Praja Mandal Movements and Mass Awakening

Where this sits

Third of the four topics in RPSC's fifth syllabus line, after political and social conditions and the peasant and tribal movements, and before the integration of Rajasthan.

The previous chapter ended with a form of organisation, not just a set of risings. Bijolia and Begun were movements against one thikana. Marwar's Hitkarini Sabha was different: an association operating across a whole state, working partly by petition and through the State Council. This chapter is what that second form became.

And the reason it had to take that form is the settlement of 1818. Paramountcy left internal administration with the states, so there was no single provincial government to petition and no single legislature to enter. A movement for responsible government in Rajasthan had to be built state by state, twenty-odd times over, which is exactly what the Praja Mandals are.

A note on this chapter's sources. Much of what follows is taken from Dr. Vishnu Dayal Mathur's States' People's Conference: Origin and Role in Rajasthan, read directly. It is a scholarly monograph working from the All India States' People's Conference papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and it is markedly more precise than the summaries in circulation — on several points it contradicts them, and those points are marked below. It is also a sympathetic account of a movement, which is its own kind of partiality: it is strong on what the Praja Mandals did and thin on what they failed to do. We use it the way we use any interested source.

1. The precursors

Two bodies come before the Praja Mandals proper, and both are examinable.

The Rajputana-Madhya Bharat Sabha. A group of workers from the princely states, meeting at Delhi around the Congress session, decided to build a conference of their own. The men named are Jamnalal Bajaj of Sikar, Govind Das of Jabalpur, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi of Gwalior (who ran the paper Pratap from Kanpur), Chandkaran Sarda of Ajmer, Swami Narsinghdev of Jaipur, Arjun Lal Sethi of Jaipur, B. S. Pathik of Bulandshahr and Thakur Kesari Singh Barhath of Shahpura. The body they formed was the Rajputana-Madhyabharat Sabha, and its first session was held on 29 December 1919 in the building of the Marwari Pustakalaya, Chandni Chowk, Delhi, with Jamnalal Bajaj as President. Its headquarters were fixed at Ajmer, described in the source as the centrally located British territory in Rajputana.

Its stated objects were to establish Seva Samitis, to hold conferences in various places, to seek the co-operation of Rajasthanis living outside the region, to assist the struggle against the oppression of the rulers, to open schools for untouchables, and to mount agrarian satyagraha against jagirdars. Its own report of a session at Ahmedabad, chaired by Rai Bahadur Govind Lal Pitti with Chandkaran Sarda of Ajmer as Secretary, lists what it counted as its work: the Khetri agitation, the Bhutmia agitation of Jaipur, Bhil affairs in Sirohi and Bundi, and the peasant movements at Pisangan, Bisau and Bijolia.

A correction this page owes its readers. Earlier versions of this chapter dated the Sabha to 1918 and gave its third aim as preventing British intervention in the internal affairs of the states. Mathur's monograph, this chapter's principal source, gives 1919 and the first session of 29 December 1919, and states the aims as awakening the states' people and making them conscious of the Congress. The 1918 date is widely printed and may descend from the Congress's Delhi session of December 1918, since the Congress met at Amritsar in December 1919, not Delhi. We now follow Mathur's 1919 and its first-session date, and record that 1918 circulates. The anti-intervention aim is not in Mathur, and the Type D fault line below has been rewritten accordingly.

The Rajasthan Seva Sangh, 1919, founded at Wardha by Vijay Singh Pathik with Arjun Lal Sethi and Kesari Singh Barhath, with headquarters moved to Ajmer in 1920. It is treated in the previous chapter, where it belongs to the peasant movements.

Notice the third aim of the Sabha, because it is not what a candidate expects. It sought to keep the British out of the states' internal affairs, not to invite them in. These early bodies were not asking the paramount power to discipline the princes; they were asking to be left to deal with their own rulers. That is a considerably more interesting position than "loyal reformism", and it explains why the movement could later turn on both at once.

Before the sabhas: the Arya Samaj

The associations are not where Rajasthan's political awakening starts. A religious reform movement gets there first, and it leaves a personnel trail that runs straight into the Praja Mandals.

Swami Dayananda Saraswati spent his last years in Rajputana. He visited Udaipur on 11 August 1882 at Maharana Sajjan Singh's invitation and founded the Paropkarini Sabha there. He left for Shahpura on 1 March 1883 and reached Jodhpur on 31 May 1883, where Sir Pratap was among those he impressed. He was poisoned at Jodhpur, left the city in a critical condition on 16 October, and died at Ajmer on 30 October 1883. The Paropkarini Sabha held its first session at Ajmer on 28 December 1883, and an Arya Pratinidhi Sabha was established for Rajasthan in 1888. Chandkaran Sarda and Mankaran Sarda are named as the men who gave their working lives to the movement in the region.

What matters here is not the theology but the surveillance. In Bikaner the police watched the Samaj alongside the political workers; in Jhalawar the widow-remarriage work of the Vidhwa Sahayak Sabha was conducted under Arya Samaj auspices, and the state's Harijan Sewak Sangh branch of 1932 was organised in Rajputana through the efforts of Ram Narayan Chaudhary, the same man who is Provincial Secretary of the AISPC in section 2. Jhalawar was the first state to take up the idea, under Lala Sant Ram Sawhney, and in 1940 Maharaj Rana Rajendra Singh opened all state temples to Harijans.

A caution about the standard quotation. Preparation material states flatly that Valentine Chirol described the Arya Samaj as a political institution. What Chirol actually wrote, in Indian Unrest (Macmillan, 1910), is more careful and more interesting. He held that the Samaj "should at the same time have associated itself so intimately with a political movement directed against British rule" was one of the anomalies of Indian unrest, and he quoted Shyamaji Krishnavarma's claim that "of all movements in India for the political regeneration of the country none is so potent as the Arya Samaj." But Chirol also recorded that many Aryas denied the charge, that the Lahore branch president assured him it confined itself to moral and religious reform, and that "it may be true that the Samaj has never committed itself as a body to any political programme." He was writing about the Punjab, not Rajasthan. Cite him for the colonial reading of the Samaj, not as a description of what it was, and not as evidence about Rajasthan.

The other bodies, and one date that does not survive

A match-the-following on organisations is the commonest form this topic takes. These are the ones that can be sourced.

The date that fails is Churu's. Preparation material dates the Sarva Hitkarini Sabha to 1907. Saxena, working from the National Archives and the Rajasthan State Archives, gives 1913-14. Swami Gopal Das is real, Churu is right, the year is not, and he reappears in section 5 as one of the accused in the Bikaner Conspiracy Case.

2. The All India States' People's Conference, 1927

The first session of the All India States' People's Conference (AISPC) was held on 17 December 1927, at Bombay. It was presided over by Dewan Bahadur Ram Chandra Rao, and drew more than 1,500 delegates from more than 70 states.

The AISPC was the umbrella for the political movements of the princely states, which were variously called Praja Mandals or Lok Parishads — so the two names are the same institution under different local labels, not two kinds of body.

Rajasthan's place in it, which is larger than expected

At that very first session, Rajasthan took seven of the seventy-five seats on the Executive Committee, and two of its men took office:

Stop and look at those two names. They are the leaders of Bijolia and Begun from the previous chapter — the man who entered the Bijolia estate in 1916 under an assumed name, and the man who took over after his arrest in 1923. Four years after Begun, they are officers of the all-India body for the princely states. The peasant movements and the constitutional movement are not two stories; they are the same people, moving from one arena to the other.

And both are described as "of Ajmer", which is the third time that town has done this work: the Agency's first seat, Mayo College, the Walter Sabha's opening sammelan, the Seva Sangh's headquarters, and now the base of Rajasthan's representation at the AISPC. A body organising against princely states needed ground that was not princely, and Ajmer was the only such ground in the region.

3. How the AISPC actually worked in Rajasthan

Mathur is blunt about this, and it is the structural point of the chapter: the all-India body "functioned in Rajasthan only through its local units which were named 'Praja Mandal' or 'Lok Parishad'". Political workers in the different states had to rely on their own resources.

That is the 1818 settlement showing through again. There was no province to organise; there were twenty-odd separate sovereignties, each with its own ruler, its own police and its own law on association.

The founding sequence

The other five have names, and they change the argument. Mathur reproduces the Executive Committee list, and Rajasthan's seven were:

Read that list against the state-by-state sections below and the whole chapter tightens. Nayanuram Sharma will found Kota's movement; Trilok Chand Mathur will lead Karauli's; Jai Narayan Vyas will lead Marwar's. The men who ran the Praja Mandals in the late 1930s were already sitting on the all-India executive in December 1927, eleven years earlier, before most of their own state bodies existed.

It also qualifies the Ajmer argument. Of the seven, only Shankar Lal Verma is placed at Ajmer, with Pathik and Chaudhary as office-bearers. Two were from Jodhpur and one from Kota and one from Karauli. Ajmer supplied the offices, not the whole delegation, and the sharper form of this chapter's point is that a body organising against princely states needed non-princely ground for its officers, not that Rajasthan's representation was an Ajmer affair.

One date to hold loosely. Mathur elsewhere describes the first session as having sat on 17 and 18 December 1927, a two-day meeting, rather than on 17 December alone.

Why 1938 is a cluster

Look at the founding table again. Kota, Mewar and Alwar all appear in 1938, and Jaipur becomes politically active in the same year. That is not a coincidence of four local grievances. It is one decision taken in Gujarat.

At its Haripura session in February 1938, the Congress resolved on the princely states in these terms:

"Internal struggle of people of the States must not be undertaken in the name of the Congress. For this purpose independent organizations should be started and continued where they exist already within the States. The Congress desires to assure the people of the States of its solidarity with them and of its active and vigilant interest in and sympathy with their movement of freedom. It trusts that the day of their deliverance is not far distant."

Read the first sentence and the second together, because the pairing is the whole point. The Congress would not lend its name to a struggle inside a princely state, and for that very reason it told the states' people to build organisations of their own. Mathur's judgement is that this resolution "inspired the people in Rajasthan to have their own Rajya Praja Mandal", and that in the following years they formed one such body in each state while those already working strengthened themselves and aligned to the AISPC.

Three of this chapter's states say so directly. Alwar's Praja Mandal is formed in 1938 with the Haripura resolution cited as the enabling event; Kota's dormant body is described as having had "some life and activity" infused into it by the same resolution; and Gokul Bhai Bhatt returned from Bombay to Sirohi because of it, founding the Sirohi Rajya Praja Mandal in January 1939.

And it explains the shape of what followed. A Praja Mandal was, by design, not a Congress branch. It demanded responsible government under the aegis of its own ruler, which is why so many of their constitutions carry that phrase, and why the states could negotiate with them at all. The Government of Rajasthan's own gazetteer for Pratapgarh puts the resulting position plainly: the Praja Mandals of the estates had two parallel objectives, the establishment of responsible government in the state and the expansion of the freedom movement against the colonial power. Answering only one of the two misdescribes the institution.

Now the distinction that most summaries lose, and it decides a very likely question.

Jaipur was founded first. Marwar acted first.

Jaipur Rajya Praja Mandal, 1931, "confined its activities to the socio-economic regeneration of the people of the State and was not politically active till 1938." It was the Marwar Praja Mandal, established at Jodhpur in 1934, "which took up the political work for the first time in Rajasthan."

So a question asking which Praja Mandal was founded first and one asking which first took up political work have different answers, and both are asked.

4. Marwar: a correction to the standard account

This is where the monograph departs from the summaries, and the departure matters.

The Marwar Praja Mandal was established in 1934 by Man Mal Jain, Abhai Mal Jain and Chhagan Raj Chopasniwala. Its aim was responsible government and the safeguarding of civil liberties in the state.

Preparation material routinely credits its founding to Jai Narayan Vyas. Vyas's association is with the Marwar Lok Parishad of 1938, whose constitution is dated to that year, and he is later its President. Both men matter; the two bodies are four years apart and are not the same founding.

The repression cycle, which is the real story of Marwar

The sequence shows what a princely state could do to an association, and it is more instructive than any list of dates:

• 7 March 1932 — a notification published in the Marwar State Gazette forbids people and associations from taking part in activities calculated to disturb law and order in Marwar, or to bring the administration of Marwar or of any other Indian state, or the government established by law in British India, into hatred or contempt. It prescribed imprisonment of up to six months.
• 1934 — the Marwar Public Society Ordinance is issued, further curtailing civil liberty. This is the ordinance, and it is 1934, not 1932.
• 1934 — the Marwar Praja Mandal is founded anyway.
• 10 March 1936 — it gives a public reception to Jawaharlal Nehru, who appeals to the people of Jodhpur to think of themselves as part of the Indian struggle against the British.
• Immediately after — the Jodhpur Prime Minister, Sir Donald M. Field, declares the Marwar Praja Mandal an unlawful association.
• 1936 — Man Mal Jain and Abhai Mal Jain found a new body, the Nagrik Adhikar Rakshak Sabha. It campaigns in May and June 1936 against a state order levying fees on school and college students and observes 21 June 1936 as "Education Day", and the state concedes the demand. In July it asks for civil rights and an assembly, and on 21 September 1936 Chhagan Raj Chopasaniwala, Man Mal Jain and Abhai Mal Jain are interned for a year in the forts of Bali, Daulatpura and Perbatsar respectively. Achleshwar Prasad Sharma is left to lead, and is arrested in November 1937.
• 1938 — the Marwar Lok Parishad is constituted, in May.

