Subject: Modern History

December 26 was the birth anniversary of freedom fighter Udham Singh, who is known for avenging the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

Try this PYQ:

Q.The Ghadr (Ghadar) was a –

(a) Revolutionary association of Indians with headquarters at San Francisco.

(b) Nationalist organization operating from Singapore

(c) Militant organization with headquarters at Berlin

(d) Communist movement for India’s freedom with head-quarters at Tashkent

Who was Udham Singh?

• Singh, born in Sunam in Punjab’s Sangrur district in 1899, was a political activist who got associated with the Ghadar Party while in the US.
• The multi-ethnic party was believed to have communist tendencies and was founded by Sohan Singh Bhakna in 1913.
• Headquartered in California, the party was committed to the ouster of the British from India.
• In 1934, Singh made his way to London with the purpose of assassinating O’Dwyer, who in 1919 had been the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab.

Why did he consider O’Dwyer responsible for the massacre?

• O’Dwyer ordered Brigadier Reginald Dyer to Amritsar before the massacre; he was worried that there might be a second Indian mutiny, given the Hindu-Muslim unity and the demonstrations and strikes.
• Instead of Dyer, O’Dwyer is considered to be the actual perpetrator, since Dyer could not have executed it without his permission.
• On March 13, 1940, Udham Singh shot O’Dwyer at a meeting of the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society at Caxton Hill.
• He was immediately arrested and held in Brixton prison and was sentenced to death and was hanged on July 31, 1940, at Pentonville Prison.

A legend in India

• For avenging the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, Singh is seen by many as a hero. Gandhi, though, had famously called Singh’s revenge as an “act of insanity”.
• While being on trial, he referred to himself as Mohamed Singh Azad, to symbolize Hindu-Sikh-Muslim unity in the fight for India’s freedom.
• In 1974, his remains were sent back to India and he was cremated in his village in Sunam.
• There have been several demands in the past few years for Udham Singh’s statue to be installed in Jallianwala Bagh and the Parliament complex.
• In 2018, his statue was installed at Jallianwala Bagh during Baisakhi.
• Udham Singh Nagar district in Uttarakhand is named after the freedom fighter.

The Visva-Bharati University established by Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore has completed its centenary.

Do you remember the scheme of education by Gandhi Ji, called Nai Talim?

Visva-Bharati University

• The university was set up by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1921 at Santiniketan, Bolpur in West Bengal’s Birbhum district.
• It was founded by Rabindranath Tagore who called it Visva-Bharati, which means the communion of the world with India.
• Until independence, it was a college. Soon after independence, the institution was given the status of a central university in 1951 by an act of the Parliament.

Its establishment

• The origins of the institution date back to 1863 when Debendranath Tagore was given a tract of land by the zamindar of Raipur, the zamindar of Kirnahar.
• He set up an ashram at the spot that has now come to be called chatim tala at the heart of the town.
• The ashram was initially called Brahmacharya Ashram, which was later renamed Brahmacharya Vidyalaya.
• It was established with a view to encouraging people from all walks of life to come to the spot and meditate.
• In 1901 his youngest son Rabindranath Tagore established a co-educational school inside the premises of the ashram.

What makes it special?

• Rabindranath Tagore believed in open-air education and had reservations about any teaching done within four walls.
• This was due to his belief that walls represent the conditioning of the mind.
• Tagore did not have a good opinion about the Western method of education introduced by the British in India; on this subject, Tagore and Gandhiji’s opinion matched.
• So he devised a new system of learning in Visva-Bharati. He allowed students to continue their course till the student and his teacher both are satisfied.
• At Visva-Bharati, if a course demanded by a student is not available, then the university will design a course and bring teachers for that course.
• The university would not be bothered by the consideration of whether there is a demand for the course.

Union Home Minister has visited the native village of Bengali revolutionary Khudiram Bose in Midnapore, West Bengal.

One of the youngest leaders of the Independence movement, Khudiram Bose is highly regarded in Bengal for his fearless spirit. He was just 19 when he was hanged!

Who was Khudiram Bose?

• Bose was born in 1889 at a small village in Midnapore district.
• From his adolescent years, he was drawn towards revolutionary activities, being inspired by a series of public lectures given by Sri Aurobindo and Sister Nivedita, when the duo visited Midnapore in the early 1900s.
• In 1905, when Bengal was partitioned, he actively participated in protests against the British.
• At the age of 15, Bose joined the Anushilan Samiti, an early 20th-century organisation that propounded revolutionary activities in Bengal.
• Within a year, he had learnt how to make bombs and would plant them in front of police stations.

Revolutionary activities

• The deciding moment of Bose’s life came in 1908 when he along with another revolutionary, Prafulla Chaki was assigned the task of assassinating the district magistrate of Muzaffarpur, Kingsford.
• Before being transferred to Muzaffarpur, Kingsford was a magistrate in Bengal.
• His tortuous clamping down on revolutionaries had earned him the ire of this young group of nationalists who decided to hurl a bomb on him.

Kingsford’s assassination attempt

• There were multiple attempts to assassinate Kingsford.
• Initially, the plan was to throw the bomb in the court. However, after much deliberation, it was decided to avoid the court since a lot of civilians might get injured.
• Thereafter, on April 30, 1908, Bose threw a bomb on a carriage which he suspected was carrying Kingsford.
• But it turned out that it was carrying the wife and daughter of a barrister named Pringle Kennedy, who lost their lives, as Kingsford escaped.

