Subject: Modern History

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.

This newscard is an excerpt from an article originally published in TH.

Try this question from CSP 2016:

Q.A recent movie titled The Man Who Knew Infinity is based on the biography of-

(a) S. Ramanujan
(b) S. Chandrasekhar
(c) S. N. Bose
(d) C. V. Raman

Subramania Bharati

• Bharati was a Tamil writer, poet, journalist, Indian independence activist, social reformer and polyglot.
• Popularly known as “Mahakavi Bharathi”, he was a pioneer of modern Tamil poetry and is considered one of the greatest Tamil literary figures of all time.
• His numerous works included fiery songs kindling patriotism during the Indian Independence movement.

Literary works

• As a working journalist, Bharati necessarily employed prose to communicate, and his writings in Swadesamitran and India made an important contribution to Tamil political vocabulary.
• He wrote stories, commentaries, and was also the pioneer of column writing in Tamil.
• Active participation in the day-to-day politics of the nationalist movement notwithstanding, Bharati never lost sight of the future, the dream of how a free India should look like.
• Aspects of this dream form part of his fantasy story, Gnanaratham (The Chariot of Wisdom), written when he was still in his late 20s.

Four martyrs of Communist movement of Kerala will be added to the ‘Dictionary of Martyrs India’s Freedom Struggle (1857-1947)’, if an earlier review report to the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) is accepted.

Communist revolutionaries of Kerala

• The four who may make it to the list include Aboobacker and Chirukandan of Kayyur, “who walked to the gallows shouting Inquilab Zindabad and Communist Party Zindabad” and “died as brave communists,” as mentioned in the fifth volume of the dictionary.
• Abu of Mambram, a Communist and active partner in the nationalist and anti-imperialist movements, and Chattukutty, an active Communist cadre involved in the agitations for price control, wage hike, and relief to peasants, who were killed in the Tellichery police firing on September 15, 1940, would also qualify.
• The report had suggested the deletion of the martyrs of Punnapra-Vayalar, Karivelloor, and Kavumbayi agitations as they were rioters against the interim government headed by Jawaharlal Nehru.

Back2Basics: “Dictionary of Martyrs” Project

• The project for the compilation of “Dictionary of Martyrs” of India’s Freedom Struggle was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the uprising of 1857.
• In this dictionary, a martyr has been defined as a person who died or who was killed in action or in detention, or was awarded capital punishment while participating in the national movement for the emancipation of India.
• It includes ex-INA or ex-military personnel who died fighting the British.
• Information of about 13,500 martyrs has been recorded in these volumes.

Who are included?

• It includes the martyrs of 1857 Uprising, Jallianwala Bagh Massacre (1919), Non-Cooperation Movement (1920-22), Civil Disobedience Movement (1930-34), Quit India Movement (1942-44), Revolutionary Movements (1915-34), Kissan Movements, Tribal Movements, Agitation for Responsible Government in the Princely States (Prajamandal), Indian National Army (INA, 1943-45), Royal Indian Navy Upsurge (RIN, 1946), etc.

Five Volumes

• Volume 1: In this volume, more than 4400 martyrs of Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh have been listed.
• Volume 2: In this volume, more than 3500 martyrs of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Jammu & Kashmir have been listed.
• Volume 3: The number of martyrs covered in this volume is more than 1400. This volume covers the martyrs of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Sind.
• Volume 4: The numbers of martyrs covered in this volume is more than 3300. This volume covers the martyrs of Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Tripura.
• Volume 5: The number of martyrs covered in this volume is more than 1450. This volume covers the martyrs of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

In its centenary year, Aligarh Muslim University is planning to bury a time capsule, containing its history and achievements for posterity.

Try this PYQ:

Q.Consider the following:

1. Calcutta Unitarian Committee
2. Tabernacle of New Dispensation
3. Indian Reforms Association

Keshab Chandra Sen is associated with the establishment of which of the above?

