Practice: Peasant and Tribal Movements

(b) 1897 to 1941. Roughly forty-four years, in the Bijolia jagir of Mewar, against jagirdar Rao Krishna Singh. The longest peasant movement in modern India.

Why not the others: (a) 1913-1923 covers only the turning point and the second phase; picking it means remembering the famous events rather than the span.

(c) Fateh Karan Charan → Sadhu Sitaram Das → Vijay Singh Pathik → Manikya Lal Verma. The three phases run 1897-1915 (spontaneous, local), 1915-1923 (leaders of national standing) and on to 1941.

Why not the others: (a) puts Pathik first, which is the common error — he entered Bijolia in 1916, nineteen years after the movement began.

(d) Against a crop-share assessment, a fallow field yields the jagirdar nothing. Lata and kunta took a share of the actual crop, so refusing to sow withdraws the thing the whole system depends on. It is a strike, not a riot.

Why not the others: This is the chapter's central argument and it follows from the administration chapter's assessment methods. Begun's no-rent campaign is the same insight applied again.

(a) 84. Including the chanwari levy and the talwar bandhai. A tax list of that length is the lag-bag system seen from below.

Why not the others: (b) 29 is the Bishnoi rule count, (c) 26 the Bairath pillars and (d) 110 the Nagar coins in Calcutta — all real figures from elsewhere in this unit.

(b) Bhoop Singh Gurjar. Of Guthawali village, Bulandshahr. He was connected with Rash Behari Bose's network, was implicated in the Lahore conspiracy case of 1915 and took the new name after it, entering Bijolia in 1916.

Why not the others: The others are his co-leaders. The point of the question is that a revolutionary under an assumed name arrived to organise a peasant movement — the agrarian and revolutionary movements were not separate.

(c) At Wardha in 1919, moving to Ajmer in 1920. By Vijay Singh Pathik with Arjun Lal Sethi and Kesari Singh Barhath.

Why not the others: The Wardha-then-Ajmer detail matters: a body organising against princely states could not be headquartered inside one, and Ajmer was the only directly-administered British ground in the region.

(d) A "Bolshevik settlement". A settlement between a jagirdar and his own cultivators, refused by the paramount power in that language, five years after the Russian revolution.

Why not the others: It is the sharpest illustration in the unit of paramountcy's real posture: internal administration was left to the states, but not the right to settle with peasants on terms London would find alarming.

(a) G. C. Trench. The peasants boycotted its proceedings, insisting it camp at Raita instead.

Why not the others: (b) declared the Marwar Praja Mandal unlawful, (c) commanded at the Eki firing of March 1922, (d) at Dabi. Four British or state officers, four different episodes.

(b) Roopa and Kripa ji. Troops encircled the village and opened fire.

Why not the others: (a) are Maldeo's commanders at Sammel in 1544; (d) are among the Kudan dead of 1935. Naming the right dead for the right episode is what these questions test.

(c) Fixed tax rates, withdrew many taxes and abolished begar. It is described as the first peasant agreement in Mewar.

Why not the others: Leadership passed to Ram Narayan Chaudhary after Pathik's arrest on 10 September 1923, three months before the settlement.

(d) 17 November 1913. On Mangarh Hill, at the Rajasthan-Gujarat border, on Bhils gathered under Govind Guru for his annual meeting.

Why not the others: Each wrong option is another firing in this chapter: Dabi, Neemuchana and the Eki firing. The set of four dates is the question.

(a) Dabi, in Bundi, on 2 April 1923. He was hoisting a flag at a gathering when police under S. P. Ikram Hussain opened fire.

Why not the others: (b) Neemuchana is Alwar, 1925. The two are commonly merged because both are firings on peasant gatherings in the 1920s.

(b) Neemuchana, 14 May 1925. Writing in Young India, he judged it worse than Jallianwala Bagh. The peasants had gathered at a Kisan Sabha in Alwar against increased exactions.

Why not the others: The phrase is the identifier, and it attaches to Neemuchana alone.

(c) They circulate widely and are not verified. The figures come from tribal narrative, contemporary journalism and later accounts rather than counted records.

Why not the others: The chapter goes further on Mangarh: about 1,500 attaches in the sources to the SIZE OF THE GATHERING — the Bhagats assembled for the annual meeting — so the familiar "over 1,500 killed" may be that same number moved from crowd to casualties.

(d) submitted a report, to Minister of State for Culture Arjun Ram Meghwal at the IGNCA. The PIB release says the report carries recommendations, and quotes the minister saying we will positively take forward the report.

Why not the others: (a) and (b) are the trap, and they are wrong twice over. Under the AMASR Act, 1958, a monument is declared of national importance by the Central Government by notification — the NMA recommends and has no power to declare. So a headline reading NMA DECLARES is wrong about the act and about the body.

(a). A report was submitted in July 2022 and Mangarh Dham ki Gaurav Gatha was held on 1 November 2022. Neither is a declaration, and no notification was located.

Why not the others: (c) treats an anniversary programme as conferring a legal status, which is the commonest version of this error. A recommendation is not a declaration and a commemoration is not a notification — the same rule that separates an award announcement from its conferral. If an option asserts the declaration without a notification date, treat it as unsupported.

