Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. In what year did Mahatma Gandhi return to India from South Africa?
Answer: Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in January 1915, after two decades of residence abroad, mostly in South Africa.
Q. What was satyagraha, and where did Gandhiji first develop this technique?
Answer: Satyagraha was the distinctive technique of non-violent protest that Mahatma Gandhi first forged in South Africa, the same period the historian Chandran Devanesan called “the making of the Mahatma”.
Q. Name the committee whose recommendations led to the “Rowlatt Act”.
Answer: The tough wartime measures were continued on the recommendation of a committee chaired by Sir Sidney Rowlatt, which gave the “Rowlatt Act” its name.
Q. What event caused Gandhiji to call off the Non-cooperation Movement, and in which month and year?
Answer: In February 1922, peasants attacked and torched a police station at Chauri Chaura, killing several constables; this act of violence prompted Gandhiji to call off the movement altogether.
Q. What was the Khilafat Movement?
Answer: The Khilafat Movement (1919-1920) was a movement of Indian Muslims, led by Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, demanding that the Turkish Sultan (Khalifa) retain control of Muslim sacred places and enough territory to defend Islam; Gandhiji joined it to Non-cooperation.
Q. Why did Gandhiji choose salt as the target of his 1930 satyagraha?
Answer: Salt was indispensable in every Indian household, yet people were forbidden from making it even for domestic use and had to buy it at a high price under the state monopoly; targeting this deeply unpopular law let Gandhiji mobilise wide discontent well beyond politically active circles.
Q. Who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, and on what date?
Answer: Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead by Nathuram Godse at his daily prayer meeting on 30 January 1948.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. Name the three localised campaigns Gandhiji led in 1917-18, and where each took place.
Answer: Champaran (1917), securing peasants’ tenure security and freedom to choose their crops; Ahmedabad (1918), a textile mill labour dispute demanding better working conditions; and Kheda (1918), a peasant campaign for remission of taxes after a failed harvest.
Q. What was the Gandhi-Irwin Pact?
Answer: The Gandhi-Irwin Pact (March 1931) was an agreement between Gandhiji and Viceroy Lord Irwin under which civil disobedience would be called off, all prisoners released, and salt manufacture allowed along the coast; Gandhiji secured only an assurance of talks toward independence, not independence itself, which radical nationalists criticised.
Q. What was the prati sarkar of Satara?
Answer: In 1943, younger leaders in the Satara district of Maharashtra set up a parallel government (prati sarkar), with volunteer corps (seba dals) and village units (tufan dals), running people’s courts and constructive work; dominated by kunbi peasants and backed by dalits, it functioned until the 1946 elections.
Q. Why should newspaper reports not be read as unprejudiced sources, according to the chapter?
Answer: Newspapers were published by people who had their own political opinions and world views, which shaped both what was published and how events were reported; a London newspaper’s account of an event would differ from an Indian nationalist paper’s account of the very same event.
Q. What did Justice Broomfield say in his 1922 sentencing speech about Gandhiji, despite being legally bound to sentence him?
Answer: Broomfield said it would be impossible to ignore that Gandhiji was “in a different category from any person” he had tried, and that “in the eyes of millions of your countrymen, you are a great patriot and a leader”, adding he would be pleased if the Government could later reduce the sentence and release him.
Q. What three reasons does the chapter give for the historical significance of the Salt March?
Answer: First, it brought Gandhiji to world attention through heavy European and American press coverage. Second, it was the first nationalist activity with large-scale women’s participation. Third, it forced the British to realise their Raj could not last forever, leading to the Round Table Conferences.
3 3-Mark Questions
Q. How was Mahatma Gandhi perceived by the peasants, according to Shahid Amin’s study?
Answer: Historian Shahid Amin traced how peasants of eastern Uttar Pradesh, during Gandhiji’s February 1921 tour, greeted him with adoring crowds of 10,000-20,000 at small stations and showered him with money. Rumours spread of his miraculous powers: that he could overrule local officials, that his power exceeded the King’s, and that opposing him brought misfortune, a collapsing house, a bitten goat, a field’s wheat turning to sesamum. Known as “Gandhi baba” or “Mahatma”, he appeared to peasants as a saviour who would restore dignity and rescue them from high taxes, reflecting their hopes rather than any literal truth about his powers.