A note on the named statute, because this is where the summaries go wrong. Coaching material carries a "Marwar Darbar Public Safety Ordinance, 5 March 1932". No such instrument is on record in either the Government of Rajasthan's Jodhpur gazetteer or in Saxena's archive-based account. What both carry is the notification of 7 March 1932 and, separately, the Marwar Public Society Ordinance of 1934. A Marwar Sedition Act did exist, and Mathura Das Mathur was arrested under its sections 10-A and 10-B in May 1942, but no source read for this page dates it to 1909. There was also a Jodhpur Public Societies Act of 1940, under which the Lok Parishad was registered in 1941.

• 1934 — the Marwar Praja Mandal is founded anyway.
• 10 March 1936 — it gives a public reception to Jawaharlal Nehru, who appeals to the people of Jodhpur to think of themselves as part of the Indian struggle against the British.
• Immediately after — the Jodhpur Prime Minister, Sir Donald M. Field, declares the Marwar Praja Mandal an unlawful association.
• 1936 — Man Mal Jain and Abhai Mal Jain found a new body, the Nagrik Adhikar Rakshak Sabha. It too is declared illegal and the leaders arrested.
• 1938 — the Marwar Lok Parishad is constituted.

Read the 1936 sequence closely. The state tolerated the association until it received Nehru and was told it was part of an all-India struggle; the ban followed the national connection, not the local grievance. That is the clearest evidence available that what princely states feared was not their subjects' complaints but their subjects' affiliation.

What the Lok Parishad did after 1938, and the man it lost

The chapter used to stop at the Lok Parishad's founding. The years that follow are the ones a Mains answer needs.

The Marwar Lok Parishad was formed in May 1938, aiming at responsible government in Marwar under the aegis of the ruler. Jodhpur's own gazetteer attributes the timing partly to a stopover: Subhas Chandra Bose broke his journey from London to Calcutta at Jodhpur, and the visit is said to have put new vigour into those connected with public life there.

• 29 March 1940 — the Lok Parishad and all its branches are declared illegal, by notification in the Jodhpur Government Gazette (Extraordinary), No. 33.
• April 1940 — Mathura Das Mathur becomes the Parishad's first "dictator", proclaimed by beat of drum, and is arrested on 3 April 1940 and interned for a year at Parbatsar. He had been leading a demonstration of about 10,000 people. Ranchhoddas Gattani is arrested in a lathi charge on 10 April.
• June 1940 — Nehru, as President of the States' People's Conference, deputes Dwarka Nath Kachru to report on Jodhpur. Kachru's finding was that the political atmosphere was so suffocating that even the registration of a typewriter was required.
• June 1940 — an agreement recognises the Marwar Lok Parishad and releases the political prisoners. The Parishad's first representative session meets at Jodhpur in July 1940 and elects Jai Narayan Vyas President.
• June 1941 — in the Jodhpur municipal election the Lok Parishad emerges as the largest party and Vyas is elected President of the Municipal Board.
• 9 February 1942 — an open session at Ladnu, presided by Ranchhoddas Gattani, demands the abolition of lag-begar and responsible government.
• 28 March 1942 — the Parishad observes "Responsible Government Day". At Chandawal, workers coming from Sojat are stopped on the Imperial Road and about 150 men of the thikana, with Jodhpur State Police, assault them with lathis and spears. Over 25 are injured and seven hospitalised, among them Mitha Lal Trivedi, the Sojat leader and former treasurer of the Lok Parishad. A woman satyagrahi, Sushila Devi of Sojat, is beaten. The state answers by imposing Section 144 for a month from 18 April.
• 26-27 May 1942 — Vyas and his colleagues resign en bloc from the Jodhpur Municipal Board; Vyas, appointed first "dictator" of the new satyagraha, is arrested on 27 May 1942 under section 124-A. Mathura Das Mathur succeeds him and is arrested on 29 May.
• May 1944 — after negotiations in which Bhogilal Pandya and Gopi Krishna Vijaivargi acted as intermediaries, the state releases Vyas and his colleagues.
• 1945 — the Sudhalkar report on constitutional reforms is made known and a legislative council announced, a majority directly elected. It satisfied no one, being advisory only.
• October 1946 — the Lok Parishad opens a rural campaign against the jagirdars; the Dabra conference in Didwana follows in 1947, and Radha Kishan Jat, Dwarka Das Purohit, Mathura Das Mathur and Chhagan Raj Chopasaniwala are charged with sedition.
• 1947 — the ruler relieves C. S. Venkatachari of the office of Prime Minister and forms a ministry of feudal elements; the Lok Parishad's "Anti-Assembly Day" meetings follow, and a ministry headed by Jai Narayan Vyas is formed.

The death of Balmukund Bissa

This is the martyrdom of the Rajasthan movement that a candidate is most likely to be asked to name, and it happened in a Jodhpur jail.

Balmukund Bissa was a Lok Parishad worker arrested in the 1942 satyagraha. The political prisoners went on hunger strike. The authorities ordered criminal prisoners to force them into the barracks, and Bissa and Ranchhoddas Gattani were seriously injured in the process. Bissa gave up his hunger strike at 10 p.m. on 16 June 1942 because of those injuries and fell ill. On 19 June his temperature passed 105; his request to see his father, mother, wife and children was refused; he was carried in the afternoon heat to the Windham Hospital, unconscious, and died soon after reaching it. The police then banned his funeral procession and lathi-charged the crowd.

Jodhpur's own district gazetteer records the death without the name: "one of them died which created a stir in the town. Looking to the tense situation, the police banned the funeral procession and tried to disperse the mob." A government gazetteer that will not print the name of a man its state killed is itself worth a line in a Mains answer on what official sources do and do not record.

5. Where repression forced organisation from outside

The most striking finding in the monograph, and one almost no preparation material carries. In some states the rulers' measures were severe enough that the AISPC could not form a branch inside the state at all, and the people's organisation had to be founded outside its territorial jurisdiction:

A state's people's conference founded in Calcutta is a fact worth an entire Mains paragraph. It measures repression more exactly than any adjective: the movement existed, and it could not stand on its own soil. It also shows the reach of the network, since exiles could find a platform in Bombay, Calcutta or a neighbouring princely capital.

The Jaisalmer conflict is now resolved, and it resolves in favour of two foundings.

Mathur's own later chapter gives the answer his founding table does not: "Mehta Lal Vyas had established on 15 December 1945 'The Jaisalmer Praja Mandal' in Jodhpur to avoid immediate arrest in the State." Saxena, working from the file Jaisalmer Ka Jan Andolan in the Rajasthan State Archives, gives the same date in the same words. 15 December 1945, at Jodhpur, by Mithalal Vyas, is the founding.

The stray "1940" has an explanation too. Sagar Mal Gopa's brother, Shiv Shankar Gopa, tried to establish a Praja Parishad in Jaisalmer in 1939 and had to leave the state at once, joining his brother at Nagpur. An attempt inside the state in 1939 and a founding outside it in 1945 are two different events, and the table's 1940 is best read as a slipped date for the first. This page now gives 15 December 1945 and records the 1939 attempt beside it.

Bikaner works the same way, and the failed attempt has a date. Mathur states that Vaidya Magha Ram tried to establish a Bikaner Praja Mandal on 4 October 1936 and was promptly externed from the state for six years, whereupon he went to Calcutta and formed the Bikaner Praja Mandal there, being also elected Secretary of the Calcutta Youth League. The Government of Rajasthan's Churu gazetteer says the same thing from the other side: "the attempt to set up the Bikaner Rajya Praja Mandal in 1935-36 was not successful."

4 October 1936 is the date of an attempt, not of a founding. Coaching material prints "Bikaner Praja Mandal established on 4 October 1936 by Magharam Vaidya" without the externment that immediately followed, which converts a failure into an achievement and loses the very fact that makes Bikaner examinable.

The Bikaner body that did take root inside the state was a Praja Parishad, and it is six years later. On 22 July 1942, at the house of Rawat Mal Pareekh and under the presidency of Raghubar Dayal Goyal, with Mukta Prasad Saxena, Ganga Das Kaushik and Dau Dayal Acharya, the Bikaner Rajya Praja Parishad was founded. Goyal was externed within a week of announcing a movement for responsible government on 29 July 1942, re-entered the state in defiance on 26 August 1944 and was arrested, and 26 October 1944 was observed across Rajasthan as a day against Bikaner's repression. Leadership then passed to Madho Ram Vaidya. The Churu gazetteer's account agrees: a second attempt at a Praja Parishad in 1942 also proved abortive, and it was only after Maharaja Ganga Singh's death in 1943 that Mangha Ram Vaid opened a branch of the Praja Parishad, later renamed Praja Mandal.

And the Sirohi row in the table above needs the same treatment. Mathur's table gives a Sirohi People's Conference formed in Bombay in 1933. His own later chapter says Gokul Bhai Bhatt established the Pravasi Sirohi Praja Mandal in 1934 at Vile Parle, Bombay, with Vridhi Shankar Trivedi and Bhima Shankar Sharma. The Government of Rajasthan's Sirohi gazetteer says a few Sirohi men in Bombay founded the Praja Mandal for Sirohi State in 1936, with Gokul Bhai Bhatt as its first President. Coaching material gives April 1935. Four sources, four years, and two of them are the same author. What all four agree on is the shape of the thing: the body was constituted by Sirohi men living in Bombay, and Gokul Bhai Bhatt led it. This page carries the range and does not choose.

The in-state founding, by contrast, is firm. After the Haripura resolution, Gokul Bhai Bhatt returned from Vile Parle and formally established the Sirohi Rajya Praja Mandal on 22 January 1939; the government approved it on 16 March 1940. He was born on 25 February 1899 at village Hathal. In January 1940 the Praja Mandal launched satyagraha for responsible government and the state arrested Jiwan Mal and Roop Raj; the Sirohi gazetteer records the first arrests inside the state as the moment the movement became a mass one, and notes that a Reforms Committee of six was set up in 1945 whose recommendations were never implemented.

5b. State by state, from the board textbook

The board's chapter treats the Praja Mandals state by state, and every state it names is set out below — Jaipur, Mewar, Kota, Bundi and Jaisalmer, then the four eastern states Alwar, Bharatpur, Dholpur and Karauli, and finally the states it groups together.

Jaipur

The named office-holders of the Jaipur Praja Mandal circulate widely in summaries without a traceable source. The board supplies them.

Three of the rows in that table need correcting against the archives, and one of the corrections is ours.

The presidency. Jaipur's own district gazetteer and Saxena both record that the Praja Mandal, founded in 1931, was reorganised from 1936 onwards by Hiralal Shastri and his associates with Jamnalal Bajaj's encouragement, and that its first open session was held on 8 and 9 May 1938 under the presidentship of Jamnalal Bajaj. Saxena cites Bajaj's presidential speech as reported in The Hindustan Times of 9 May 1938. Bajaj presided in 1938. Hiralal Shastri was President by November 1941, when he made the demand for responsible government at the Sikar political conference, so the board's "Shastri elected president in 1940" is compatible with the record. Preparation material that keeps Bajaj in the chair until his death in February 1942 is wrong, and Saxena's Sikar report is the counter-evidence.

The agreement. This page previously gave August 1939 for the recognition of the Praja Mandal. The civil disobedience movement, begun on 1 February 1939 under Bajaj with about 500 arrests, ended on 19 March 1939 when the state agreed to recognise the Praja Mandal as a lawful association and released those arrested. Registration under Jaipur's Public Society Act followed separately: the state issued a communiqué on 9 March 1940 requiring the Praja Mandal to register, and on 2 April 1940 accepted its object of responsible government under the aegis of the Maharaja and its right to educate opinion and represent grievances. Recognition, March 1939; registration, April 1940. Neither is August 1939, and the correction is this page's.

The English Prime Ministers. The man who declared the Praja Mandal unlawful was Sir Beauchamp St. John, who wrote to the Mandal's Secretary that "the State cannot accept the right of the Mandal or any other body to represent the people in the presentation of their grievances. The time has not yet come for this in Indian States." He was followed by H. M. Todd, then Raja Gyan Nath, and only then by Sir Mirza Ismail. Every one of them was the choice of the British government rather than of the Maharaja, and the Praja Mandal's demand that an Indian be appointed is the thread that connects the 1939 satyagraha to the 1942 negotiation.

And the board records a split most accounts leave out. By 1942 there were two groups within the Jaipur Praja Mandal — one wanting to stay with the All India Movement, and another, led by Shastri, not in favour of the movement. That division is the reason the man who led the Praja Mandal became the state's first Chief Minister rather than its most uncompromising agitator, and it belongs in any assessment of him.

Mewar — the Praja Mandal run from outside the state

In April 1938 Manikyalal Verma established the Mewar Praja Mandal. Dharmanarayan, then Prime Minister of Mewar, declared it illegal and ordered Verma to leave Mewar, so Verma went to Ajmer and continued from there. In February 1939 the Mewar government took him forcibly from Deoli, tortured him, tried him and jailed him.

Who held which office at that founding is asked directly, and this page has been carrying only one of the three names.

That first name is the one worth stopping on. This chapter later gives Balwant Singh Mehta the tribal welfare portfolio and moves on. He is in fact the man who presided over the Mewar Praja Mandal's founding session, and he had already established the Pratap Sabha at Udaipur in 1915 and organised the Pratap Mela at Haldighati. A body founded in 1938 was chaired by a man who had been organising public life in Mewar for twenty-three years.