(b) four states — Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. The site itself is on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border, in Banswara district.

Why not the others: (a) and (d) drop states from a phrase that is quoted verbatim in the PIB record, which is exactly how this gets set. Govind Guru spent the last years of his life on the Gujarat side, and his death anniversary falls on 30 October.

(c). A PIB release of 6 July 2022 records the minister stating that 1500 Bhil tribal freedom fighters were brutally killed by the British army on 17th November 1913. The release gives no source, no enumeration and no method.

Why not the others: (b) understates it — the figure is the one the Government of India uses. (a) overstates it. An official assertion raises a figure's standing without supplying its evidence, and the honest position is to report both facts. The date, place and circumstances are secure and unaffected.

(d) 1883. Reported as established in Sirohi, to unite the Bhils and promote morality, self-reliance and confidence. 1858 is his birth year, at Bedsa in Dungarpur, into a Banjara family.

Why not the others: (a) 1913 is Mangarh and (b) 1910 the year the 33 demands were placed before the British. All three are real dates in his life.

(a) Give up alcohol, meat and gambling, tend a dhuni and hoist a nishan. The ritual form was borrowed from the Shaivite Dashanami Panth.

Why not the others: The visibility is the point: a household with a fire kept burning and a flag flying is enrolled, and that is what turned a reform movement into something a state could count and fear.

(b) Banjara. The organiser of the largest Bhil movement in western India was not himself a Bhil.

Why not the others: (a) is the assumption almost everyone makes, and it is the reason the question is worth asking.

(c) The Eki, or Bhomat Bhil, movement. 1885-1963, uniting Bhil and Garasia communities on the Rajasthan-Gujarat border in the 1920s.

Why not the others: (a) is Govind Guru's, and the two tribal leaders are routinely swapped.

(d) Agreed to 18, and his officers implemented none. He refused those on forest rights, begar and the killing of wild pigs; the eighteen agreed were then not carried out, and Tejawat intensified the revolt.

Why not the others: The movement was defeated by agreement followed by non-implementation, which is a different and more corrosive thing than refusal, and the clearest evidence that the states' internal authority went unchecked.

(a) The Mewar Bhil Corps, under Major H. G. Sutton. A paramilitary force. A second episode followed at Bhula and Balohiya on 8 May 1922, and the Eki movement collapsed by the end of that year.

Why not the others: The other three options are the forces at Neemuchana, Dabi and Kudan respectively.

(b) Whether a Jat bridegroom might ride a horse to his bride's house. A ceremonial act asserting a standing that Rajputs were not prepared to concede.

Why not the others: It is the most instructive fact in the chapter. In a jagirdari order, who pays what and who may ride a horse are the same question about rank, so a movement about cesses ignited over a wedding procession.

(c) Killed four Jats and arrested 104. Preceded by Khuri on 27 March and Bhaironpura on 22 April.

Why not the others: (a) 363 is Khejarli, 1730; (b) about 800 is the circulating and unverified Neemuchana figure. Kudan's four and 104 are the recorded ones.

(d) Chandmal Surana. Jai Narayan Vyas reorganised and renamed it the Marwar Hitkarini Sabha in 1923.

Why not the others: (a) is the near-miss and the answer most sources give, because Vyas is the more famous name. The founding and the reorganisation are five years apart.

(a) Association-based and state-wide, working partly by petition. Its first campaign, in 1923, was against the export of female livestock; the state responded with violence and relented on 15 August 1924.

Why not the others: That association form is what becomes the Praja Mandal, and Jai Narayan Vyas is the man who carries it there.

(b) 1924 and 1930. The Meena Kshatriya Mahasabha was established to resist it in 1933.

Why not the others: 1924 and 1933 are frequently merged, with the Mahasabha wrongly dated to 1924 — the year the Act arrived, not the year the resistance organised.

(c) Resigned the post of chowkidar. Restrictions were finally withdrawn in 1952.

Why not the others: The chowkidar post was the mechanism by which a "criminal tribe" was made to police itself under supervision. Refusing the office was refusing the classification.

(d) The Mer, Mina and Bhil tribes — and the word to hold onto is first. Before Bijolia, before the Praja Mandals, before 1857.

Why not the others: Each is a real movement arriving later. The reason the board's sentence matters is chronological: it puts the tribal risings at the head of the sequence rather than treating them as a sidebar to the peasant movements, and an answer that opens with Bijolia has started in the middle.

(a). The men who had just been defeated were made into a battalion.

Why not the others: Rebellion answered by recruitment is the most economical instrument of colonial control there is — it removes the fighters, pays them, and turns the frontier into a garrison. And note where the headquarters went: Beawar, which the 1857 chapter lists as one of the six cantonments and as the town British officials fled to from Nasirabad. The battalion raised from a defeated tribe in 1822 is part of the military furniture of 1857. The sequence before it: 1818 F. Wilder's agreement with Jhak and other villages; March 1819 his punitive campaign with soldiers from Nasirabad; early 1820 risings against the police posts; November 1820 the massacre of the British police at Jhak; and suppression by three battalions of the British Army with the combined forces of Mewar and Marwar by the end of January 1821.

(b). The Bhils were soldiers — regularly and irregularly employed in the armies of the state and of the jagirdars. A treaty that dissolved those armies removed a livelihood, and a tribe that had been paid to fight was left with the skill and without the wage.