Q. Why were the dialogues at the Round Table Conferences inconclusive?
Answer: The first Conference (November 1930) proceeded without Gandhiji, the pre-eminent Indian leader, making it an exercise in futility. At the second Conference (late 1931), Gandhiji’s claim to represent all of India was directly challenged by three parties: the Muslim League (claiming to speak for Muslims), the Princes (whose territories they said fell outside Congress’s stake), and B.R. Ambedkar (who argued the lowest castes were not truly represented). With no agreement among these competing claims, the Conference ended inconclusively and Gandhiji resumed civil disobedience on his return.
Q. What was Ambedkar’s central objection to Gandhiji’s opposition to separate electorates for the Depressed Classes?
Answer: Ambedkar argued that the Depressed Classes were tied to a religion that, instead of giving them an honourable place, branded them as unfit for ordinary intercourse, and that Hindu society made a “definite attempt… to bolt every possible door” against their advancement. Since they had no independent way of earning a livelihood and faced organised social prejudice, he held that “some share of political power”, which separate electorates would guarantee, was “a paramount necessity” for such a handicapped community to protect itself at all, directly opposing Gandhiji’s view that separate electorates would instead perpetuate their stigma.
Q. How did the Home Department’s Fortnightly Reports frame the Salt March, and why might they have done so?
Answer: The reports consistently downplayed the march, calling it “theatrical” and Gandhiji’s programme “impracticable”, and insisted meetings “excite little or no interest” on the general population. They may have framed it this way because they were based on police information from the localities but often expressed what higher officials wanted to believe, that the movement was not evoking genuine mass enthusiasm, rather than an unfiltered account of what was actually happening on the ground; by April, the same reports had to record the Salt Act being “openly defied” in several towns, showing a gap between the official framing and events.
Q. Why did Congress ministries resign in 1939?
Answer: When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Gandhiji and Nehru, both strongly critical of Hitler and the Nazis, offered Congress’s support to the war effort on the condition that the British promise India independence once hostilities ended. The British refused this offer, and in protest the Congress ministries, which had governed eight of eleven provinces since the 1937 elections, resigned in October 1939.
Q. What do private letters and autobiographies tell us about an individual? How are these sources different from official accounts?
Answer: Private letters can reveal a person’s anger, pain, hopes and frustrations in ways public statements do not, though the line often blurs since letters are sometimes written with an eye to future publication. Autobiographies give a similarly rich, human account, but are retrospective, written from memory, shaped by what the author wants remembered and how they wish to be seen, so a reader must ask what is left out and why. Official accounts, such as the Home Department’s Fortnightly Reports, differ from both: they were compiled by colonial officials keeping watch on those they saw as critical of the government, and often reflect what those officials believed or wanted to believe rather than ground reality.
4 4-Mark Questions
Q. Discuss the organisational work that broadened Gandhian nationalism beyond Gandhiji’s own personal appeal.
Answer: New Congress branches were set up across India, and a series of “Praja Mandals” promoted the nationalist creed within the princely states. Provincial Congress committees were reorganised along linguistic lines rather than British India’s artificial administrative boundaries, and the nationalist message was carried in local languages rather than English, taking it into corners of the country and among social groups previously untouched. Prosperous businessmen and industrialists, such as G.D. Birla, backed the movement, some openly, some tacitly, recognising that British favouritism toward their competitors would end with independence. Between 1917 and 1922, a group of highly talented associates, Mahadev Desai, Vallabh Bhai Patel, J.B. Kripalani, Subhas Chandra Bose, Abul Kalam Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Govind Ballabh Pant and C. Rajagopalachari, drawn from different regions and religious traditions, attached themselves to Gandhiji and in turn inspired countless others to join the Congress.
Q. Describe the Quit India Movement and the role of underground activists such as Jayaprakash Narayan.
Answer: After the Cripps Mission failed in 1942, Gandhiji launched the “Quit India” campaign in August 1942, his third major movement. He was jailed at once, but younger activists organised strikes and acts of sabotage across the country; socialist members of the Congress, particularly Jayaprakash Narayan, were especially active in this underground resistance. In districts such as Satara in the west and Medinipur in the east, “independent” governments were proclaimed; the Satara prati sarkar functioned till the elections of 1946. The British responded with much force, and it still took more than a year to suppress the rebellion; the movement energised very large numbers of young people, who left college for jail, bringing hundreds of thousands of ordinary Indians into the struggle.