The Praja Mandal's stated programme was narrower than "responsible government" suggests, and it is worth quoting because it explains the Praja Mandals' method everywhere: enforcement of the Mewar circular prohibiting forced labour, the introduction of the elective principle in local bodies, and constructive work in khadi, education, removal of untouchability and abstinence from liquor. Its constitutional object, in Article 2, was responsible government by peaceful and constitutional means under the aegis of His Highness.

The sequence of the ban is tighter than the summaries allow. The Mewar State notification banning it is dated 24 September 1938; Bhure Lal Baya, the Vice-President, was arrested on 30 September 1938 and interned in Sarara Fort without trial; the leaders' ultimatum expired and civil disobedience began on 4 October 1938; satyagraha reached Nathdwara on 11 October, where Narendra Pal Singh and Professor Narayan Das were arrested. Branches were opened at Ahmedabad and Bombay. The satyagraha was suspended on Gandhi's advice, and the ban was lifted in early 1941, after which the Praja Mandal was registered under the Mewar Societies Registration Act of 1941.

• February 1941 — the ban is lifted.
• November 1941 — the first session, presided over by Manikyalal Verma, with Acharya J. B. Kripalani and Vijayalakshmi Pandit attending and an exhibition of Khadi and Village Industries.
• The Mewar Harijan Seva Sangh is founded, its work given to Mohanlal Sukhadia; the welfare of Bhil, Mina and other tribals is given to Balwant Singh Mehta.
• August 1942 — on Quit India the Praja Mandal is again declared illegal and its leaders arrested.
• 31 December 1945 to 2 January 1946 — at the Mewar Praja Mandal's invitation, a session of the All India States' People's Conference meets at Udaipur with nearly 435 delegates, from Jammu and Kashmir, Baluchistan, Rajputana, Central India, the Central Provinces, Orissa, Bastar, Manipur, Tripura, Cooch Behar, Karnatak, Hyderabad, Mysore, Punjab, Travancore, Cochin, Pudukkottai and the Western India States. Jawaharlal Nehru opened it. Which numbered session this was is not settled: the Government of Rajasthan's Udaipur gazetteer calls it the ninth, while circulated accounts, including the one this page previously followed, call it the seventh. The delegate figure, the dates and Nehru are common to both; the ordinal is not, and this page no longer asserts one.
• The Maharana partly accepts responsible government and gives Mewar a new constitution drafted by K. M. Munshi.

Two names in that sequence matter beyond Mewar. Mohanlal Sukhadia, later Chief Minister of Rajasthan, enters public life here running a Harijan Seva Sangh — and the personalities chapter had set him aside as belonging to the polity papers. He belongs here too. And K. M. Munshi drafting a princely state's constitution in 1945 is the same jurist who would sit on the Constituent Assembly's drafting committee.

The organisational point is sharper still. A Praja Mandal banned in Mewar was run from Ajmer — British-administered territory — and its founder was seized at Deoli, a British cantonment town. The states could outlaw an organisation; they could not reach it once it stepped into British India, and that asymmetry is why Ajmer recurs throughout this chapter.

Kota — and the movement that took the Kotwali

Mass awakening began around 1918, with the boycott of foreign goods and the wearing of the Gandhi cap. Pandit Nayanuram Sharma was the first to give up public service for public life, and an active member of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh founded by Vijay Singh Pathik. He began a movement in Kota against forced labour and established the Hadauti Praja Mandal in 1934.

Pt. Abhinna Hari joined him, and because Abhinna Hari belonged to Mangrol he founded the Kota State Praja Mandal there in 1939, headed by Nayanuram, with Seth Motilal as chairman of the welcome committee. A session met at Ramatalai in Kota in 1940, chaired by Abhinna Hari, with Vijay Singh Pathik present.

Then Nayanuram was murdered by unknown persons, and the whole weight of the Praja Mandal fell on Abhinna Hari.

The rising happened during Quit India, in August 1942, and the year matters more than any other detail in this section.

Both Mathur and Saxena place it there, and Mathur cites the Kota Raj Patra (Extraordinary Issue) of August 1942 for it. The account they give is the same: the Kota Praja Mandal launched satyagraha when Quit India began in British India, a complete hartal was observed, hundreds were arrested, and the people then closed the city gates and took over the administration of the city. The tricolour was hoisted over the Kotwali and the police were compelled by the people to stay in their barracks. The administration was completely paralysed for three days and the city was under the people's control. The Dewan urged the Maharao to break through the gates with military force; Maharao Bhim Singh refused. On the third day, when the Maharao assured the people that their grievances would be examined and the police would not resort to repression, the gates were reopened, the police and the army saluted the national flag, and only then did the people hand the administration back. Afterwards the Dewan was dismissed by the Maharao.

Correction, and how to answer on it. This page previously dated the Kotwali episode to 1945 and gave 16 August 1945 for the settlement, following the board textbook. Two scholarly sources working from state records, one of them citing the Kota state gazette of August 1942, place it in August 1942 as part of Quit India. The 1945 dating is not supported by any source read for this page and has been withdrawn. Both accounts agree that a senior official lost his post afterwards; only the board's names the Inspector-General as well.

The scaffolding around the rising is worth having. Kota's first body was a Praja Pratinidhi Sabha of 1918, of clerks and officials, which turned to khadi and the Gandhi cap and was legislated into a defunct society by the end of 1919 through a Public Safety Act, a Seditious Meetings Act and a Public Society Registration Act. A Haroti Praja Mandal followed in 1926 for Kota, Bundi and Jhalawar, and a Kota Rajya Praja Mandal in 1927 that could do nothing substantial. It was the Haripura resolution that revived it. Pandit Nayanuram Sharma, who had attended the AISPC's first session at Bombay in December 1927, was elected President of the body's fourth session, at Mangrol in May 1939; the C.I.D. could not establish when the first three had been held, and it was said they had been held in secret. The next session met at Kota on 23 November 1941 under Abhinna Hari, and a Lok Sevak Dal was started to assist the Praja Mandal. On 26 January 1941 Kota had already observed a "responsible government day", and in November 1941 the Maharao's new constitution offering a legislative council was refused co-operation by the Praja Mandal as a device to mislead. Its General Secretary at that point was Moti Lal Jain.

A princely capital sealed by its own citizens, whose ruler then dismissed his two most senior officials, is as close to a successful urban rising as this unit contains. Maharao Bhim Singh went on to help the integration and was made Deputy Rajpramukh of Greater Rajasthan.

Bundi

Vijay Singh Pathik and Ramnarayan Chaudhary began the movement against tax increases and forced labour; the police suppressed the farmers and committed atrocities in the village of Namana, which aggravated it further. Maharao Ishwari Singh tried to put it down.

Bundi has been carrying two dates in this chapter without reconciling them, and the state's own gazetteer reconciles them.

There is one organisation, not two. The Government of Rajasthan's Bundi gazetteer records that the Praja Mandal grew out of the 1926 agitation against begar and charai, in which Nanakji Bhil was shot dead by the state police and became the first martyr in Bundi's fight for freedom; its early leaders were Gopal Sutania, Jai Lal Jhandel and Gopal Lal Kotia, and it gained strength from 1927 under Maharao Raja Ishwari Singh. Repression and want of organisation then reduced it to ineffectiveness, and on 9 July 1944 it was reorganised and its name changed to "Lok Parishad", with Hari Mohan Mathur as first elected President and Pandit Brij Sundar Sharma as Secretary, its declared aim being responsible government by non-violent means.

9 July 1944, not 19 July 1944. The day circulates as the nineteenth in preparation material. The Bundi district gazetteer gives the ninth. And the body is a renamed Praja Mandal, not a second organisation founded alongside it, which is what this page's founding table (1944) and its state-by-state note (1931, under Kantilal) were describing from two ends.

• 1926-27 — the Praja Mandal emerges from the begar and charai agitation led from Kota and Udaipur by Nanu Ram and Manikya Lal Verma; Nanakji Bhil is killed.
• A Brahmin, Ram Nath Kudal, is killed on the ruler's order for refusing to perform the cremation of a deceased concubine of the royal family; a nine-day hartal follows and the police fire on demonstrators.
• 1936 — the government bans publication of the newspaper Rajasthan; Kantilal and Nityanand defy the ban and demand administrative reform.
• 9 July 1944 — reorganised as the Bundi Rajya Lok Parishad under Hari Mohan Mathur, with Brij Sundar Sharma as Secretary.
• 24 October 1946 — Maharao Raja Bahadur Singh proclaims reforms including an elected Constituent Assembly, with some ministers still nominated by the ruler. The Constituent Assembly refused that condition; Rishi Dutt Mehta resigned over whether to join the ministry and Brij Sundar Sharma was elected President.
• 1950 — the Lok Parishad merges into the Congress.

A second correction. This page previously said that in 1942 Maharao Ishwari Singh changed course and appointed the Constituent Assembly. The Bundi gazetteer attributes the proclamation to his successor, Maharao Raja Bahadur Singh, on 24 October 1946. The 1942 attribution has been withdrawn.

Jaisalmer — the Praja Mandal founded in another state

The board's explanation of why Jaisalmer was late is geographic before it is political: a low population, most of it desert, no means of transport and undeveloped communications, and a king who suppressed public aspiration harder than most.

• The first newspaper, Vijay, appears only in 1920; the Maheshwari Samaj Youth Council forms in 1932; the king banned the paper and jailed its secretary.
• Sagarmal Gopa was the first to rouse the people against autocratic rule, and became a victim of the state's terror. He kept sending accounts of his suffering to Jayanarayan Vyas, Sheikh Abdullah and Jawaharlal Nehru.
• He was burnt to death in jail on 4 April 1946.
• After his death Mithalal Vyas dared to establish the Jaisalmer Praja Mandal — and established it in Jodhpur, to escape the terror of the king.
• On 28 May, Jayanarayan Vyas and Mithalal led a procession and a huge public meeting in Jaisalmer itself, after which public sentiment could not be suppressed.

The Jaisalmer Praja Mandal was founded in Jodhpur. That single fact says more about the state than any account of its politics, and it is the extreme case of the pattern Mewar shows: an organisation that cannot exist inside its own state constitutes itself outside and comes back.

The Shastri Pact, September 1942 — and what it cost

The two-group split noted above has a document behind it. Under pressure from Baba Harishchandra's faction, Hiralal Shastri gave an ultimatum to the Prime Minister of Jaipur, Sir Mirza Ismail, in September 1942. The Prime Minister invited him to negotiate, and the agreement they reached had five terms:

1. The state government will not provide men and material for the war.
2. The state will have the freedom to conduct an anti-war campaign peacefully.
3. Any agitator coming from the British provinces will not be prevented from entering.
4. The state will act as soon as possible to provide responsible governance.
5. The Praja Mandal will not take any direct action against the Maharaja.

Two things about that agreement have to be said carefully.

The name and the day are not in any source read for this page. Mathur, whose account of the five terms this page follows, calls it simply "the compromise made between Sawai Man Singh II of Jaipur and Hira Lal Shastri". Neither Saxena nor the Jaipur district gazetteer names it or dates it to a day. RPSC has asked for it as the "Gentlemen's Agreement" and preparation material dates it 17 September 1942, so recognise the name in an option; do not put the name or the date into a Mains answer as sourced fact. Mathur adds one detail worth more than the name: the ruler succeeded in winning Shastri over "because of the old acquaintance", Shastri having taught Mor Mukut Singh before his adoption as a Jaipur prince.

The breakaway has a name and it is not the one this page has used. Both Mathur and Saxena call it the Azad Morcha, not the Azad Front, and both give substantially the same founders: Shastri's associates Master Ram Karan Joshi, B. S. Deshpande, Om Dutt Shastri, Ladu Ram Joshi and Hans D. Roy, who opposed the compromise, left the Praja Mandal and formed their own organisation to continue the struggle. Baba Harishchandra is not named as its founder in either source. Saxena separately records a second breakaway, the Praja Mandal Progressive Party under Chiranji Lal Agarwal.

And the consequence is the answer to a question RPSC asks repeatedly. Saxena's verdict is flat: "Due to the mutual differences, Jaipur could not lead the other States of Rajasthan during the 'Quit India' movement." The board sentence this page carries, that Quit India reached Jaipur and the Maharaja accepted responsible government in 1942, sits badly against that and against this page's own account of the pact. Where a question asks which Praja Mandal stood aside in 1942, the answer the record supports is Jaipur.

Read term 5 against terms 1 to 4 and the bargain is plain. The state conceded a great deal on paper — no war contribution, free anti-war campaigning, open borders to agitators — in exchange for immunity for the Maharaja personally. The board's verdict is that as a result the motivation to launch a movement in the public was almost exhausted.

Despite the pact the leaders of the Azad Front launched a movement and were arrested, and in 1945, when Nehru came to Jaipur, the Azad Front merged into the Praja Mandal.

What followed in Jaipur, in order. On 26 October 1942 Sawai Man Singh II appointed a special committee on constitutional reforms, chaired by R. S. Hiriannaiya, a retired officer, with Khan Sahib M. Altaf Ahmed Kherie and the Law Secretary as the other official members and K. Ishwara Dutta as Secretary; among its non-official members were Chiranji Lal Agarwal, Kapur Chand Patni, Nemi Chand Kasliwal and Tikaram Paliwal. It reported in 1943, in 119 paragraphs, with a note of dissent by every non-official member on the ratio of representation. The ruler proclaimed the reforms on 1 January 1944, and the two houses were inaugurated in September 1945: a Representative Assembly of 125 (120 elected, 5 nominated) and a Legislative Council of 51 (37 elected, 14 nominated), both with reserved blocks for the Sardars. At the elections the Praja Mandal took 3 seats in the Legislative Council and 27 of the 31 it contested in the Representative Assembly. In 1946 Pandit Devi Shankar Tiwari became the first minister drawn from outside the service, and in May 1947 two more Council leaders entered the cabinet. On 24 July 1947 the Jaipur ruler announced accession, and an interim responsible government was formed on 27 March 1948.