Why not the others: All four are the board's causes, so this is a judgement question, not a recall one. Put (b) beside the Merwara Battalion of 1822 and the pattern is exact: the same colonial settlement disbanded Bhil soldiers in Mewar and enlisted Mer soldiers at Beawar. The board also describes the Bhils as an originally peaceful tribe leading an independent life until the British arrived, revolting only after 1818 — framing the risings as a response rather than a disposition.

(c) The size of the gathering. Military forces fired indiscriminately with machine guns, and the board gives the dead only as "hundreds".

Why not the others: (a) is a claim this site itself carried as unverified, and the board's account is what settles the reading of the number. Gandhi described the incident as more disgusting than the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and termed it deep and widespread Dyeredom; the government then bowed to the farmers on revenue and the agitation ended. The rent rise was Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar's in 1923-24.

(d). The princely government banned killing them; the farmers agitated from 1921; and eventually the government allowed them to be killed.

Why not the others: (a) came later — the rent rise of 1923-24 — and produced Neemuchana. The pig grievance sounds trivial and is not: it is the first stage of the same movement, and it shows a princely state conceding on a game law years before it conceded on revenue.

(a). About 500 farmers gathered at Bharatpur on 23 November 1931; Bhoji Lumberdar was arrested that same month and the movement ended.

Why not the others: A revenue official leading a revenue protest is the detail to carry. The board opens the entry by noting that the condition of the farmers was good — ninety-five per cent of the land was directly under state control, and the five main cultivating castes, Brahmins, Jats, Gurjars, Ahirs and Meos, stood more or less alike. Where the state holds the land directly, the man who collects for it is also the man who knows exactly how much a new settlement takes — and Bharatpur is the one Rajasthan rising led from inside the administration.

(b) Chaudhary Yasin Khan, under whom the farmers stopped paying rent on the kharif crop.

Why not the others: (a) Bilgrami is the state's answer, not the movement's leader — a Muslim member brought onto the state council to satisfy the Meos, a communal appointment rather than a settlement. The movement intensified anyway. In 1937 a special committee under Bilgrami investigated, and on its report land revenue and other taxes were remitted and the social and religious grievances addressed. A tenurial grievance was met first with a religious appointment and only afterwards with a revenue remedy — and the second worked where the first did not.

(c) Nanak Bhil and Devlal Gurjar.

Why not the others: (b) Nainuram was the leader, not a martyr — a committed worker of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh who led the Barad region's movement from April 1922, Barad bordering Bijolia. The farmers of Bundi paid about twenty-five kinds of tax and forced labour. The movement lapsed by 1923 partly because the farmers had stopped getting guidance from the Rajasthan Seva Sangh, revived in 1936, and on 5 October 1938 a conference of 500 representatives of Gurjar and Mina farmers from 90 villages met in the temple of Hudeshwar Mahadev at Hindoli and drew up a demand charter.

(d) Jaipur State, whose original centres it gives as Shekhawati, Toravati, Sambhar, Sikar and Khetri thikanas in the west of the state, the movement being kicked off in the Sikar thikana.

Why not the others: This reframing is examinable. Sikar was a Jaipur thikana, not an independent state, and an answer that treats Shekhawati as free-standing has lost the constitutional relation the whole dispute turned on. The sequence: 1922, the new Raoraja Kalyan Singh of Sikar raises the land tax by 25 to 50 per cent and breaks his promise of a waiver; Ramnarayan Chaudhary and Hari Brahmachari arrive; the affair is raised in the Central Assembly and the House of Commons; the Raoraja surveys with the small zarib and adds two annas per bigha as ijafa; October 1925 the Jat Sabha meets at Bagad; 1932 on Vasant Panchami the Jat Mahasabha at Jhunjhunu draws sixty thousand Jat farmers; September 1933 Deshraj convenes Palsana; January 1934 the Mahayagya.

(a) An elephant. He also arrested Chandrabhan, secretary of the Jat Sabha.

Why not the others: The elephant is not a decorative detail. This chapter argues that Shekhawati ignited over whether a Jat bridegroom might ride a horse. Here the same dispute recurs at the level of an institution — who may ride what, in whose procession. Two refusals of a mount, nine years apart, both producing a movement, and saying so is worth more in a Mains answer than either episode alone.

(a) R explains A: against a crop share, a fallow field yields the jagirdar exactly nothing.

(d) R is true and makes A false. Chandrasen was in the hills six years before Haldighati and died five years before Pratap. The inversion is why he is called the forgotten hero of Marwar.

(a) R is precisely A. Agreement followed by inaction is more corrosive than refusal, and shows what unchecked internal authority looked like.

(a) R is the reason for A. The universally quoted "over 1,500 killed" may be the same number moved from crowd to casualties.

(a) R explains A. Treating Shekhawati as purely economic misses why it started where it did.

(d) R is true and A false: it was founded as the Marudhar Hitkarini Sabha in 1918 by Chandmal Surana. Vyas's association begins five years later.

(a) R gives A its force. Twenty-six thousand resignations in a day is a community declining the role the state had assigned it.

(a) Four firings across twenty-two years, in four districts, on four different communities. Keeping them apart by year is the whole task.

