Modern History MCQs for UPSC Prelims

Correct answer: B - 2 only

N.M. Lokhande was a pioneer of the organised labour movement in British India and founded the Bombay Mill Hands Association, so statement 2 is correct. The Factories Act of 1881 dealt mainly with child labour and working hours, not with fixing wages or allowing trade unions, so statement 1 is wrong. Hence only statement 2 is correct.

Correct answer: C - To secure a fixed income for the Company

Under Lord Wellesley's Subsidiary Alliance the Company stationed troops maintained at the host state's expense (a), countered the perceived Napoleonic/French danger (b) and progressively established British paramountcy over Indian states (d); securing a fixed income for the Company was not an aim of the system, so (c) is the statement that does not apply and is the answer. The alliance worked by stripping rulers of independent foreign relations rather than by generating fixed revenue. Official and coaching keys agree the odd-one-out is the fixed-income clause.

Correct answer: C - Joining of peasant unrest to India's National Movement

The Champaran Satyagraha (1917) was Gandhi's first civil disobedience experiment in India, where indigo cultivators' grievances under the oppressive tinkathia system were linked to the wider national movement, so (c) is correct. Broad all-India participation of lawyers, students and women (a) and large-scale involvement of Dalit and tribal communities (b) became prominent in later movements like Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience, not specifically Champaran. There was no drastic decline in plantation cropping as a defining feature (d); the significance lay in mobilising peasant discontent into the freedom struggle.

Correct answer: C - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

'Songs from Prison' was a collection of English translations of ancient Indian devotional lyrics made by Mahatma Gandhi during his imprisonment, later edited and published by John S. Hoyland, so the correct answer is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Tilak is remembered for the Gita Rahasya, Nehru for works like the Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History, and Sarojini Naidu for her own poetry such as The Golden Threshold, none of which match this particular title, so the other three are wrong.

Correct answer: C - 2 and 3 only

The Ryotwari Settlement, in which revenue was collected directly from individual cultivators (ryots), was introduced in the Madras and Bombay presidencies by Alexander Read and Thomas Munro, so statements 2 and 3 are correct. Lord Cornwallis is associated with the Permanent (Zamindari) Settlement of Bengal, not the Ryotwari system, so statement 1 is wrong. Hence 2 and 3 only.

Correct answer: B - Indian National Congress did not want to include social reforms in its deliberations and decided to form a separate body for such a purpose

Option (b) is correct. The early Indian National Congress deliberately confined itself to political questions, fearing that contentious social reform issues would divide its ranks, so social reformers founded the Indian National Social Conference in 1887 as a separate body; it met annually in the same venue immediately after the Congress session. Option (a) is wrong because it was a national platform, not a union of Bengal groups. Option (c) is misleading: the Conference was founded by M. G. Ranade and Raghunath Rao; Behramji Malabari was a reformer associated with the age of consent campaign but not the co-founder named here. Since (b) is correct, option (d) is eliminated.