Arrest and execution

• By midnight the entire town was aware of the incident and the Calcutta police were summoned to catch the duo.
• Bose was arrested from a railway station called Waini where he had reached the next morning after having walked 25 miles.
• Chaki on the other hand, killed himself before he could get arrested.
• As Bose was brought handcuffed to the police station at Muzaffarpur, the entire town crowded around to take a look at the teenaged boy.
• On July 13, 1908, he was finally sentenced to death.

Ireland is commemorating 100 years of the mutiny by a British Army battalion stationed in Jalandhar and Solan in Punjab in support of the Irish freedom movement.

Try this PYQ:

Q.With reference to the Indian freedom struggle, consider the following events:

1. Mutiny in Royal Indian Navy
2. Quit India Movement launched
3. Second Round Table Conference

What is the correct chronological sequence of the above events?

(a) 1-2-3

(b) 2-1-3

(c) 3-2-1

(d) 3-1-2

Irish mutiny in India

• The Connaught Rangers were raised during the British Army reforms of 1881.
• A British Army battalion belonging to the Connaught Rangers was the one in which Irish soldiers mutinied in Jalandhar and Solan in Punjab.
• Solan now lies in Himachal Pradesh but in 1920 it was part of Punjab. The Ist Battalion of the Connaught Rangers was stationed in Jalandhar since January 1920 after it had taken part in the First World War.

Why did the mutiny take place?

• The troops were protesting against the behaviour of the ‘Black and Tans’ during the Irish War of Independence (1919-22).
• The Black and Tan were members of the Irish constabulary which had been recruited from Great Britain and mostly comprised demobilized soldiers who had fought in the First World War.
• The Irish soldiers felt that they must rise in solidarity with their compatriots back in Ireland and hence in June and July 1920 some of the regiment’s men mutinied.
• Some of the mutinied soldiers were later put through a court-martial.

Who were the Black and Tans?

• They were constables recruited into the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) as reinforcements during the Irish War of Independence.
• Recruitment began in Great Britain in January 1920 and about 10,000 men enlisted during the conflict.
• The vast majority were unemployed former soldiers from Great Britain who fought in the First World War, although some were from Ireland.

Maharani Jindan Kaur, the last wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, is in news for the auction of some of her jewellery in London.

Try this PYQ:

Q.Consider the following Bhakti Saints:

1. Dadu Dayal
2. Guru Nanak
3. Tyagaraja

Who among the above was/were preaching when the Lodi dynasty fell and Babur took over?

(a) 1 and 3

(b) 2 only

(c) 2 and 3

(d) 1 and 2

Who was Rani Jindan (1817-1863)?

• She was the youngest wife of Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh empire, whose boundaries stretched from Kabul to Kashmir and the borders of Delhi.
• She was also the mother of Duleep Singh, the last ruler of the empire, who was raised by the British.
• Duleep Singh was five years old when he was placed on the throne in 1843 after the death of two heirs to Ranjit Singh. Since he was just a child, Maharani Jindan was made the regent.
• Not a rubber stamp, she took an active interest in running the kingdom, introducing changes in the revenue system.

Anglo-Sikh War and Jindan

• The British declared war on the Sikh empire in December 1845. After their victory in the first Anglo-Sikh war, they retained Duleep Singh as the ruler but imprisoned Jind Kaur.
• She escaped and arrived at Kathmandu on April 29, 1849, where she was given asylum by Jung Bahadur, the prime minister.
• She was given a house on the banks of river Bhagmati. She stayed in Nepal till 1860, where she continued to reach out to rebels in Punjab and Jammu-Kashmir.

PM has paid rich tributes to revolutionary freedom fighter Shyamji Krishna Varma on his birth anniversary.

Try this PYQ:

Q. The Ghadr (Ghadar) was a –

(a) Revolutionary association of Indians with headquarters at San Francisco.

(b) Nationalist organization operating from Singapore

(c) Militant organization with headquarters at Berlin

(d) Communist movement for India’s freedom with head-quarters at Tashkent

About Shyamji Krishna Varma

• SK Varma (1857–1930) was an Indian revolutionary fighter, a patriot, lawyer and journalist who founded the Indian Home Rule Society, India House and The Indian Sociologist in London.
• He was a noted scholar in Sanskrit and other Indian languages.
• He pursued a brief legal career in India and served as the Divan of a number of Indian princely states in India.
• He had, however, differences with Crown authority, was dismissed following a supposed conspiracy of local British officials at Junagadh and chose to return to England.
• An admirer of Dayanand Saraswati’s approach of cultural nationalism, and of Herbert Spencer, Krishna Varma believed in Spencer’s dictum: “Resistance to aggression is not simply justified, but imperative”.

This newscard is an excerpt from the original article published in TH.

UPSC may ask a question like this:

Q. In which Governor-General/Viceroy’s term was the famous cricketing ground ‘Eden Gardens’ was built?

Eden Gardens

• The first cricket club outside Britain was the Calcutta Cricket Club founded in 1792, and the first match was played 12 years later between the Etonians, senior civil servants and other company officials.
• In 1825 the club got a plot of land on the ground between Government House and Fort William to be used as a cricket ground.
• In 1841, the club was permitted to enclose the ground with a fence. But the Army at Fort William described the club as an “encroacher”.
• Cricket Club of Calcutta authorities then looked for an alternative ground and at ₹1,000, found a new one, fenced it and made it playable.
• In 1864, the land was laid out for a ground for Calcutta Cricket Club in the extended part of Eden Gardens.

Deriving its name

• Eden Gardens made its first appearance during the time of Governor-General Lord Auckland (1836-42).
• According to the achieves, a local landlord gifted this land to Lord Auckland and his sisters Emily Eden and Fanny Eden helped him save his third daughter from a deadly disease.