(a) B and C are the pair most often swapped, both being tribal leaders active in the same decades on the same border.

(a) The names are secure where the totals are not, which is why this page asks about people and not about numbers. C belongs to the religious life chapter, 167 years before Bijolia.

(a) A and C are the pair that gets merged, with the Mahasabha wrongly dated to 1924. Restrictions were withdrawn in 1952.

(b) The Maharana of Mewar. The farmers rose against the Maharana and sent their own representatives to have their grievances redressed; the grievances were enquired into and the ruler conceded to remove some of them. The Bhilwara District Gazetteer calls the episode "the first agrarian agitation in the region", which is what makes 1897 the start of anything.

Why not the others: (a) is the assumption, and getting it wrong loses the shape of the next forty years. The cultivators go over the thikana's head to the durbar, the durbar makes an enquiry, and the enquiry produces a partial concession the thikana then declines to honour — that cycle, not a single revolt, is what makes Bijolia forty-four years long.

(c) Abandon their land and begin migrating to Gwalior, against the Rao's refusal to withdraw the new tax. They were actually loading their carts when the Rao came in person and promised to withdraw it.

Why not the others: (a) and (b) are the weapons of 1913, ten years later, and the two protests are routinely merged into one. A mass departure is the same weapon as a fallow field aimed one step earlier: it removes not the crop but the cultivator.

(d) The investiture due, the payment made on succession. In 1913 the farmers petitioned the Rao not to levy an extra tax on them to meet the one lakh of rupees he owed the Mewar Durbar as talwar bandhai. The Rao was passing his own succession bill down to his cultivators.

Why not the others: (a) is the version in circulation and it has the direction of the payment backwards. An option reading "jagirdar X imposed talwar bandhai in year Y" is describing a due the jagirdar himself owed upwards. (c) is bigori, a Marwar term.

(a) Six taxes out of eighty-four. The Rao ignored the petition; the peasants resolved not to plough Bijolia's land but to plough the Khalsa land of Mewar instead; no land of Bijolia was cultivated that year and it yielded neither revenue nor corn. Under that pressure the Rao withdrew six taxes, imprisoned some leaders and banished others.

Why not the others: (b) is a figure attached in preparation material to the settlement of 1922, and it is in no state record. The famous number in this chapter is 84. The useful number is 6 — it is what a whole year of non-cultivation was worth at the bargaining table.

(b) Bairisal, the board that "also started organising political activities". Its offshoot was the Uparmal Sewa Samiti, whose volunteers were trained to assist the leaders; the training ran through a school and the Vidya Pracharini Sabha; and the newspaper was Uparmal Ka Danka, founded by Pathik, through which the news of the Bijolia cultivators reached national leaders. In 1922 the Sarpanch was Moti Chand and the secretary Narain Patel.

Why not the others: (a) Umaji Ka Khera, four kilometres from Bijolia, was a second centre, not the board's seat. Uparmal is the plateau's own name, and naming the body after the plateau rather than the jagir claimed a region rather than a village. A school, a volunteer corps, a newspaper and an elected panchayat is not a protest but a parallel administration, which is why the thikana could neither buy the movement off nor disperse it.

(c). Pathik met Bal Gangadhar Tilak at Amritsar and put the Bijolia case to him; Tilak moved the resolution, Kelkar seconded it, and it was then dropped, because Madan Mohan Malaviya gave an assurance that he would personally press the Maharana of Mewar to grant concessions.

Why not the others: (a) is the version in circulation, and the record is narrower and more interesting. The resolution was moved by the most senior man in the room and withdrawn on a promise of private intercession. Congress did not refuse Bijolia; it chose quiet diplomacy over a public resolution, and the cultivators got neither for another three years. The pressure came instead from the press: Pratap of Kanpur, Abhyudaya of Allahabad, Bharat Mitra of Calcutta and Maratha of Poona — four papers in four cities, none of them in Rajputana. In 1918 seven persons from Bijolia attended the Thirty-third Session at Delhi and were arrested without warrant on their return, and Mahadev Desai visited Bijolia the same year and gave a very favourable report to Gandhi, who expressed his willingness to lead the movement if the situation required.

(d) 5 February 1922. For the paramount power, Mr Holland, Agent to the Governor-General, Mr Ogilvie, his Secretary, and Mr Wilkinson, Resident in Mewar; for the Durbar, Prabhash Chandra Chatterji and Bihari Lal; for the Rao, Kamdar Hira Lal, Fauzdar Tej Singh and Master Zalim Singh; for the cultivators, Ram Narain Chaudhary, Manikya Lal Verma, Sarpanch Moti Chand and Secretary Narain Patel. The agreement prepared in May 1922 was signed and adhered to faithfully, and the farmers still did not begin paying arrears or current revenue.

Why not the others: (a) is the date and the figure that circulate, and the state record carries neither. (b) 22 July 1922 is the day the Resident met the Rao, who dismissed his Kamdar and appointed a new one. Agreement and non-implementation were running in both directions at once: in Mewar the state agreed and the officers did not implement, at Bijolia the cultivators signed and did not pay, and both sides had learned that a signature settles nothing.

(a) Teach three girls to read and write, alongside the collective pledge "to observe the truth and non-violence, to wear khadi, to abstain from intoxicants and to maintain the Panchayat at all costs".

