, Monson, Barwell and Philip Francis.

Two, three and five do not match the number of assisting members under the Act.

The Council was named in the Act itself: Lt. Gen. John Clavering, George Monson, Richard Barwell and Philip Francis. The Governor General had only a casting vote and was often outvoted, a problem later fixed by the Act of 1786. This is why the number of assisting members is four.