Modern Sources and British Expansion Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The ruler of Kanpur who called himself Peshwa was Nana Saheb.

Nana Saheb was the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II. The British refused him his father's pension, and in 1857 he gathered armed forces, expelled the British garrison from Kanpur, proclaimed himself Peshwa and declared that he was a governor under the emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Baji Rao II was the last actual Peshwa, who died in exile at Bithoor in 1851, Baji Rao I was the great eighteenth-century Peshwa, and Bahadur Shah Zafar was the Mughal emperor, not a ruler of Kanpur.

Answer: A

The British consolidated control by transfer of powers of the East India company to the British crown for a more responsible management of Indian affairs.

NCERT's Class 8 history lists the changes after 1857. The British Parliament passed an Act in 1858 transferring the Company's powers to the British Crown to ensure more responsible management, with a Secretary of State for India and a Viceroy as the Crown's representative.

The other options misstate those changes. The proportion of Indian soldiers was reduced, and recruitment moved away from Awadh, Bihar, central India and south India towards Gurkhas, Sikhs and Pathans. Land policies protected landlords and zamindars, not the landless. Ruling chiefs were assured that their territory would not be annexed, but that is not described as general appeasement.

Answer: A

The correct order is Satara, Sambalpur, Udaipur, Nagpur, Jhansi.

Lord Dalhousie, Governor-General from 1848 to 1856, used the Doctrine of Lapse to annex a state whose ruler died without a male heir, refusing to recognise an adopted son. The annexations followed one another almost yearly:

1. Satara: 1848
2. Sambalpur: 1850
3. Udaipur: 1852
4. Nagpur: 1853
5. Jhansi: 1854

The Udaipur here is the small state in central India, not Mewar. The other options misplace Sambalpur before Satara, or put Nagpur ahead of Udaipur, so only the first sequence runs from earliest to last.

Answer: D

The words are Robert Clive's.

After Plassey (1757) the East India Company tried ruling Bengal through puppet nawabs, but they did not always obey. Clive concluded that the Company should take power itself, writing in 1765 that 'we must indeed become nawabs ourselves', in fact if not in name. That year the Mughal emperor granted the Company the diwani of Bengal, the right to collect its revenue.

Stringer Lawrence was an earlier Company military commander in the south, Harry Verelst was Governor of Bengal after Clive (1767-1769), and Warren Hastings became the first Governor-General in 1773. None of them is the source of the remark.

Answer: C

The coast is in Kerala.

Vasco da Gama sailed round the Cape of Good Hope and, guided across the Arabian Sea, reached the Malabar coast near Calicut (Kozhikode) in May 1498. He landed at Kappad, near Calicut, which is in present-day Kerala.

His voyage opened the sea route from Europe to India and led to the Portuguese presence on the west coast. Karnataka lies further north on the same coast, and Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are on the east coast, which he did not reach on this voyage.

Answer: A

James Mill published A History of British India in 1817.

The three-volume work divided Indian history into Hindu, Muslim and British periods, a periodisation the NCERT history textbook discusses and criticises. Mill, who never visited India, argued that British rule would bring civilisation to the country.

1815, 1816 and 1818 are near-miss dates; the book appeared in 1817.

Answer: B

The appropriate statements are (c), (d), (a) only.

The NCERT history textbook says that in the seventeenth century both the Dutch and English East India Companies tried to control Masulipatnam, which had become the most important port on the Andhra coast; that competition among the Golconda nobles, Persian merchants, Telugu Komati Chettis and European traders made the city populous and prosperous; and that the Mughal governor Mir Jumla, himself a merchant, began to play off the Dutch and the English against each other.

Statement (b) is wrong. The Dutch came from the Netherlands, not from Denmark and Spain, so every option including (b) is wrong.

Answer: C

The key's answer is both (A) and (B) are true and (B) was ensured because of (A).

The NCERT chapter on the revolt of 1857 says that once the sepoys reached Delhi and persuaded Bahadur Shah Zafar to accept their leadership, he wrote letters to all the chiefs and rulers of the country to come forward and organise a confederacy of Indian states to fight the British. It also says that this single step taken by Bahadur Shah had great implications and changed the entire situation dramatically.

The key reads B as resting on A: the Emperor's blessing became decisive because he called on the rulers of the country to join, and smaller rulers and chieftains responded. The options calling one statement false are wrong, and option D wrongly says the two have no relationship.

Answer: A

The presidencies grew from Surat, Madras, Calcutta.

The East India Company's main trading posts were Surat on the west coast, Fort St George at Madras and Fort William at Calcutta. Bombay took over from Surat as the western base, and by the late eighteenth century these posts had become the centres of the three presidencies of Bombay, Madras and Bengal.

Nagpur, Madurai, Pune and Delhi were inland cities that came under British control later and were never the Company's founding trading posts.

Answer: B

(A) is false, (B) is true.

Under Warren Hastings's judicial plan of 1772, each district had two courts: a criminal court (faujdari adalat) and a civil court (diwani adalat). The diwani adalat was the civil court, so statement A is false.

Statement B is true: the civil courts were presided over by the European district collectors, while the criminal courts were still under a qazi and a mufti, supervised by the collectors.