Why not the others: (b) and (c) belong to Govind Guru's Bhagat programme, which is where they get borrowed from. The literacy pledge is the line worth an essay: a peasant panchayat under siege made each member personally responsible for a girl's reading, which is the sharpest available answer to the idea that these were movements about money. In 1928, with Pathik prohibited from entering Mewar, the movement passed to Seth Jamnalal Bajaj, who deputed Haribhau Upadhyaya, and it weakened because the new leaders were not acquainted with the pulse of the peasants.

(b) Revenue Commissioner of Mewar State, and he sat as a member of the commission rather than as its sole author. The commission halted at Begun from 13 June to 13 July 1923; the Dhakar peasantry sent in their petitions; it framed its findings and sent copies to the Panchas, who refused to accept the copies and refused to comply with the decisions.

Why not the others: (a) and (c) are the British officers of the February 1922 talks, Wilkinson and Holland. Bijolia produced four separate enquiries before it produced a settlement, and the first of them — Bindu Lal Bhattacharya, Afzal Khan and Amar Singh Ranawat — gave no verdict on the main issue of begar and the other taxes, securing only the release of the cultivators, Manikya Lal Verma and Sadhu Sita Ram among them. An enquiry that releases the prisoners and says nothing about the tax ends an agitation without ending a grievance.

(c) Govindpura. Having failed to get its findings accepted, the commission turned into a collecting party, began realising taxes and revenue, and proceeded against the peasants of Govindpura with Thikana police and State troops. The village was besieged, the peasants beat the drum, swarms of Dhakars, men and women, fell upon the troops, and the troops opened fire. 485 Dhakars were arrested, and they came from 45 different villages.

Why not the others: (a) Raita is where the peasants insisted the commission should camp instead; (d) Rawarda is one of the thikanas of the June 1922 rising. A firing at one village that produces prisoners from forty-five is not a local riot; it is the reach of the panchayat network made visible by the state's own arrest register.

(d). The Bhilwara gazetteer, working from Home Department Political Branch files, records the troops killing one man, Rupa Dhakar of Jainagar. The Chittorgarh gazetteer, describing the same day, records many wounded and names no dead at all. Two named martyrs are the received account; one named death is the state record.

Why not the others: (b) belongs to the figures that circulate for Neemuchana and is in no state record. (c) reads silence as proof. The direction of the first blow is disputed in the same way: both gazetteers describe the peasants attacking the troops before the troops fired, while the circulating account has troops encircling a village and opening fire on it. These are two accounts of who moved first, and a candidate should know the state's version exists.

(a) Deposed him, with the estate placed under the Court of Wards, and his agreement — the one the British Resident called a "Bolshevik Agreement" — cancelled. A jagirdar who settled with his own peasants was removed from his own jagir for doing it, and the durbar and the paramount power acted together to remove him. The 1818 settlement left internal administration to the states; it did not leave them free to make peace on terms the Residency disliked.

Why not the others: The rising of June 1922 had been against the Rao and the Thakurs of Rawarda, Semlia and Charchha, with cultivators arrested, their houses burnt, cattle driven off, crops crushed and families beaten. At Rawarda, two women whose husbands were away, Ratni Bhilni and Udi Malini, were beaten mercilessly by being hung upside down, and were freed only after more than a hundred cultivators sat in dharna and satyagraha at the jagirdar's residence.

(b). He was prosecuted at both Udaipur and Bundi, jailed at Udaipur, released in 1928 and then externed from Mewar — which is why the movement had to be handed to Jamnalal Bajaj in that year.

Why not the others: (a) April 1927 is the release date in circulation, and it is not what either gazetteer records. (d) Kumbhalgarh is where Manikya Lal Verma was interned in 1932-33; Verma was arrested three times in 1927 and again in 1931, having already been imprisoned in 1919 and 1923.

(c) The Mewar Bhil Corps, requisitioned after the Maharawal, apprehending danger, asked for British assistance. A corps raised from the Bhils in April 1841 was one of the forces sent against Bhils seventy-two years later, which turns the argument that the British answered rebellion with recruitment into a matter of the state's own record rather than inference.

Why not the others: (a) the Merwara Battalion was raised from the Mers in 1822 and belongs to Ajmer-Merwara. (b) and (d) appear in preparation lists of the Mangarh deployment and are not in the state's account of it. The sequence before the siege is examinable in itself: the armed Bhils assembled on Mangarh, a hillock on the borders of Banswara and Sunth states, seized the sepoys sent by the Sunth State, attacked the fort of Partabgarh in Sunth Rampur and looted the village of Bhamri in Banswara.

(d). The combined forces of the British and the local rulers attacked, and the state's own district record declines a total and gives a counted number of prisoners instead. The prisoner figure is the only counted number anyone has. Five days earlier, on 12 November, a deputation sent by the insurgents with a statement of grievances met the British officer, and negotiations did not take place.

Why not the others: (a) is an official assertion without evidence — a PIB release of 6 July 2022 quoting the Minister of State for Culture, with no source, enumeration or method given — and the same figure attaches elsewhere to the size of the assembly at the annual meeting. (b) is a counter-figure that circulates and appears in no located record. Nine hundred people were taken alive off that hill, and a government that counted its prisoners to the hundred did not publish its dead. That silence is the fact to write about, and it is stronger than any of the totals.