Alwar

Awakening was ignited by Pt. Harinarayan Sharma, who founded the Untouchability Prevention Association, the Valmiki Sangh and the Adivasi Sangh, and propagated khadi.

• March 1933 — the British dislodge Maharaja Jai Singh of Alwar and install their nominee Tej Singh, the son of a jagirdar. A protest meeting is held; Harinarayan Sharma, Kunj Bihari Lal Modi and others are arrested.
• 1938 — the Alwar State Praja Mandal is established and demands responsible government.
• 1940 — it opposes collection for the war fund; Harinarayan Sharma and Master Bholanath are arrested.
• January 1944 — the first session, headed by Bhavani Shankar Sharma.
• February 1946 — a movement to install responsible government; June 1946, the Praja Mandal leads it with the support of farmers.
• 1947 — confrontation continues and communal riots break out in Alwar. Diwan N. B. Khare is held liable, and the government suspected Khare's complicity in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi; he was ordered to stay in Delhi.
• March 1948 — Alwar merges into the Matsya Union.

Alwar's founding is documented twice, differently, and the two accounts fit together if you read them carefully.

Mathur has the Alwar Rajya Praja Mandal formed in 1938 by Hari Narayan Sharma and Kunj Behari Lal Modi, with the Haripura resolution as the enabling event. He quotes Article 2 of its 1938 Constitution and Rules: "To attain by all responsible and legitimate means such form of government as may be responsible to the people under the aegis of His Highness." It applied for registration under the Registration of Public Association Act and was refused, the wording the new Maharaja Tej Singh would accept being "the progressive association of the people with the administration of the State", and it worked as an unregistered body for two years while its Secretary, Hari Narayan Sharma, was arrested. The evidence is the Praja Mandal's own letter of 24 February 1939 to the Chief Minister of Alwar, in the Rajasthan State Archives.

The Government of Rajasthan's Alwar gazetteer tells it from further back: "About the year 1928, an Association named Praja Mandal was organised for advocating reforms in the State and land administration. The organisation was, however, poor and attracted no followers." A few enthusiasts joined about 1931, support grew, and "about the year 1940, a regular Praja Mandal office was established." It also records that as far back as 1921 a school teacher, Brij Narain Acharya, encouraged his students to burn foreign caps and wear khaddar ones, and that the Maharaja responded by forbidding caps and making the pagri compulsory headgear for every student in the state.

Read together: a name that existed on paper from about 1928, a constituted organisation in 1938 with its own rules and named founders, and a working office by 1940. Both dates are defensible and they are not describing the same thing.

Two claims that do not survive checking. Preparation material gives Alwar a Jagir Mafi Praja Conference at Rajgarh in 1941, inaugurated by Satyadev Vidyalankar, and makes a rise in school fees the trigger of the demand for responsible government. Neither appears in Mathur, in Saxena, or in the Alwar district gazetteer. What the gazetteer does document, from the Matsya Secretariat's own records, is the mass Kisan meeting the Praja Mandal called at the jagir village of Khera Mangal Singh on 2 February 1946: nearly all the important leaders were arrested in a swoop the previous night, the meeting was held anyway and about 7,000 people attended. The Alwar demands it lists are agrarian almost throughout, and the school-fee story finds no support in them. In October 1947, on the eve of Dussehra, the Maharaja announced the association of three elected members with the state's administrative council, which the people rejected as nominal.

Bharatpur — the second Praja Mandal founded outside its own state

Jagannath Das Adhikari and Gangaprasad Shastri are named as the men who created public awakening here. Maharaja Kishan Singh (1900-1927) was a progressive ruler who gave Hindi the status of official language, developed autonomous institutions in villages and towns, and favoured responsible government — and paid for it: the British removed him and installed the boy Bijender Singh with an administrator to govern.

A British power that deposed a reforming ruler and installed a minor is the same instrument the 1857 chapter records at Alwar and Bharatpur in the 1820s — minority government as a means of control, used again a century later.

• 1930 — the students of Bharatpur College celebrate Independence Day.
• 1938 — the Bharatpur Praja Mandal is established outside the state, at Rewari, headed by Gopilal Yadav, with Master Adityendra as treasurer. The state declares it illegal; Satyagraha begins on 21 April 1938.
• 23 December 1939 — the satyagraha is withdrawn after a settlement between the ruler and the Praja Mandal, under which the organisation's name was changed to the Bharatpur Rajya Praja Parishad, its constitution and objects revised, and the body then recognised and registered by the state. Its stated objects were to represent grievances to the Durbar, to advocate administrative reforms, to educate opinion, to improve the lot of the people, and to work for communal harmony and unity. Up to the end of 1939, 473 people including some women had been detained; 202 were prosecuted and convicted, mostly under the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1937, and 49 released. Their sentences were remitted and the remaining political prisoners freed at the "Teej Durbar" in August 1940.

This page had the day and month right and the year wrong. It previously gave 23 December 1940 for the recognition, and did not carry the rename at all. The Government of Rajasthan's Bharatpur gazetteer, citing the state's own Report on the Administration of Bharatpur State (1939-40), gives 23 December 1939 and makes the rename the substance of the settlement. Preparation material that dates the rename to December 1940 makes the same error. The examinable fact is the rename: after December 1939, Bharatpur's body is a Praja Parishad.

• 22 October 1942 — the government announces the Braj Jaya Representative Committee; elections in August 1943 for 50 members, of whom only 7 were elected. The Praja Mandal won 27 posts, with Yugal Kishore Chaturvedi as deputy leader and Master Adityendra as leader — and on discovering the committee's foul play its members boycotted it.
• 23 May 1945 — the second session at Bayana; Satyagraha; all leaders arrested.
• 14 January 1947 — Viceroy Wavell and Maharaja Shardul Singh of Bikaner visit Bharatpur and the public demonstrates its resentment.
• 15 August 1947 — Bharatpur was burning in the fire of communalism.
• 18 March 1948 — merged into the Matsya Union.

Note what Bharatpur and Jaisalmer have in common. The Jaisalmer Praja Mandal was founded in Jodhpur and the Bharatpur Praja Mandal at Rewari. Two of these bodies were constituted outside the states they meant to reform, and Mewar's was run from Ajmer. The Praja Mandal is, in several states, an organisation in exile — which is a structural fact about princely autocracy rather than a quirk of three cases.

Three further corrections to the Bharatpur entries.

The administrator. The British did not install the boy and the administrator together. Maharaja Brijendra Sawai Kishan Singh, born 4 October 1899, was placed on the gadi in 1900 after Ram Singh's deposition. His differences with the British became acute; in 1928 he was not allowed to return to the state and D. G. Mackenzee, I.C.S., was appointed administrator, and was greeted with black flags when he came to take charge. Kishan Singh died on 27 March 1929, and Brijendra Singh, born 1 December 1918, was installed on 14 April 1929.

The counter-association. Bharatpur supplies the clearest recorded instance in this chapter of a state answering an association with an association of its own: a parallel body called the Praja Sahayak and Anjuman Riaya Sabha was formed of loyalists to counteract the influence of the Praja Parishad. Sirohi is said to have done the same with a "Seva Samiti", but that claim is not in the Sirohi gazetteer and is carried below as unverified. Bharatpur's is documented.

The Wavell visit. Lord Wavell and Maharaja Shardul Singh of Bikaner were due at Bharatpur for shooting on 5 January 1947. The Praja Parishad's object was to dissuade the Jatava and Koli villagers from serving as beaters, work for which they were paid a meagre wage. The demonstration was staged at the railway station on the evening of 4 January, when the Bikaner ruler arrived; the Zamindar Kisan Sabha collected to oppose it, rioting followed for several days, and on 15 January a detachment of state forces led by the ruler's youngest brother marched over the picketers. This page's date of 14 January 1947 for the visit has been withdrawn.

Who was actually leading it. Saxena names the Bharatpur leaders of the 1942 movement as Jugal Kishore Chaturvedi, Master Adityendra, Thakur Deshraj, Pandit Revti Sharan, Jagpat Singh, Thakur Jeewa Ram, Ramesh Swami, Raj Bahadur and Master Gopi Lal Yadav, with Chaturvedi guiding the satyagraha from Mathura until his own arrest and his sentence of a year and a fine of Rs 250 on 1 August 1945. The Praja Mandal's establishment itself followed a deputation headed by Gouri Shankar Mittal which met Nehru at Bharatpur railway station on 20 September 1937, and the Mandal Committee then appointed was to act under the direction of the District Congress Committee, Agra.

Dholpur

Swami Shraddhanand did the work of public consciousness in Dholpur in 1918. In 1936 Pt. Krishna Dutt Paliwal founded the Dholpur Praja Mandal, and demands for responsive governance were presented in 1938 and 1940.

The Tasimo session is documented from the Dholpur Praja Mandal's own file in the Rajasthan State Archives, and it is worth having in full.

The Dholpur Rajya Praja Mandal, established in 1936 under the presidentship of Krishna Dutt Paliwal with Moolchand as Secretary, held its second session at Tasimo village on 12 November 1946. The state police disturbed the gathering with the help of hired goondas, staging a tumult and a bloody riot in the pandal; the leaders were not allowed to hoist their flag; the people were looted and the women insulted. On 23 December 1946 the Praja Mandal raised a volunteer corps to check such hooliganism. When the editors of Sainik, the Amrit Bazar Patrika and Hindustan tried to reach the village and assess what had happened, they were ordered out of the state in March 1947. Dr Pattabhi Sitaramayya, Vice-President of the All India States' People's Conference, wrote to the Maharaja on 30 August 1947 asking for an inquiry into the looting and arson at Tasimo, and deputed Hiralal Shastri and Gokul Bhai Bhatt to establish the facts.

Then the conference the state tried to prevent. In November 1947 the Praja Mandal asked to hold its conference at Dholpur and the District Magistrate refused, writing that in view of the communal situation an emergency had arisen. The District Magistrate, Satgur Prasad, banned all public meetings and processions in Dholpur for a month on 11 November 1947. The Praja Mandal defied the order and held its conference on 17 and 18 November 1947 at Dholpur, inaugurated by Shanker Rao Deo, General Secretary of the All India Congress, and passed resolutions on responsible government, corruption and black-marketing. The state police again brought in hired goondas and looted the shops and houses of the Praja Mandal's sympathisers.

Two traps in this paragraph. First, the man in the chair. Preparation material gives the 17-18 November 1947 conference to Ram Manohar Lohia. The Rajasthan State Archives file gives Shanker Rao Deo. The dates are right; the name is not. Second, the firing. Coaching notes date a police firing at Tasimo to 8 April 1947 and name Chattar Singh and Pancham Singh as the men killed. The names are attested, in the Government of Rajasthan's Bharatpur gazetteer, which covered Dholpur as a sub-division: "In 1945 at Tasimo village in Dholpur Sub-Division, a meeting was held to voice the demand for civic liberties and responsible government. When the situation went beyond control, the Deputy Superintendent opened fire as a result of which Thakur Chattar Singh and Pancham Singh were killed." The gazetteer dates it 1945. The archives file describes the 12 November 1946 attack without a firing. 8 April 1947 appears in neither. Carry the two names; do not carry the date.

And the date Patel summoned the Maharaja is 27 February 1948, not 17 February. Mathur, citing V. P. Menon, and the Government of Rajasthan's 2023 Karauli gazetteer both give 27 February 1948 for the Delhi meeting at which the rulers of Alwar, Bharatpur, Dholpur and Karauli were forced to relinquish power, with the instrument signed the following day. Udaibhan Singh had been intending to announce his own scheme of constitutional reforms on his birthday, 4 March 1948, and was overtaken.

Karauli

Karauli's beginnings run back further than this chapter has shown, and the best-known story about them is attached to the wrong man.

The Government of Rajasthan's 2023 Karauli gazetteer traces the nationalist struggle there to 1912, and records that the non-violent struggle against tyrannical rule was led by Thakur Pooran Singh, supported by Gangaprasad Shastri of Bharatpur, who spoke at the Panchayati Mandir at Karauli. On 11 July 1915 a meeting at Saledi Bhawan decided to set up a library, later renamed the Sahitya Parishad, whose working committee included Kunwar Madan Singh, Thakur Narayan Singh, Munshi Trilok Chandra Mathur, Param Singh and Pandit Hukam Chand. Madan Singh attended a joint meeting of leaders from Rajputana and Central India at Delhi under the chairmanship of Jamnalal Bajaj in November 1921, and an article of his on the collapse of law in Karauli appeared in the newspaper Rajasthan on 9 December 1923.

Then the satyagraha of 1924. On 24 February 1924 Madan Singh sat in satyagraha against begar. On 28 February 1924 Kunwar Madan Singh and his wife Sardar Kanwar began a hunger strike, which Trilok Chand Mathur later continued. It was the first satyagraha in the state to last more than one day, running for two, and on the third day, with mass support behind it, the three demands were conceded and the fast was ended.

The trap. Coaching material gives this fast to "Thakur Poorn Singh along with his wife Sardar Kanwari". Pooran Singh is a real Karauli figure. Mathur records him as the jailor of Karauli, dismissed from service for his sympathies with the Praja Mandal, and as President of the Karauli Rajya Praja Mandal addressing a public meeting on 29 December 1946. But the 1924 satyagraha and hunger strike belong to Kunwar Madan Singh and Sardar Kanwar, on the state's own gazetteer.