Q. What light does Source 7’s 1936 correspondence throw on ideological tension within the Congress?
Answer: The letters show Nehru, as Congress President, increasingly influenced by socialism and speaking passionately against fascism and for workers and peasants, which alarmed conservatives like Rajendra Prasad and Sardar Patel, who threatened to resign from the Working Committee. Prasad’s letter accuses Nehru of acting as “the mouthpiece of the minority” rather than the Congress majority, and of being part of a campaign that treated conservatives as obsolete. Nehru’s reply to Gandhiji admits feeling like “an intolerable nuisance” whose qualities had become “dangerous” for being “harnessed to the wrong chariot” (socialism). Gandhiji’s own letter to Nehru shows him mediating, gently, by treating the dispute as a “tragi-comedy” and urging Nehru to keep the Congress presidency despite the friction. Together, the letters reveal a real socialist-conservative fault line inside the Congress and Gandhiji’s constant, deliberately informal role in managing it.
5 5-Mark Questions
Q. How was Non-cooperation a form of protest? Discuss the variety of ways different social groups participated in it.
Answer: Non-cooperation asked Indians to renounce “all voluntary association” with British government: leaving government schools, colleges and courts, and refusing to pay taxes, a deliberately negative but disciplined form of protest that Gandhiji’s biographer Louis Fischer called “training for self-rule”. Different groups joined on their own terms: students left government institutions, lawyers boycotted courts, and industrial workers mounted 396 strikes in 1921 alone, involving 600,000 workers and costing seven million workdays. In the countryside, hill tribes in northern Andhra broke forest laws, Awadh farmers refused to pay taxes, and Kumaun peasants refused forced labour for officials, often reinterpreting the call to “non-cooperate” to suit their own local grievances rather than following the leadership’s precise instructions. This combination, linked to the Khilafat Movement to draw in India’s Muslim community as well, shook the British Raj more severely than anything since the Revolt of 1857, until the violence at Chauri Chaura led Gandhiji to call it off.
Q. Discuss the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate on separate electorates for the Depressed Classes.
Answer: At the second Round Table Conference, Gandhiji opposed separate electorates for the “Untouchables”, arguing they would “ensure them bondage in perpetuity” and permanently segregate the Depressed Classes from other caste Hindus rather than integrate them; he insisted the real need was to destroy untouchability itself. Ambedkar responded that the Depressed Classes, branded by their own religion as unfit for ordinary intercourse and economically dependent on high-caste Hindus with no independent livelihood, needed “some share of political power” as a “paramount necessity” simply to protect themselves, since Hindu society was actively working to “bolt every possible door” against their advancement. The Conference itself ended inconclusively, and Gandhiji returned to India to resume civil disobedience.
Q. What are the different kinds of sources historians use to reconstruct Gandhiji’s career, and what are the limitations of each?
Answer: Writings and speeches give a public voice, while private letters offer a glimpse of private thought, though the distinction often breaks down since letters are sometimes written with an eye to eventual publication, as with Gandhiji’s own Harijan or Nehru’s “A Bunch of Old Letters”. Autobiographies are similarly rich but retrospective, written from memory and shaped by what the author wants remembered, so a reader must notice what is left out and why. Government records, such as the Home Department’s Fortnightly Reports, are secret-at-the-time documents now open in archives, but reflect what officials believed or wanted to believe rather than a neutral transcript, as with their persistent downplaying of the Salt March’s real impact. Newspapers, English and vernacular, tracked Gandhiji and reported ordinary opinion, but were never neutral, shaped by the political outlook of whoever published them, so a London paper and an Indian nationalist paper covering the same event would differ sharply. Each source therefore has to be read for whose interest and anxiety it reflects, not accepted as a plain record of what happened.
6 6-Mark Questions
Q. In what ways did Mahatma Gandhi transform the nature of the national movement, from 1915 to 1947?
Answer: Before 1915, nationalism was largely an elite phenomenon of lawyers, doctors and landlords, a fact Gandhiji himself named in his 1916 BHU speech. Through Champaran, Kheda and Ahmedabad (1917-18), he first demonstrated a personal, hands-on sympathy for the poor. The Rowlatt satyagraha and, still more, Non-cooperation combined with Khilafat (1920-22) turned nationalism into a genuinely mass phenomenon: hundreds of thousands of peasants, workers and artisans, who came to venerate him as “Mahatma” because he dressed, lived and spoke like them, unlike other leaders, joined the movement, aided by his deliberate use of symbols like the dhoti and charkha. The Salt March (1930) extended this further, bringing world attention, drawing large-scale women’s participation for the first time, and forcing the British to accept some devolution of power was inevitable. At the same time, this expansion exposed real limits: the Gandhi-Ambedkar clash at the Round Table Conferences showed his claim to represent all Indians could be genuinely contested. Quit India (1942) was his last and most explosive mass mobilisation, energising the young especially, though the imprisonment of Congress’s leadership let the Muslim League expand into new ground. In his final months, after the violence of Partition, he redirected the same moral authority toward peacemaking in Calcutta and Delhi, until his assassination on 30 January 1948. Across this arc, Gandhiji turned Indian nationalism from a narrow, professional elite’s project into a genuinely mass movement built on symbolic identification with ordinary Indians, even as its final years also revealed how contested that claim to represent “all of India” really was.