(a) Transportation for life. Thirty prisoners, including Govindgiri and Punja, were tried by a special tribunal after being taken to Ahmedabad; five were acquitted; Govindgiri was sentenced to be hanged, Punja to transportation for life and the remaining twenty-three to three years' rigorous imprisonment. On appeal, Govindgiri and Punja were both given transportation for life and the twenty-three six months' rigorous imprisonment.

Why not the others: (b) is the version in wide circulation and it is wrong twice over. The reduction was made by a court on appeal, not by an administrative decision taken out of fear of the movement, and the sentence was transportation for life, not a fixed term of twenty years. That the other twenty-three fell from three years to six months on the same appeal says something about the quality of the tribunal's original findings. A release year is not settled at all: the Banswara record says he "is said to have died in jail", while the PIB release of 1 November 2022 has him spending the last years of his life in the Gujarat portion of the region, with a death anniversary of 30 October. Treat any option that supplies a release year with suspicion.

(b) About 1905. The record reads "a sanyasi, named Govind set up a 'Samp-Sabha' about 1905 A.D.", its object local self-government, with Bhils, Minas and others of the hill tracts rallying to him, intoxicating drugs and foreign articles boycotted, and an uprising against the Maharao of Sirohi suppressed in 1908 — an episode five years before Mangarh and in another state.

Why not the others: (a) 1883 is the date in circulation, and the Dungarpur record makes it very hard to hold. He was Govindgiri Gopalia, a Banjara, earlier known simply as Govinda; he lost his wife and his children in the Chhappaniya famine of 1899-1900, left Dungarpur for Gujarat, married again, met Rajgiri Gosain there and became Govind Giri, and only then returned to Bedasa to light his dhuni on Chhani Dungari and plant his neji. An 1883 founding requires the Samp Sabha to have been built sixteen years before the event that, on the state's own account, set him on the path. (d) 1858 is his birth year.

(c). Rakhwali was a protection or watch tax and bolai a safety tax taken for the security of the passes and roads, both levied by the gametis, the hereditary headmen of the pals, who were grouped under a naik commanding the defence network and summoned the community by a shrill cry, the kulki. James Tod moved to abolish both, and that decree, coming in the same years as the disbanding of the native armies, is identified as a strike at Bhil identity and a significant impetus for the revolts of 1818.

Why not the others: (a) is the received story and it is backwards. The British did not begin taxing the Bhils; they stopped the Bhils taxing others. A community holding a recognised fiscal right over the roads was reduced, in a single administrative decision, to a community with nothing to sell but its labour, and losing the power to levy is a different and larger injury than being levied on. The same tax explains 1844: the Banswara rising of that year was precipitated by the British prohibition of the rakhwali the Bhils had long taken from neighbouring Malwa villages, on which pretext they attacked Mokheri village in Malwa, where the Mukhia's brother was killed.

(d). The thanedar and his constables were killed in the attack on Barapal. The Bhils then blocked communications and attacked the marks of state authority under leaders named as Neema Gameti, Khema and Joyta, and the state burnt Bhil villages and deployed troops. Negotiations were opened by Shyamaldas, the Maharana's personal secretary and the author of the Vir Vinod, and the Bhils put three demands: stop interfering in their social and religious affairs, stop the census, and withdraw the oppressive taxes. An agreement was reached in April 1881, the state conceding some of them; the British were displeased; and in March 1882 the Bhils revolted again.

Why not the others: (a) is the version in circulation, with a different officer and a different village. (b) and (c) are causes rather than the trigger, alongside the division of Udaipur into eleven Nizamats in 1878, the customs checkpoints and the new taxes on tobacco, salt, opium and liquor with a ban on traditional distillation, the Vilayati Pathan moneylenders who seized Bhil children against unpaid loans, the famines of 1868-69 and 1877-78, Pandit Raghunath Rao's misappropriation and atrocities, and the suppression of dakan. The census point deserves a line of its own: the most ordinary act of a modern state was read here as preparation for extermination, which is not superstition but an accurate reading of what enumeration had preceded elsewhere, and the same instinct that made the Criminal Tribes Act legible to the Meenas forty years later.

(a). The sentence is "It is said that even women and children were shot dead, 1,800 men were killed and 600 houses burned and razed to the ground", and it attaches to the May 1922 uprising in Rohera tahsil that proved abortive and, with British assistance, was ruthlessly crushed.

Why not the others: (c) understates it and (b) overstates it, which is the same pair of errors the Mangarh figure invites. A hedged figure in an official publication is not a counted record, and the gazetteer's own "it is said" is why it is not asserted — but a candidate should know the number is in the state's book. The same record treats Tejawat as the beginning of politics in that state: "The first political agitation was organised by Shri Moti Lal Tejawat in the year 1922", and he organised the Bhils and Girasias of Sirohi to the extent that the State and the jagirdars got alarmed.

(b) Siwaya. To smash the organisation the jagirdars set fire to four villages, Bhula, Valoria and Siwaya among them, and all those villages were resettled later. Valoria is the place given elsewhere as Balohiya, so a list of the Eki sites that stops at Bhula and Balohiya is short by one. Note also the agency: the burning is attributed to the jagirdars, not to the state army and the Mewar Bhil Corps, and who burnt the villages is not settled.