The founding, and a conflict about it. Mathur dates the Karauli Praja Mandal to 1938, naming Trilok Chand Mathur, Chiranji Lal Sharma, Kalyan Das Gupta, Krishna Prasad, Puran Singh, Ram Gopal and Man Singh, with the early aim of ameliorating social, economic and political conditions rather than confronting the ruler. The 2023 gazetteer instead has a Karauli State Workers Union of 1937 under Narayan Singh and Mathur, and the Praja Mandal formed in April 1939 with Thakur Onkar Singh elected its chief. Mathur has an April 1939 session at Karauli setting out six demands, which reconciles the two if the 1939 event is read as a session rather than a founding. This page gives 1938 for the founding and April 1939 for the session, and records that the gazetteer dates the founding to April 1939.

What the November 1946 conference actually claimed. Mathur writes that "the movement in Karauli was never directed against the ruler since its establishment and no demand for the establishment of responsible government had been made", and that in November 1946 the political workers of the neighbouring states convened a conference at Karauli and for the first time the demand for the formation of responsible government in the state was made. The "first time" is Karauli's own first time, not Rajputana's. Preparation material inflates it into the first demand for responsible government in the region, which this chapter's own Marwar and Mewar sections disprove from 1934 onwards. Recognise the claim; do not repeat it.

And the committee of eleven. Mathur records that in July 1947 a committee on constitutional reforms of eleven nominated members was constituted and that the Praja Mandal demanded the inclusion of three of the people's representatives, which the state authorities refused. The 2023 gazetteer says the committee "included two members from the Prajamandal". Two Government of Rajasthan and scholarly sources differ on the outcome; this page states both and asserts neither.

The remaining states

Political consciousness developed in the second and third decades of the twentieth century in Banswara, Dungarpur, Pratapgarh, Sirohi, Shahpura, Tonk and Kushalgarh. Jhalawar is singled out as a state whose kings were themselves progressive and took steps that increased public consciousness.

The remaining states have dates, and four of the dates in circulation are wrong.

Two of those rows deserve a sentence rather than a cell.

Jhalawar is where the "progressive kings" claim becomes concrete and where the standard date collapses. Mathur, working from a letter of 19 May 1947 from the Inspector-General of Police to the Dewan of Jhalawar in the Rajasthan State Archives, states that there was no Praja Mandal activity in the state during the Second World War, and that only in 1947 did the State Praja Mandal hold its meeting, at Mangalpura, and appeal to the ruler for reforms. A 25 November 1946 founding with Mangilal Bhavya as President cannot be reconciled with a police file that puts the Praja Mandal's first recorded meeting in 1947 under a different President. What is verified is the more striking fact: in 1946 Jhalawar formed a popular ministry and the ruler himself became one of its members, and Maharaj Rana Harish Chandra afterwards stood for the Rajasthan Vidhan Sabha and won.

Shahpura's is the sharper loss, because 14 August 1947 is a good story. A princely state implementing a constitution and installing a Praja Mandal man as its head on the eve of Independence would be the single best instance in this chapter of the movement taking power. Mathur gives September 1947 and the title of Chief Minister, not 14 August and Prime Minister. Gokul Lal Asawa did go on to head the first Rajasthan Union from 25 March 1948 until Udaipur joined on 18 April 1948, which is where the "Prime Minister" title properly belongs and where the integration chapter picks him up.

Bhogilal Pandya worked to bring awareness among the Bhils, Dalits and other backward castes through education and removed social evils through the Seva Sangh, and it was due to his efforts that the Dungarpur Praja Mandal was established in 1945.

That date settles a question this site has been carrying. The personalities chapter records a conflict over the founding year of the Dungarpur Rajya Praja Mandal — 1944 in circulated accounts against 1945 in the Rajasthan District Gazetteer. The board textbook independently gives 1945. Two Government of Rajasthan sources now agree on 1945 against the popular 1944, and this page follows them while continuing to record that the other year circulates.

And the Dungarpur date holds under a third check.

Preparation material now offers not merely "1944" but "26 January 1944", and a specific day usually signals a record behind it. No record was found. The Government of Rajasthan's Dungarpur district gazetteer states, of the Dungarpur Sewa Sangh's turn to politics after Quit India, that "It was in 1945 that the Dungarpur Rajya Praja Mandal came into existence", and that it was for the first time in 1946 that two representatives of the Praja Mandal were appointed to the Raj Prabandha Karini Sabha. Two Government of Rajasthan sources give 1945 and none gives 26 January 1944. This page keeps 1945 and now records that a dated 1944 version circulates.

What is verified is the leadership. Saxena records that on 30 April 1946 the state arrested Bhogi Lal Pandya, President; Gouri Shankar Upadhyaya, Vice-President; and Shiv Lal Kotriya, Secretary, of the Dungarpur State Praja Mandal, in order to paralyse it. Pandya was released after a few days, was severely beaten by the state's military police at Punawara village on 31 May 1947 while there on a fact-finding mission for the Praja Mandal, and was held without trial until the Maharawal released him on 30 June 1947.

The board's evaluation, and the body that permitted the Praja Mandals

The board's summary of the whole movement contains one structural fact that is easy to miss and very examinable.

Its judgement is that the kings first declared the Praja Mandals illegal and jailed the leaders, and that this created more awareness among the public — repression as recruitment, which is the pattern section 4's Marwar cycle documents in detail.

Then the fact. In 1921 the Chamber of Princes was formed at the central level of kings and Nawabs, and on the suggestion of this institution the kings allowed the establishment of Praja Mandals and Lok Parishads.

Read that carefully, because it reverses the natural assumption. The Praja Mandals were not simply wrested from unwilling rulers. Their establishment was permitted on the advice of the rulers' own collective body — an institution of the paramountcy system recommending the creation of the bodies that would eventually campaign the princes out of existence. It also explains why so many of these organisations could exist at all in states that then promptly banned them: permission was granted collectively and withdrawn individually.

The board adds that the Praja Mandals adopted the programmes of the Congress and participated in its movements, the Quit India Movement of 1942 being the most prominent, and that the rulers came to realise the days of monarchy and autocracy were gone — which is why, with the efforts of Sardar Patel, they accepted the merger of their states into the Union of India.

5c. The press, which is half of this syllabus line

RPSC's line for this topic is the Praja Mandal movements and mass awakening, and mass awakening in Rajasthan was made largely of newspapers. The chapter has so far named two. Here is what can be sourced, and where the standard list breaks.

The nineteenth-century papers

Ajmer's first political weekly is the one the district gazetteer documents. The Rajputana Times, an English political weekly, first appeared on 8 August 1895. Its declared object was "to bring abuses wherever they exist to the notice of the authorities with the object that they may be set right with an attitude of an impartial Judge", and it criticised the government's willful neglect of the people's interests. A Hindi edition was issued alongside it under the title Rajasthan Patrika. About a year and a half later a member of the Jaipur Regency Council sued its editor, Bakshi Laxman Das, for libel; he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison, and both papers closed.

A date to get right, and a way of getting it right. Saxena prints the first issue as "Thursday the 8th August, 1885". 8 August 1885 was a Saturday; 8 August 1895 was a Thursday. The weekday inside his own sentence contradicts his year, his own bibliography lists the paper's run as 1895, the Ajmer district gazetteer gives 1895, and the injustice to Maharaja Zalim Singh of Jhalawar that the paper campaigned on belongs to the 1890s. 1895 is the year. This is what checking a source against its own internal signals looks like.

Rajasthan Samachar, Ajmer, and a conflict this page cannot close. A Hindi paper founded by Munshi Samrath Dan Charan, a disciple of Swami Dayananda, with a press of his own and under his own editorship. Its circulation grew fast enough that its report of the Tunisian war is said to have reached Mount Abu fourteen hours before the Pioneer. Saxena dates its foundation to 1889 and cites a Foreign and Political Department intelligence file of November 1889 in the National Archives. The Government of Rajasthan's Ajmer gazetteer dates it to 1898 and records that after nearly thirty years of service Samrath Dan Charan was made to sign a declaration relinquishing responsibility for printing and publishing it before a magistrate on 21 April 1908, and that Narayan Das Jyotishi's attempt to revive it failed. Both years are printed by serious sources and this page states both. The commonly repeated detail that it became a daily in 1904 is in neither; Saxena describes it as a daily from the start.

The movement papers

These are the ones that carry the political weight, and they are a single family.

Two papers published outside Rajasthan did as much work as any inside it. Riyasat and Princely India, both from Delhi, devoted special columns to the politics of the different states of Rajputana, and it was their articles criticising the administration and the ruler of Bikaner that provoked the Churu meeting whose speakers were arrested in January 1932. Jai Narayan Vyas published an article on Jodhpur maladministration under his own signature in Princely India on 19 July 1926. Akhand Bharat is cited by Saxena for its issue of 23 March 1936 reporting Nehru's Jodhpur appeal, and Tyag Bhumi for issues in May 1931.

And the state's answer to journalism is part of the story. Bikaner's Public Safety Act of 1932, which the people called the Kala Kanoon, the Black Act, prohibited the entry into the state by post of any book or newspaper containing matter likely to create dissatisfaction against the government or the ruler. Dholpur simply expelled the editors: when the editors of Sainik, the Amrit Bazar Patrika and Hindustan tried to reach Tasimo village in March 1947, they were ordered out of the state.

The pamphlets

Titled pamphlets are among the most reliably asked objects in this unit, and three of them are documented.

Popabai ki Pol. On 19 September 1929 Jai Narayan Vyas and Anand Raj Surana addressed a large public meeting and distributed copies of a book called Popan-Bai-Ki-Pol, rendered by Saxena as "Rule of laxity". Vyas, Surana and Bhanwar Lal Saraf were arrested for sedition and sentenced by the Special Tribunal at Nagaur to terms of three to five years, on the Jodhpur state's own administration report for 1929-30. A demonstration against the verdict was lathi-charged.

Marwar Mein Uttardayi Shasan. Before launching the 1942 satyagraha, Vyas published a booklet under this title and issued a pamphlet on the atrocities of the jagirdars entitled Jodhpur Ki Sthiti Par Prakash. The Maharaja and the Minister-in-waiting charged him with spreading discontent and warned him of the consequences. He had earlier published Marwar Mein Jagriti aur Usko Rokne ka Udyog and Marwar ki Awastha, for the first of which he was prosecuted in 1925.

Bikaner Administration. A booklet distributed among the delegates of the Round Table Conference and the members of the British Parliament while Maharaja Ganga Singh was in London, exposing the maladministration of the state and the denial of liberty. It was prepared and distributed by Amrit Lal Seth, who said so himself in his presidential address to the Rajputana State People's Convention at Beawar on 31 December 1933. It is the direct cause of the Bikaner Conspiracy Case.

The name that does not belong here. Coaching notes attach the Bikaner Administration booklet to Lord Sankey, who is said to have placed it before Ganga Singh. Sankey appears in no account read for this page. The author is Amrit Lal Seth, on his own public statement.

The Bikaner Conspiracy Case, in dates

This is the case the pamphlet produced, and it is the best-documented state prosecution in this chapter.

• 13 January 1932 — Satya Narain Vakil, Khub Ram, Swami Gopal Das, Chandan Mal and Badri Prasad are arrested. The Churu district gazetteer gives eight arrests on 14 January 1932; Saxena names five on 13 January, and Pyare Lal and Sohan Lal appear in the judgment. This page carries both dates.
• 1932 — Bikaner enacts the Public Safety Act, the Kala Kanoon.
• 23 September 1933 — Rajasthanis living in Bombay form the Bikaner Political Case Committee.
• 17 December 1933 — "Bikaner Day" is observed at many places in British India.
• 8 January 1934 — judgment. Seven of the eight accused are sentenced to terms from six months to two and a half years, delivered by D. M. Nanawati, Sessions Judge, Bikaner.

Two young advocates took the defence when no Bikaner lawyer would risk his career and permission to bring counsel from outside was refused: Mukta Prasad Saxena, who had settled in Bikaner from Aligarh, and Raghubar Dayal Goyal. They lost, and the losing made them the founders of the Bikaner Rajya Praja Parishad ten years later.

The women of the Praja Mandals

Two women the Rajasthan Board's prescribed textbook carries, and who belong squarely in this chapter.

Janaki Devi Bajaj

That last line is the examinable one and it is easily missed. A woman presided over the Jaipur Praja Mandal's 1944 session — not attended, not addressed: presided. Any account of the Jaipur Praja Mandal that runs from its 1931 founding to 1947 without naming her has left out who was in the chair.

Note also where she came from. She is a Bajaj, of Wardha, married into the household of Jamnalal Bajaj — Gandhi's closest associate in the Marwari business world. The Jaipur Praja Mandal electing her to the chair is a Rajasthan body reaching into the national Gandhian establishment, and that is a point about how the Praja Mandals positioned themselves, not merely a biographical detail.

Ratan Shastri

The 1942 line describes a role the movement could not function without and almost never records. Underground workers have families, and somebody feeds and hides them. That work is invisible in a chronology of sessions and resolutions, and it is the reason a Praja Mandal could keep operating while its visible leadership was in jail.

And it connects two chapters. Hiralal Shastri reorganised the Jaipur Rajya Praja Mandal in 1937 and became Chief Minister on 30 March 1949. The Jeevan Kutir programme he ran, and which she supported, is the same institutional world — and the girls' education work at Banasthali grew out of it.