(a) 1 and 3 only

(b) 2 and 3 only

(c) 3 only

(d) 1, 2 and 3

Aligarh Muslim University

• AMU is a public central university in Aligarh, India, which was originally established by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875.
• Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920, following the Aligarh Muslim University Act.
• It has three off-campus centres in Malappuram (Kerala), AMU Murshidabad centre (West Bengal), and Kishanganj Centre (Bihar).

Its establishment

• The university was established as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College in 1875 by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, starting functioning on 24 May 1875.
• The movement associated with Syed Ahmad Khan and the college came to be known as the Aligarh Movement, which pushed to realize the need for establishing a modern education system for the Indian Muslim populace.
• He considered competence in English and Western sciences necessary skills for maintaining Muslims’ political influence.
• Khan’s vision for the college was based on his visit to Oxford University and Cambridge University, and he wanted to establish an education system similar to the British model.

About Syed Ahmad Khan

• He was an Islamic pragmatist, reformer, and philosopher of nineteenth-century British India.
• Born into a family with strong debts to the Mughal court, Ahmed studied the Quran and Sciences within the court.
• He was awarded an honorary LLD from the University of Edinburgh in 1889.
• In 1838, Syed Ahmed entered the service of East India Company and went on to become a judge at a Small Causes Court in 1867, retiring from 1876.
• During the Indian Rebellion of 1857, he remained loyal to the British Raj and was noted for his actions in saving European lives.
• In 1878, he was nominated to the Viceroy’s Legislative Council.
• He supported the efforts of Indian political leaders Surendranath Banerjee and Dadabhai Naoroji to obtain representation for Indians in the government and civil services.

The final design of the Indian National Flag, hoisted by PM Nehru on August 16, 1947, at Red Fort, had a history of several decades preceding independence.

Note various personalities involved in the development of our National flag. It may be no wonder to accept a personality-based question on such topics.

Story of our National Flag: A timeline

(1) Public display for first time

• Arguably the first national flag of India is said to have been hoisted on August 7, 1906, in Kolkata at the Parsee Bagan Square (Green Park).
• It comprised three horizontal stripes of red, yellow and green, with Vande Mataram written in the middle.
• Believed to have been designed by freedom activists Sachindra Prasad Bose and Hemchandra Kanungo, the red stripe on the flag had symbols of the sun and a crescent moon, and the green strip had eight half-open lotuses.

(2) In Germany

• In 1907, Madame Cama and her group of exiled revolutionaries hoisted an Indian flag in Germany in 1907 — this was the first Indian flag to be hoisted in a foreign land.

(3) During the Home Rule Movement

• In 1917, Dr Annie Besant and Lokmanya Tilak adopted a new flag as part of the Home Rule Movement.
• It had five alternate red and four green horizontal stripes, and seven stars in the saptarishi configuration.
• A white crescent and star occupied one top corner, and the other had Union Jack.

(4) Final version by Pingali Venkayya

• The design of the present-day Indian tricolour is largely attributed to Pingali Venkayya, an Indian freedom fighter.
• He reportedly first met Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa during the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), when he was posted there as part of the British Indian Army.
• Years of research went into designing the national flag. In 1916, he even published a book with possible designs of Indian flags.
• At the All India Congress Committee in Bezwada in 1921, Venkayya again met Gandhi and proposed a basic design of the flag, consisting of two red and green bands to symbolise the two major communities, Hindus and Muslims.

(5) During Constituent Assembly

• On July 22, 1947, when members of the Constituent Assembly of India, the first item on the agenda was reportedly a motion by Pandit Nehru, about adopting a national flag for free India.
• It was proposed that “the National Flag of India shall be horizontal tricolour of deep saffron (Kesari), white and dark green in equal proportion.”
• The white band was to have a wheel in navy blue (the charkha being replaced by the chakra), which appears on the abacus of the Sarnath Lion Capital of Ashoka.