Why not the others: (a) Rohera is the tahsil of the May 1922 uprising, not one of the burnt villages. One place-name warning belongs beside this. A widely set question asks where the Mewar Bhil Corps fired on Tejawat's followers on 7 March 1922, with "Pal" as the key. Pal is the ordinary Bhil word for a settlement, the unit governed by a gameti, and a place-name answer that is also a common noun for "village" is exactly the kind that decays in transmission. The date, the Mewar Bhil Corps and Major H. G. Sutton are secure; the place-name is not.

(c). Mr C. U. Wills, a retired ICS officer, was appointed Officer on Special Duty to examine and report on the status of the Thikanedars of Panchpana Singhana, including Khetri, and of Sikar, Khandela, Udaipurwati, Patao and Uniara. The word is real, and it names one group among several.

Why not the others: (a) is the composition given in preparation material — usually Nawalgarh, Mandawa, Dhundalod, Bisau and Malsisar, with 75 per cent of Shekhawati's land — and it is not verified. The same record puts the Shekhawati chronology differently from most notes: new taxes on the cultivators of Sikar in 1924; a 1925 compromise under which the Jat cultivators promised to pay jakat in proportion to the harvest, which broke down when the authorities enhanced the land revenue; a 1927 determination not to pay the enhancement; and the 1935 flare-up, with a Jat Mahayagya at Sikar, hundreds arrested, leaders externed and police firing on cultivators with casualties. The 1935 firing sequence is agreed on all accounts; the 1922 tax rise and the January 1934 Mahayagya are contested. The record also names "Capt. Webb, who was Senior Officer of Sikar Thikana", whose name "became a synonym of repression".

(d). Relations broke down over Jaipur's interference in Sikar's internal administration and worsened when Jaipur tried to remove Kunwar Hardayal Singh, the only son and heir of Rao Raja Kalyan Singh, from his father's custody and send him to England. The Rao Raja was repeatedly summoned to Jaipur and humiliated, an attempt was made at Sikar to arrest him by force, and several thousand armed Rajputs, Qayamkhanis and others assembled in the fortress. In July 1938 Jaipur police fired at a train, killing a few Rajputs and injuring several, including children.

Why not the others: A commission under Col. Gillan was boycotted by the townspeople, who held that such a commission should be appointed by the Government of India and not by Jaipur; the Sikar Public Committee was formed to vindicate the people and their Rao Raja, demanding responsible government under the aegis of the Rao Raja; and Seth Jamnalal Bajaj mediated twice, the second time after Jaipur gave the town a 48-hour notice to open its gates. The episode settles the constitutional point beyond dispute: a state cannot have its ruler declared insane and its lands taken into the Court of Wards by a neighbour. It also shows the Jats and the Rajputs of Sikar on the same side within four years of Kudan — a movement that looks like a caste confrontation in 1935 looks like a town against its overlord in 1938, and an answer carrying only the first is carrying half the decade.

(a) 1923. Its base was theocratic and it turned political only later, drawing inspiration from the Anjuman-i-Ahrar of Bombay and Delhi, the Jamiat-ul-Ulema bodies of Ambala and Badaun, the Rajputana Muslim League at Ajmer and the All India Muslim Conference.

Why not the others: (b) 1932 is the year the Anjuman changed what it did, not the year it was founded. That year it organised two demonstrations in March and April; a meeting in the Jama Masjid at Alwar on 22 April 1932 put up 18 demands; a further meeting on 29 April told volunteers to be prepared at all times; and meetings at Kishangarh, Ramgarh and Nuh saw Muslim lumberdars resolve to refuse security bonds and Meos advised to pay no interest on loans. The state's first answer was a commission under Rao Bahadur Raja Durjan Singh, jagirdar of Jaoli, with Raja Ghazzanfar Ali and Lala Ganeshi Lal, which the Meos refused to appear before on a resolution of no confidence passed at Ferozepur Jhirka; its second answer was money, a remission of Rs 3,10,000 announced at a public durbar on 12 December 1932.

(b). Wyllie was appointed Prime Minister of Alwar in 1933, taking over the administration after the agrarian trouble of 1931-32 over rent rates. He did no field work, revising the assessment in consultation with local officers, and his rates were announced in 1934, bringing the demand to, and in places below, the level of the earlier O'Dwyer assessment. A seven-lakh cut imposed by a British Prime Minister installed over the ruler's administration is a measurable result, and it confirms the structural point in the hardest possible form: the Meo cultivators could not move their Maharaja, so the outcome arrived when the paramount power replaced him with its own man.

Why not the others: (d) came first and did not work. Non-payment spread, the roads between Tijara and Kishangarh were cut, and at Govindgarh troops who had arrested about 25 Meos were surrounded in the Nizamat building by a crowd put at 30,000, with fire exchanged. The Government of India then sent its own troops, placed the four Meo Nizamats of Ramgarh, Lachhmangarh, Tijara and Kishangarh under a special Commissioner, and declared martial law. The same record states what it all finally cost the ruler: "Bad finances of the State coupled with Meo agitation and the Neemuchana trouble gave the British authorities opportunity to interfere in his administration, and he was in 1933 ultimately asked to leave the State." Maharaja Jai Singh died in Paris on 19 May 1937. A movement can lose the day and still be the reason cited in the file.