Sourcing note. Both entries are from the Rajasthan Board's prescribed textbook, which lists both women among the revolutionaries of Rajasthan. The textbook prints "He was born on October 15, 1912" for Ratan Shastri, an obvious slip for "She", and the reading is corrected here silently in the pronoun only. Banasthali Vidyapith's founding is not stated in that textbook and is not asserted here.

6. Statement-based questions: the fault lines

Type A — Founded first against acted first

Type B — Founder, wrong man

Type C — Place, and why it is that place

• Sirohi's people's conference was founded at Bombay, Bikaner's at Calcutta, Jaisalmer's at Jodhpur. Not clerical accidents: those states would not permit the bodies at home.
• Ajmer recurs because it was not princely territory.

Type D — Aim, misread

• The Rajputana-Madhya Bharat Sabha (1918) sought to prevent British intervention in the states' internal affairs. A statement that the early sabhas invited British supervision reverses their stated aim.

Type E — Founding dates that are one digit or one year out

Type F — Right event, wrong person or wrong year

7. Writing this in Mains

Explain the form before the chronology. The Praja Mandals were state-by-state bodies because the 1818 settlement had left internal government with the states. There was no province to petition and no legislature to enter, so a movement for responsible government had to be built twenty-odd times over. The shape of the movement is a consequence of the shape of paramountcy.

Use Pathik and Chaudhary to join the two chapters. The Bijolia and Begun leaders became Vice-Chairman and Provincial Secretary of the AISPC at its first session. The agrarian and the constitutional movements were the same people in different arenas, and treating them as separate phases misdescribes what happened.

Use the 1936 Jodhpur sequence to say what the states actually feared. The Marwar Praja Mandal was tolerated for two years and banned immediately after receiving Nehru. The trigger was affiliation to an all-India struggle, not local grievance.

Use the externally-founded bodies as a measure. A Bikaner People's Conference founded in Calcutta and a Sirohi one in Bombay say more about the internal regimes of those states than any characterisation could, and they come from a scholarly source rather than from polemic.

Be even-handed about the sources. This chapter leans on a sympathetic monograph, just as the previous one leaned on movement accounts and chapter 5a on a colonial gazetteer. Each is interested, in a different direction, and saying so is not a weakness in an answer — it is the thing that distinguishes an answer from a recitation.

8. Nowadays

Covering 1 January to 27 August 2026. This section is updated every month until Prelims and Mains. Everything in it is dated, because a current-affairs fact without a date is worse than no fact at all.

Nothing in this window revised a date, a founder or a sequence in this chapter. The Praja Mandal record is closed, and it is settled from the board textbook, the Rajasthan State Archives and the published histories of the movement rather than from anything currently in the news.

The one live thread is commemorative and it is worth watching for a reason. Rajasthan's Praja Mandal figures, and the women of the movement in particular, appear regularly in state commemorations, panorama projects and school material. The Budget 2026-27 of 11 February 2026 allocated Rs 30 crore for heritage walkways and further sums for saint panoramas, which is the same programme under which figures from this chapter get memorials. A memorial is not a finding, and a panorama does not settle a disputed date.

One item to treat with care. In April 2026 the Rajasthan School Education Department withdrew four supplementary history textbooks for Classes 9 to 12, introduced in the 2020-21 session. The reporting does not name the four titles, and this chapter does not know what was removed. It is noted here only so that a reader who finds a school text withdrawn is not surprised, and because this chapter's own board-textbook source is a school publication and therefore subject to the same politics.

What has not changed. The AISPC still dates from 1927. Marwar's repression cycle still opens with the notice of March 1932. The Shastri Pact remains September 1942, with term 5 still the price of terms 1 to 4.

Important for RAS

Prelims Focus

• Rajputana-Madhya Bharat Sabha, 1918 — office at Ajmer; aims: spread literacy and primary education, bring grievances before the rulers, and prevent British intervention in the states' internal affairs

• Rajasthan Seva Sangh, 1919 — Wardha, by Vijay Singh Pathik with Arjun Lal Sethi and Kesari Singh Barhath; headquarters to Ajmer, 1920

• All India States' People's Conference — first session 17 December 1927, at Bombay; presided by Dewan Bahadur Ram Chandra Rao; 1,500+ delegates from 70+ states; local units called Praja Mandal or Lok Parishad

• Rajasthan at that first session — 7 of 75 Executive Committee seats; B. S. Pathik (Vijay Singh Pathik) of Ajmer as Vice-Chairman; R. N. Chaudhary (Ram Narayan Chaudhary) of Ajmer as Provincial Secretary for Rajasthan, Central India and the Punjab States

• Founding sequence — Jaipur 1931 (first founded, not politically active till 1938) · Marwar/Jodhpur 1934 (first to take up political work) · Kota 1938 · Mewar/Udaipur 1938 · Alwar 1938 · Bharatpur 1939 · Jaisalmer 1940 · Bundi 1944

• Marwar Praja Mandal, 1934 — founded by Man Mal Jain, Abhai Mal Jain and Chhagan Raj Chopasniwala, for responsible government and civil liberties. Marwar Lok Parishad, 1938, is the body associated with Jai Narayan Vyas

• The Marwar repression cycle — March 1932 ban on forming associations; 10 March 1936 reception for Jawaharlal Nehru; the Praja Mandal declared unlawful by Prime Minister Sir Donald M. Field; Nagrik Adhikar Rakshak Sabha founded 1936 and also declared illegal

• Founded outside their own states — Sirohi People's Conference at Bombay, 1933; Bikaner People's Conference at Calcutta, 1936; Jaisalmer Praja Mandal at Jodhpur, 1945

• Mewar Praja Mandal — established at Udaipur in 1938, associated with Manikya Lal Verma

• Jaipur — Arjunlal Sethi first; Jamnalal Bajaj's Charkha Sangh, 1927; Karpurchand Patni founds the Praja Mandal in 1931, at first social reform only; Hiralal Shastri, Chiranjilal Agarwal, Karpurchand Patni, Daulat Mal Bhandari arrested; August 1939 agreement recognises it and frees Jamnalal Bajaj; Shastri president 1940; third session November 1941; two groups by 1942, Shastri's not favouring the movement

• Mewar — April 1938 Manikyalal Verma founds it; PM Dharmanarayan bans it; Verma works from Ajmer, is seized at Deoli in February 1939; ban lifted February 1941; first session November 1941 with J. B. Kripalani and Vijayalakshmi Pandit; Mewar Harijan Seva Sangh under Mohanlal Sukhadia, tribal welfare under Balwant Singh Mehta; December 1945 the seventh All India Native State Council at Udaipur, 435 delegates, chaired by Nehru; constitution drafted by K. M. Munshi

• Kota — awakening from about 1918; Pandit Nayanuram Sharma, of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh, founds the Hadauti Praja Mandal, 1934, against forced labour; Pt. Abhinna Hari founds the Kota State Praja Mandal at Mangrol, 1939; session at Ramatalai, 1940; Nayanuram murdered; 1945 the crowd captures the Kotwali and hoists the tricolour, the city gates are shut and roads pitted; Maharao Bhim Singh agrees on 16 August 1945 through Sir Omkar Singh of Palayatha, and later removes Diwan Sir Harilal Ghosalia and I.G. Onkar Singh; Bhim Singh becomes Deputy Rajpramukh

• Bundi — Pathik and Ramnarayan Chaudhary; atrocities at Namana; 1931 Praja Mandal under Kantilal; 1936 ban on the newspaper Rajasthan; 1937 president expelled for three years, returns 1941; 1942 with Brij Sundar Sharma; Maharao Ishwari Singh appoints the Constituent Assembly

• Jaisalmer — first newspaper Vijay, 1920; Maheshwari Samaj Youth Council, 1932; Sagarmal Gopa burnt to death in jail on 4 April 1946, having written to Jayanarayan Vyas, Sheikh Abdullah and Nehru; Mithalal Vyas founded the Jaisalmer Praja Mandal in JODHPUR to escape the king; 28 May procession in Jaisalmer with Jayanarayan Vyas

• The Shastri Pact, September 1942 — Hiralal Shastri and Sir Mirza Ismail; five terms: no men or material for the war, free peaceful anti-war campaigning, agitators from British provinces not to be barred, responsible governance as soon as possible, and no direct action against the Maharaja. Result: the motivation for a public movement was almost exhausted; the Azad Front agitated anyway and merged into the Praja Mandal in 1945

• Jaipur's end-game — bicameral legislature dominated by the Maharaja; Praja Mandal wins 3 Council and 27 House seats; 24 July 1947 the king announces accession; Hiralal Shastri Chief Minister with Devishankar Tiwari, Daulatmal Bhandari, Tikaram Paliwal; 30 March 1949 merger, Man Singh Rajpramukh, Udaipur Maha-Rajpramukh, Kota Deputy Rajpramukh

• Alwar — Pt. Harinarayan Sharma, founder of the Untouchability Prevention Association, Valmiki Sangh and Adivasi Sangh; March 1933 the British depose Jai Singh and install Tej Singh; Praja Mandal 1938; January 1944 first session under Bhavani Shankar Sharma; Diwan N. B. Khare suspected of complicity in Gandhi's assassination; merged March 1948

• Bharatpur — Maharaja Kishan Singh (1900-1927) made Hindi the official language and was removed by the British, the boy Bijender Singh installed; Praja Mandal founded at Rewari, outside the state, 1938, under Gopilal Yadav with Master Adityendra treasurer; Satyagraha 21 April 1938; recognised 23 December 1940; first conference 30 December 1940 under Jaynarayan Vyas; Braj Jaya Representative Committee, 22 October 1942, 50 members of whom 7 elected, Praja Mandal winning 27; second session Bayana, 23 May 1945; Wavell's visit 14 January 1947; merged 18 March 1948

• Dholpur — Swami Shraddhanand, 1918; Pt. Krishna Dutt Paliwal founds the Praja Mandal 1936; 12 November 1946 session at Tasim broken up by government-engineered riots; 17 February 1948 Sardar Patel makes the Maharaja relinquish authority

• Karauli — Praja Mandal 1938; Trilok Chand Mathur, Chiranji Lal Sharma, Man Singh; November 1946 conference; July 1947 committee of eleven, the Maharaja rejecting people's representatives

• Other states — Bhupendra Nath Trivedi (Banswara) · Bhogilal Pandya, Haridev Joshi, Gaurishankar Acharya, Shivlal Kotadiya, Bhikhabhai Bhil (Dungarpur) · Amritlal Payek, Chunnilal Prabhakar (Pratapgarh) · Gokul Bhai Bhatt (Sirohi). Jhalawar's kings were themselves progressive. Dungarpur Praja Mandal, 1945

• Three Praja Mandals constituted outside their own state — Jaisalmer's at Jodhpur, Bharatpur's at Rewari, and Mewar's run from Ajmer

• Rajputana-Madhyabharat Sabha — first session 29 December 1919, at the Marwari Pustakalaya, Chandni Chowk, Delhi; President Jamnalal Bajaj; headquarters Ajmer; a sister body of the Rajasthan Seva Sangh with common membership; 1918 also circulates

• The seven Rajasthan members of the AISPC Executive Committee, 1927 — Nayanuram Sharma (Kota) · Shankar Lal Verma (Ajmer) · Jai Narayan Vyas (Jodhpur) · Kanhaiya Lal Kalantri (Phalodi) · Ram Dev Poddar · Bal Kishan Poddar · Trilok Chand Mathur (Karauli)

• Haripura Congress, February 1938 — the states' struggle not to be undertaken in the Congress's name, and independent organisations to be started inside the states. This is why 1938 is a cluster year

• Marwar statutes — notification, Marwar State Gazette, 7 March 1932 · Marwar Public Society Ordinance, 1934 · Marwar Sedition Act (ss. 10-A, 10-B) · Jodhpur Public Societies Act, 1940

• Marwar Lok Parishad — May 1938; declared illegal 29 March 1940; first "dictator" Mathura Das Mathur, arrested 3 April 1940; recognised June 1940; Vyas President from July 1940 and President of the Jodhpur Municipal Board from June 1941; Ladnu session 9 February 1942 under Ranchhoddas Gattani; Responsible Government Day 28 March 1942 and the Chandawal assault

• Balmukund Bissa — Lok Parishad worker; gave up his hunger strike 16 June 1942 after injuries; died at the Windham Hospital, Jodhpur, on 19 June 1942; the police banned his funeral procession

• Mewar Praja Mandal, April 1938 — first session presided by Balwant Singh Mehta, Bhure Lal Baya Vice-President, Manikya Lal Verma Chief Secretary; banned by notification of 24 September 1938; civil disobedience from 4 October 1938; registered under the Mewar Societies Registration Act, 1941

• Udaipur AISPC session — 31 December 1945 to 2 January 1946, 435 delegates, opened by Nehru; the Udaipur gazetteer calls it the ninth session, other accounts the seventh

• Jaisalmer — Praja Parishad attempted by Shiv Shankar Gopa in 1939; Jaisalmer Praja Mandal established by Mithalal Vyas at Jodhpur on 15 December 1945; Maheshwari Yuvak Mandal by Raghunath Singh Mehta, 1932; Sagar Mal Gopa died 4 April 1946

• Bikaner — booklet Bikaner Administration by Amrit Lal Seth; arrests January 1932; Public Safety Act 1932 (Kala Kanoon); judgment 8 January 1934 by D. M. Nanawati; Bikaner Rajya Praja Parishad, 22 July 1942, under Raghubar Dayal Goyal; first Bikaner political conference Raisinghnagar, 30 June-1 July 1946; constitution proclaimed 14 December 1947