(c). The Bundi District Gazetteer: "In 1926, in the time of Maharao Raja Raghubir Singh, a movement against Begar and Charai was started in Kota and Udaipur under the leadership of Manikya Lal Verma of Udaipur and Shri Nanu Ram of Kota ... Nanakji Bhil was shot dead by the State Police and thus became the first martyr in the history of Bundi's fight for freedom." The 1923 dating is supported by the Bhilwara record that State troops were moved to Dabi about the end of May 1922 and withdrawn from Barrad village after 15 June, leaving a reserve of forty muskets at Dabi. The 1922 troop movements are documented; the 1926 martyrdom is documented; the two do not sit together.

Why not the others: The same Bundi volume states, in its chapter on land reform, that apart from "an inconclusive movement against cesses, localized in the herd area of Talera tehsil" the district "has not witnessed any serious agrarian disputes" — a good reason to read a gazetteer's history chapter and its revenue chapter against each other rather than trusting either alone. Bundi's other grievance was not agrarian at all: a Brahmin, Ram Nath Kudal, was killed on the order of the ruler for refusing to perform the cremation ceremony of a deceased concubine of the royal family, and the nine-day hartal that followed was fired on by the police.

(d) Raisinghnagar. The procession was lathi-charged and, when that proved ineffective, firing was resorted to, resulting in one death. Neither history chapter names the man, but the Ganganagar volume's list of the district's important local fairs includes the "Birbal Singh Shaheed fair" at Raisinghnagar, which is as close to a state identification as the record comes. Seven weeks later, on 31 August 1946, the Maharaja proclaimed that a constitution-making body would be set up for a responsible government.

Why not the others: (a) Dudhwa Khara, in Rajgarh tehsil of Churu district, is where the Kisans who came forward to voice their grievances were lathi-charged, with several severely injured and no medical aid provided. (b) 1944 is when Mangha Ram Vaid opened a branch of the Praja Parishad at Ganganagar and the first Kisan procession in the history of Bikaner State was organised; the mass arrests and the fast unto death headed by Vaid belong to 6 June 1945. The movement that is remembered as unsuccessful and the constitutional proclamation are fourteen months apart.

(a) May 1938. It was declared an unlawful body on 28 March 1940 by notification in the Jodhpur Government Gazette, its prominent members arrested and interned in different forts and then released on a compromise; its first representative session met in July 1940, with begar and lag-bag as the business and Jai Narayan Vyas elected President; it was registered under the Jodhpur Public Societies Act, 1940; and in June 1941 it became the largest party in the Jodhpur municipal election, with Vyas elected President of the Board.

Why not the others: (b) is the founding the Jodhpur record gives for the Marwar Hitkarini Sabha, an earlier and separate body, "in or about 1921" — against the 1918 and the name Marudhar Hitkarini Sabha that other accounts carry, a divergence worth knowing rather than resolving. The term to take from the Marwar Youth League's rural work is bigori, the portion of land revenue reckoned per bigha, whose remission was the first concrete demand the cultivators produced: a movement of town lawyers and pamphleteers became a peasant movement at the moment it acquired a named tax to attack. The 1941 municipal result is the hinge — an unlawful society thirteen months earlier won the capital's board, and its president then took its organisers into the thikanas, which is what the jagirdars were reacting to in 1942.

(b). He had begun a fast unto death against the atrocities of the Chandawal Thakur and ended it after twenty days on the Lok Parishad's mediation; the meeting was then attacked by jagir goons. The attack was not the opening of a dispute; it was a thikana's answer to a man it had failed to starve out. Born in 1900 into a Shrimali Brahmin family at Chandawal Nagar, he took a vow of Swadeshi in 1920, joined the Congress in 1924, donated all his property to the party in 1930, served nine months in Badhali jail in 1932 and three months in 1940 during the Lok Parishad's anti-jagiri movement, and was afterwards given six months and then eight months' house arrest.

Why not the others: (a) and (c) collect the details that circulate — the responsible-government day, Gandhi's condemnation, and a land-settlement announcement of 2 December 1943 — and none of them is on the record. The Jodhpur record puts the year in general terms: "In 1942 serious incidents occurred at various places where workers of the Lok Parishad and jagirdars came into clash with each other." Chandawal is in Jodhpur State, in what is now Pali district.

(a). The Nagaur record: "A mass meeting was called at Dabra, now in Didwana tahsil, on the 13th of March, 1947 by the leaders of the Lok Parishad and the Kisan Sabha. However, before the meeting could be held, an engagement took place between the followers of the jagirdars and the cultivators, resulting in fatal casualties on both the sides." Two more things follow from that sentence. It was not a police firing on a gathering, and the casualties were on both sides — the only incident in this chapter of which a government record says so, and the reason Dabra ends the movement where Neemuchana and Mangarh did not. No toll is given; the figures of five and six that circulate are not counted. Maharaja Umaid Singh died in June 1947, three months later, and was succeeded by Hanwant Singh, with a popular ministry under Jai Narayan Vyas following.