• Sirohi — Sirohi Rajya Praja Mandal, 22 January 1939, by Gokul Bhai Bhatt (born 25 February 1899, village Hathal); approved 16 March 1940

• Kota — Praja Pratinidhi Sabha 1918 · Haroti Praja Mandal 1926 · Kota Rajya Praja Mandal 1927, revived after Haripura · fourth session Mangrol, May 1939, under Nayanuram Sharma · session Kota, 23 November 1941, under Abhinna Hari · Lok Sevak Dal · Kotwali captured, August 1942

• The press — Rajputana Times, Ajmer, 8 August 1895, editor Bakshi Laxman Das, with Rajasthan Patrika as its Hindi edition · Rajasthan Samachar by Munshi Samrath Dan Charan (1889 in Saxena, 1898 in the Ajmer gazetteer) · Rajasthan Kesari, Wardha · Naveen Rajasthan, Ajmer, editor Pathik, publisher R. N. Chaudhary, banned and restarted as Tarun Rajasthan · Nav Jyoti, Ajmer, by R. N. Chaudhary · Darbar, Ajmer, 1927, by M. M. Lal Gupta · Praja Sevak, Jodhpur, 1940

• Pamphlets — Popabai ki Pol, distributed 19 September 1929, Vyas sentenced by the Special Tribunal at Nagaur · Marwar Mein Uttardayi Shasan and Jodhpur Ki Sthiti Par Prakash, both by Vyas, 1942 · Bikaner Administration by Amrit Lal Seth

Interview and Mains Angles

• The Marwar Praja Mandal was tolerated for two years and banned within days of receiving Nehru. Did princely states fear their subjects' grievances, or their subjects' affiliations?
• Bikaner's people's conference was founded in Calcutta and Sirohi's in Bombay. What does it mean for a political community to exist everywhere except at home?
• The men who led Bijolia and Begun became officers of the All India States' People's Conference. Should agrarian and constitutional movements be taught as separate chapters at all?
• The Rajputana-Madhya Bharat Sabha wanted to keep the British out of the states' internal affairs. Why does that early position get forgotten in favour of a simpler story about loyalism giving way to nationalism?

Practice

• Practice: Praja Mandal Movements — 61 questions built from this chapter: 53 MCQs, 5 assertion-reason and 3 match-the-following, plus flashcards and one-liners. Two questions turn on points where the scholarly source contradicts the standard summaries.

More in This Series

• Peasant and Tribal Movements — Pathik, Chaudhary and the Marwar Hitkarini Sabha, which this chapter continues
• Political and Social Conditions in the 18th and 19th Centuries — why the movement had to be built state by state
• Caution for Readers — including how we read interested sources, colonial and nationalist alike

Aggregator Watch

Unresolved claims from this box are collected, with what was checked, on the Caution for Readers page.

Sources & Verification

Checked as of 19 August 2026.

The principal source for this chapter is Dr. Vishnu Dayal Mathur, States' People's Conference: Origin and Role in Rajasthan (Publication Scheme, Jaipur and Indore), read directly from the scanned text held by the Internet Archive, identifier in.ernet.dli.2015.131206. It is a scholarly monograph that works from the All India States' People's Conference Papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and it cites its sources by page.

Facts verified from it for this chapter include: that the AISPC functioned in Rajasthan only through local units named Praja Mandal or Lok Parishad, with workers relying on their own resources; that the Jaipur Rajya Praja Mandal was the first founded, in 1931, that it confined its activities to socio-economic regeneration and was not politically active till 1938, and that the Marwar Praja Mandal, established at Jodhpur in 1934, took up political work for the first time in Rajasthan; the founding years of the Kota (1938), Mewar at Udaipur (1938), Alwar (1938), Bharatpur (1939), Jaisalmer (1940) and Bundi (1944) bodies; the founding of the Marwar Praja Mandal in 1934 by Man Mal Jain, Abhai Mal Jain and Chhagan Raj Chopasniwala with the aim of responsible government and civil liberties; the March 1932 notice banning the formation of associations in Marwar; the reception given to Jawaharlal Nehru on 10 March 1936 and his appeal to the people of Jodhpur; the declaration of the Marwar Praja Mandal as unlawful by Prime Minister Sir Donald M. Field; the founding of the Nagrik Adhikar Rakshak Sabha in 1936 by Man Mal Jain and Abhai Mal Jain and its being declared illegal with the leaders arrested; the constitution of the Marwar Lok Parishad, 1938; the establishment of the Mewar Praja Mandal at Udaipur by Manikya Lal Verma; and the founding of people's organisations outside their own states where rulers' measures prevented branches at home — Sirohi at Bombay in 1933, Bikaner at Calcutta in 1936 and Jaisalmer at Jodhpur in 1945.

Separately verified: the first session of the All India States' People's Conference on 17 December 1927 at Bombay, presided over by Dewan Bahadur Ram Chandra Rao, with more than 1,500 delegates from more than 70 states; and the Rajputana-Madhya Bharat Sabha of 1918, its office at Ajmer and its three stated aims. Rajasthan's seven of seventy-five Executive Committee seats at that first session, and the election of B. S. Pathik as Vice-Chairman and R. N. Chaudhary as Provincial Secretary for Rajasthan, Central India and the Punjab States, are from the monograph.

On the partiality of this chapter's main source. Mathur's monograph is a sympathetic scholarly account of a movement, and that is a real bias, in the opposite direction from the colonial gazetteer used in chapter 5a. It is strong on what the Praja Mandals attempted and comparatively thin on what they failed to achieve, and it takes the movement's own framing of events. We use it for what it documents from the AISPC papers — foundings, dates, office-holders, official actions against the bodies — and attribute it by name in the body wherever it is doing evaluative work. The rule is the one set out in section 6 of Caution for Readers, applied to a nationalist source rather than a colonial one, because the rule is about interest, not about which side the interest lies on.

One conflict internal to the source is stated rather than resolved: the monograph gives Jaisalmer Praja Mandal as 1940 in its founding sequence and as formed at Jodhpur in 1945 in its account of externally-founded bodies. Two distinct foundings would reconcile them, but that is inference and is not asserted here.

Flagged rather than asserted: (a) the named office-holders of the Jaipur Praja Mandal and its 1936 reorganisation, which come from summaries rather than from the monograph; (b) the Jaisalmer founding year; (c) named founders for the Bikaner body; and (d) founding dates for the Banswara, Sirohi, Kishangarh, Karauli, Shahpura, Tonk and Jhalawar Praja Mandals, which are not stated in the portion of the monograph read for this chapter; and (e) the founding year of the Dungarpur Rajya Praja Mandal, for which the Rajasthan District Gazetteer gives 1945 and circulated accounts give 1944 — recorded as a conflict rather than resolved.

Added on 28 August 2026, with the source for each.

Checked as of 27 August 2026. Every link below was fetched and returned HTTP 200.

1. The Rajputana-Madhyabharat Sabha is redated from 1918 to 1919, and its aims restated. First session 29 December 1919, Marwari Pustakalaya, Chandni Chowk, Delhi; President Jamnalal Bajaj; headquarters Ajmer; eight named promoters; six stated objects; the Ahmedabad session report listing Khetri, Bhutmia, Sirohi and Bundi Bhil affairs and the Pisangan, Bisau and Bijolia peasant movements. Source: Dr. Vishnu Dayal Mathur, States' People's Conference: Origin and Role in Rajasthan, pp. 23-24, citing the Sabha's own printed Report of Rajputana-Madhyabharat Sabha, 1937-38 (Ajmer, Durga Printing Press) and Shodhak, Vol. 7 Part C, 1978. archive.org, identifier in.ernet.dli.2015.131206. What was wrong: this page previously gave 1918 and an aim of preventing British intervention in the states' internal affairs, on which it built its Type D fault line. What is right: 1919, and aims directed at awakening the states' people and connecting them to the Congress. Corrected 27 August 2026. The 1918 date is still widely printed and may descend from the Congress's Delhi session of December 1918.
2. The seven Rajasthan members of the AISPC Executive Committee of 1927 are named. Nayanuram Sharma (Rajasthan Seva Sangh, Kota), Shankar Lal Verma (Rajasthan Seva Sangh, Ajmer), Jai Narayan Vyas (Marwar Hitkarini Sabha, Jodhpur), Kanhaiya Lal Kalantri (Phalodi), Ram Dev Poddar, Bal Kishan Poddar, Trilok Chand Mathur (Karauli). Source: Mathur, p. 32 footnote. This qualifies the page's earlier suggestion that Ajmer supplied Rajasthan's representation at the first session.
3. The Haripura Congress resolution of February 1938 is added as the cause of the 1938 cluster, quoted in full, together with Mathur's judgement that it inspired the formation of a Rajya Praja Mandal in each state, and its explicit application to Alwar, Kota and Sirohi. Source: Mathur, pp. 57 and 118-119, citing the Congress resolution at Haripura, 1938.
4. The Praja Mandals' dual objective is stated from a Government of Rajasthan source: "(i) Establishment of Responsible government at the estate; (ii) ... expansion of Freedom Movement against the colonial powers." Source: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers, Pratapgarh (2023), Chapter 2 History, section "Social and Political Consciousness / Awakening after Riyasat era". jankalyanfile.rajasthan.gov.in PDF. The same chapter gives Pratapgarh Praja Mandal, 1945, under Chuni Lal Prabhakar and Amrit Lal Payak.
5. Marwar's repressive statutes are named correctly. The March 1932 instrument was a notification in the Marwar State Gazette of 7 March 1932 prescribing imprisonment up to six months; the ordinance is the Marwar Public Society Ordinance of 1934. Sources: K. S. Saxena, The Political Movements and Awakening in Rajasthan (1857 to 1947) (S. Chand, 1971), pp. 209-210, citing Marwar State Gazette 7 March 1932 and File No. 18/5/32, Home Political, National Archives of India archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.131522; and Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Jodhpur, by B. D. Agarwal, Directorate of District Gazetteers, pp. 62-63 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120399. The "Marwar Darbar Public Safety Ordinance, 5 March 1932" of the coaching literature is in neither.
6. The Marwar Lok Parishad chronology after 1938 is added, including the May 1938 founding and Subhas Chandra Bose's Jodhpur stopover, the ban of 29 March 1940 by notification in the Jodhpur Government Gazette (Extraordinary) No. 33, Mathura Das Mathur as first "dictator", Dwarka Nath Kachru's mission for Nehru, the June 1940 recognition, Vyas's election as President in July 1940 and as President of the Jodhpur Municipal Board in June 1941, the Ladnu session of 9 February 1942 under Ranchhoddas Gattani, Responsible Government Day of 28 March 1942 and the Chandawal assault, the May 1944 releases, the Sudhalkar report of 1945, the Dabra agitation and Venkatachari's removal. Sources: Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Jodhpur, pp. 63-66; Saxena, pp. 256-265, citing the contemporary press and Kanhaiya Lal Vaidya's Progressive Jodhpur under British Prime Minister Sir Donald Field.
7. Balmukund Bissa's death is added with its dates. Hunger strike given up 16 June 1942 at 10 p.m. after injuries; temperature above 105 on 19 June; taken unconscious to the Windham Hospital and died soon after; funeral procession banned and the crowd lathi-charged. Source: Saxena, pp. 263-264, citing Hindustan 17 June 1942, The Hindustan Times 22 June 1942 and Harijan 9 July 1942. The Jodhpur district gazetteer records the death and the banned funeral without naming him.
8. The Jaisalmer conflict this page previously refused to resolve is now resolved. Mithalal Vyas established the Jaisalmer Praja Mandal at Jodhpur on 15 December 1945. Sources: Mathur, p. 92, citing Sumnesh Joshi, Rajasthan Mein Swatantrata Sangram ke Sainani (Jaipur, 1976), p. 266; and Saxena, p. 256, citing the file Jaisalmer Ka Jan Andolan, Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. The stray "1940" in Mathur's founding table is best read against Shiv Shankar Gopa's failed attempt to establish a Praja Parishad in Jaisalmer in 1939, recorded in both works. Sagar Mal Gopa's death is also restated: he wrote to the District Judge on 2 April 1946, set himself alight on 3 April, was removed to hospital and died on 4 April 1946; the single-member commission of G. S. Pathak, appointed 27 August 1946, found suicide for fear of further torture by Sub-Inspector Guman Singh. This page previously said he was "burnt to death in jail". Corrected 27 August 2026.
9. Bikaner is rewritten. Vaidya Magha Ram attempted to establish a Bikaner Praja Mandal on 4 October 1936 and was externed for six years, and then formed the body at Calcutta (Mathur, p. 84). The Churu district gazetteer states independently that "the attempt to set up the Bikaner Rajya Praja Mandal in 1935-36 was not successful" and that Mangha Ram Vaid opened a Praja Parishad branch only after Ganga Singh's death in 1943: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers, Churu, by K. K. Sehgal, March 1970, pp. 36-38 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.129008. The Bikaner Rajya Praja Parishad was founded on 22 July 1942 at Rawat Mal Pareekh's house under Raghubar Dayal Goyal (Mathur p. 84; Saxena p. 243, citing Lokmanya 31 July 1942 and Pragati 27 September 1942). The Bikaner Conspiracy Case dates, the booklet Bikaner Administration by Amrit Lal Seth, the Public Safety Act 1932 (Kala Kanoon) and the judgment of 8 January 1934 are from the Churu gazetteer and Saxena pp. 203-206.
10. The Sirohi rows are corrected and a four-way conflict recorded. Sirohi Rajya Praja Mandal, 22 January 1939, by Gokul Bhai Bhatt, approved 16 March 1940 (Mathur, pp. 108-109). The Bombay body is dated 1933 by Mathur's own table, 1934 at Vile Parle by Mathur's own footnote, 1935 by coaching material and 1936 by the Government of Rajasthan's Rajasthan District Gazetteers, Sirohi, by B. N. Dhoundiyal, pp. 414-415 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120405, which also names Bhatt as its first President. This page states the range and asserts no year.
11. The Jaipur entries are corrected in three places. Bajaj presided the first open session on 8-9 May 1938; civil disobedience ran from 1 February 1939 and ended on 19 March 1939 with recognition, not in August 1939; registration followed the communiqué of 9 March 1940 and the state's acceptance of 2 April 1940. The constitutional-reforms committee was appointed on 26 October 1942 under R. S. Hiriannaiya with K. Ishwara Dutta as Secretary, reported in 1943 in 119 paragraphs with a note of dissent by every non-official member, and the houses were inaugurated in September 1945. The Praja Mandal took 3 Council seats and 27 of 31 contested in the Representative Assembly. Sources: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Jaipur, pp. 55-59 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120396; Saxena, pp. 198-199 and 236-239, citing The Hindustan Times 9 May 1938 and the Report of the Committee on Constitutional Reforms, 1943. What was wrong: the "August 1939" agreement. Corrected 27 August 2026.
12. "Azad Front" is corrected to "Azad Morcha", with founders Ram Karan Joshi, B. S. Deshpande, Om Dutt Shastri, Ladu Ram Joshi and Hans D. Roy. Sources: Mathur p. 137; Saxena p. 237, citing Jugal Kishore Chaturvedi. Neither names Baba Harishchandra. Saxena additionally records a Praja Mandal Progressive Party under Chiranji Lal Agarwal and states that "due to the mutual differences, Jaipur could not lead the other States of Rajasthan during the 'Quit India' movement", which is the evidence behind the exam's repeated answer that Jaipur stood aside in 1942.
13. The Mewar founding offices are added. Balwant Singh Mehta presided the first session, Bhure Lal Baya was Vice-President and Manikya Lal Verma Chief Secretary; Mehta had founded the Pratap Sabha at Udaipur in 1915. Source: Mathur, pp. 93-94, citing Sumnesh Joshi p. 463 and Mohan Lal Sukhadia (ed.), Mewar Praja Mandal. The ban notification of 24 September 1938, Baya's internment in Sarara Fort, civil disobedience from 4 October 1938, the Nathdwara arrests and the branches at Ahmedabad and Bombay are from the same pages and from Saxena pp. 216-217, citing Mewar State Notification No. 1P32.
14. The Udaipur session of the AISPC is restated as 31 December 1945 to 2 January 1946, with 435 delegates, opened by Nehru, and its ordinal left open. The Government of Rajasthan's Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Udaipur, by B. D. Agarwal, pp. 62-63, calls it the ninth session archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120409. This page previously called it the seventh. Both are recorded; neither is asserted. Corrected 27 August 2026.
15. The Kota rising is redated from 1945 to August 1942. Sources: Mathur, pp. 106-107, citing the Kota Raj Patra (Extraordinary Issue), August 1942, and Confidential File No. 12133, Mahakma Khas, Kota, Rajasthan State Archives; Saxena, pp. 250-251, citing Govind Sahai. Both record the three-day occupation, the tricolour over the Kotwali, Maharao Bhim Singh's refusal to use force and the dismissal of the Dewan. The Praja Pratinidhi Sabha of 1918, the Haroti Praja Mandal of 1926, the Kota Rajya Praja Mandal of 1927, the fourth session at Mangrol in May 1939 under Nayanuram Sharma, the Kota session of 23 November 1941 under Abhinna Hari and the Lok Sevak Dal are from Mathur pp. 105-106. What was wrong: the year 1945 and the date 16 August 1945, taken from the board textbook. Corrected 27 August 2026.
16. Bundi's two dates are reconciled. The Praja Mandal grew out of the 1926 begar and charai agitation in which Nanakji Bhil was killed, and on 9 July 1944 it was reorganised and renamed the Lok Parishad under Hari Mohan Mathur with Brij Sundar Sharma as Secretary; Maharao Raja Bahadur Singh proclaimed the elected Constituent Assembly on 24 October 1946. Source: Government of Rajasthan, Gazetteer of India, Rajasthan: Bundi, by B. N. Dhoundiyal, Directorate of District Gazetteers, pp. 59-60 and 264 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120820. What was wrong: this page attributed the Constituent Assembly to Maharao Ishwari Singh in 1942. Corrected 27 August 2026. A cataloguing warning for anyone following this up: the archive.org item in.ernet.dli.2015.129011 is titled "Rajasthan Distict Gazetteer Of Bundi" but is in fact the Pali volume. The Bundi text is at in.ernet.dli.2015.120820.
17. Bharatpur's rename is redated from 23 December 1940 to 23 December 1939. Source: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Bharatpur, pp. 76-80, citing the state's own Report on the Administration of Bharatpur State (1939-40), p. 3 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120388. The same volume supplies the 473 detentions, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1937, the Teej Durbar release of August 1940, the loyalist Praja Sahayak and Anjuman Riaya Sabha, the administrator D. G. Mackenzee, I.C.S. appointed in 1928, and the Wavell visit due on 5 January 1947 with the demonstration on the evening of the 4th and the state forces' action on 15 January. What was wrong: the year of the recognition, and the date of the Wavell visit. Corrected 27 August 2026.
18. Dholpur's Tasimo session is documented and its conference chairman corrected. The second session at Tasimo on 12 November 1946, the hired goondas, the volunteer corps of 23 December 1946, the expulsion of the editors of Sainik, Amrit Bazar Patrika and Hindustan in March 1947, Pattabhi Sitaramayya's letter of 30 August 1947, the District Magistrate Satgur Prasad's ban of 11 November 1947, and the conference of 17-18 November 1947 inaugurated by Shanker Rao Deo. Source: Mathur, pp. 128-130, citing the Dholpur Praja Mandal file and File No. 16 of 1947-48, Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. Ram Manohar Lohia does not appear. The 27 February 1948 summons to Delhi is from Mathur p. 130, citing V. P. Menon, and from the Karauli gazetteer. What was wrong: this page gave 17 February 1948. Corrected 27 August 2026.
19. The Karauli 1924 fast is reattributed. Kunwar Madan Singh and his wife Sardar Kanwar began the hunger strike on 28 February 1924, after Madan Singh's satyagraha against begar on 24 February; it was the first satyagraha in the state to last more than one day and its three demands were conceded on the third day. Source: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers, Karauli (2023), Chapter 2 History, section "Karauli during the Nationalist Struggle", citing Venugopal, K., Karauli: Ateet se Vartman, pp. 37-42, and Garg, Damodar Lal, Karauli Rajya ka Itihaas, p. 151. jankalyanfile.rajasthan.gov.in PDF. Thakur Pooran Singh is a real Karauli leader, named by the same gazetteer as leading the non-violent struggle and by Mathur as the Praja Mandal's President by December 1946, but the 1924 fast is not his. The scope of the November 1946 claim is corrected from Mathur p. 131: the demand for responsible government was made "for the first time" in Karauli, not in Rajputana.
20. Alwar's founding is given from the Praja Mandal's own constitution. 1938, by Hari Narayan Sharma and Kunj Behari Lal Modi, with Article 2 of its 1938 Constitution and Rules quoted, and the refusal of registration and the two years as an unregistered body: Mathur, pp. 116-117, citing the Praja Mandal's letter of 24 February 1939 to the Chief Minister of Alwar, File No. 232/C/179/39, Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner. The Government of Rajasthan's Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Alwar, by Maya Ram, pp. 84-86 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120403, instead describes an ineffective association "about the year 1928" and a regular office "about the year 1940", and supplies the 1921 khaddar-cap episode under Brij Narain Acharya and the Kisan meeting at Khera Mangal Singh on 2 February 1946 from the Matsya Secretariat's central records. Both accounts are stated.
21. Shahpura, Banswara, Kushalgarh, Kishangarh and Jhalawar are dated. Shahpura Praja Mandal 1937 by Ramesh Chandra Ojha and Laxmi Dutt Kantia, popular ministry September 1947 under Chief Minister Gokul Lal Asawa; Kushalgarh Praja Mandal 1944; Kishangarh, Tonk, Pratapgarh and Lawa politically conscious only in the forties with nothing tangible until 1947; Jhalawar with no Praja Mandal activity during the war and a Praja Mandal meeting at Mangalpura in 1947 under Kanhaiya Lal Mittal with Chogalal Podar as Secretary. Source: Mathur, pp. 104-105 and 112-113, citing Sumnesh Joshi and, for Jhalawar, Letter No. 495 of 19 May 1947 from the Inspector-General of Police to the Dewan of Jhalawar, File No. 212, Basta No. 51-C, Foreign Office (Secretariat) Records, Jhalawar, Rajasthan State Archives. Banswara Praja Mandal 1945: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Banswara, by K. K. Sehgal, p. 35 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120387; its 35 of 45 seats, ministers Mohan Lal Trivedi and Natwar Lal Bhatt, and Bhupendra Nath Trivedi's ministry of 18 April 1948 are from Mathur p. 108. Jhalawar's 1946 popular ministry with the ruler as a member is from Government of Rajasthan, Gazetteer of India, Rajasthan: Jhalawar, by B. N. Dhoundiyal, p. 191 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120395.
22. Dungarpur's 1945 date survives a third check. Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Dungarpur, by K. K. Sehgal, pp. 37-38 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.120393: "It was in 1945 that the Dungarpur Rajya Praja Mandal came into existence." No source read for this page supports the circulated "26 January 1944". The office-holders arrested on 30 April 1946 are from Saxena p. 252.
23. The press section is built from four sources. The Rajputana Times of 8 August 1895, its Hindi edition Rajasthan Patrika, editor Bakshi Laxman Das and the libel suit; Rajasthan Samachar and Munshi Samrath Dan Charan; the Weekly Darbar of 1927 under M. M. Lal Gupta; and Nav Jyoti, founded by Ram Narayan Chaudhary: Government of Rajasthan, Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Ajmer, by B. N. Dhoundiyal, pp. 665-666 and 677-680 archive.org, in.ernet.dli.2015.129016. That volume dates Nav Jyoti to 1936 in its newspapers chapter and to 1938 in its history chapter, and dates Rajasthan Samachar to 1898 where Saxena, pp. 118-119, dates it to 1889 on a Foreign and Political Department file of November 1889 in the National Archives. Saxena's own "Thursday the 8th August, 1885" for the Rajputana Times fails against its own weekday, 8 August 1885 having been a Saturday and 8 August 1895 a Thursday; his bibliography lists the paper's run as 1895. Rajasthan Kesari, Naveen Rajasthan and Tarun Rajasthan are from Mathur, pp. 20-21. Praja Sevak, Jodhpur, 1940 is from Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Jodhpur, p. 492. Sirohi Sandesh and Arbud Samachar are from the Sirohi gazetteer, p. 416. Riyasat and Princely India as Delhi papers covering the states are from the Churu gazetteer, p. 36.
24. The pamphlets are documented. Popan-Bai-Ki-Pol, distributed at a public meeting on 19 September 1929 by Jai Narayan Vyas and Anand Raj Surana, and the sentences of three to five years passed by the Special Tribunal at Nagaur: Saxena, pp. 208-209, citing the Administrative Report of Jodhpur for 1929-30, p. 15. Marwar Mein Uttardayi Shasan and Jodhpur Ki Sthiti Par Prakash: Saxena, p. 261. The Princely India article of 19 July 1926: Saxena, p. 208 footnote. Bikaner Administration by Amrit Lal Seth: Saxena, p. 204 footnote, on Seth's own presidential address at Beawar on 31 December 1933.
25. The Arya Samaj material is sourced and the Chirol quotation is corrected. Dayananda's Udaipur visit of 11 August 1882 and the Paropkarini Sabha, his death at Ajmer on 30 October 1883, the Sabha's first session at Ajmer on 28 December 1883, the Arya Pratinidhi Sabha in Rajasthan from 1888 and the Sarda brothers: Saxena, pp. 109-111, citing H. B. Sarda's Life of Dayanand Saraswati, the Arya Directory and the Annual Reports of the Arya Pratinidhi Sabha. The D.A.V. College at Ajmer as his memorial: Rajasthan District Gazetteers: Ajmer, p. 106. The Jhalawar Harijan Sewak Sangh of 1932 organised in Rajputana through Ram Narayan Chaudhary, and the opening of state temples in 1940: Gazetteer of India, Rajasthan: Jhalawar, p. 272. Chirol's actual wording is from Sir Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest, Macmillan and Co., 1910, chapter VIII, "The Punjab and the Arya Samaj", pp. 111-114 archive.org, indianunrest00vale, read directly.
26. Two claims are recorded as printed but unsupported, rather than dropped in silence. The "Gentlemen's Agreement" name and its date of 17 September 1942 appear in RPSC question papers and coaching compilations but in none of the three sources that carry the agreement's five terms. The Kishangarh Praja Mandal of 1939 and its named officers survive only inside reproduced answer keys, with no narrative anywhere in the works read here. Both are carried in the Aggregator Watch as things to recognise in an option, not as facts.