Q. Trace the events from the failure of the Cripps Mission in 1942 to the transfer of power in August 1947, highlighting Gandhiji’s role throughout.
Answer: In spring 1942, Churchill sent Sir Stafford Cripps to India to negotiate a wartime compromise, but talks collapsed once Congress insisted on an Indian Defence Member in the Viceroy’s Executive Council. Gandhiji responded by launching Quit India in August 1942; jailed immediately, he played no direct organisational role in the resulting underground resistance led by figures like Jayaprakash Narayan, though he remained its moral author. Released in June 1944, he held talks with Jinnah seeking Congress-League reconciliation, while Britain’s new Labour government (1945) committed to independence and Viceroy Wavell convened fresh talks. Early-1946 provincial elections hardened communal polarisation, Congress sweeping general seats and the League sweeping Muslim seats, and a summer 1946 Cabinet Mission failed to secure a federal compromise. Jinnah’s Direct Action Day (16 August 1946) triggered bloody riots that spread from Calcutta across Bengal, Bihar, the United Provinces and the Punjab. Mountbatten replaced Wavell in February 1947, and when his own final talks proved inconclusive, he announced British India would be freed and divided, with the transfer of power fixed for 15 August 1947. Gandhiji, notably, was absent from the Delhi celebrations, marking the day instead with a 24-hour fast in riot-torn Calcutta, a final, symbolic statement that freedom bought at the price of Partition and communal violence was not the freedom he had spent his life working for.
7 Case Studies
(A) 1 mark According to this passage, what does the Home Department report about local response to Gandhiji’s civil disobedience meetings in Bengal?
Answer: It reports that the meetings “excite little or no interest” and leave “no profound impression on the general population”, though it does note that women were attending in increasing numbers.
(B) 2 marks Compare this claim with what the chapter’s police secret reports and Time magazine say elsewhere about the response Gandhiji was receiving during the Salt March. What does the contrast suggest?
Answer: Elsewhere, secret police reports describe Gandhiji’s meetings as “very well attended, by villagers of all castes, and by women as well as men”, with thousands of volunteers flocking to the cause, and Time magazine, within a week, shifted from mockery to calling him a “Saint” and “Statesman” precisely because of his “massive popular following”. The contrast suggests the Bengal Fortnightly Report’s claim of “little or no interest” understated the movement’s real reach, and that different arms of the same colonial and press apparatus were not even consistent with each other in how they read the same events.
(C) 3 marks Why might a colonial official have preferred to report that meetings left “no profound impression”, even if the reality on the ground was different?
Answer: Reporting a movement as insignificant reassured superiors that the situation was under control and avoided drawing attention to the state’s own weakening authority; the chapter notes the Home Department was “unwilling to accept” that Gandhiji’s actions had evoked genuine enthusiasm, precisely because such an admission would have meant acknowledging a real threat to colonial rule that officials preferred to downplay rather than confront.
(A) 1 mark According to Gandhiji’s argument in this passage, what did he believe separate electorates for the Depressed Classes would actually achieve?
Answer: He believed separate electorates would not liberate the Depressed Classes but would instead “ensure them bondage in perpetuity”, permanently segregating them from caste Hindus rather than helping to destroy untouchability itself.
(B) 2 marks According to Ambedkar’s argument in this passage, why did he believe political power through separate electorates was a “paramount necessity” for the Depressed Classes?
Answer: Ambedkar argued that Hindu society was actively working to “bolt every possible door” against the Depressed Classes’ advancement, leaving them economically dependent and without any real path to rise; in these circumstances, a share of political power was, in his own words, “a paramount necessity” for a community this handicapped to protect itself in the struggle for life at all.
(C) 3 marks What does Ambedkar say about the economic position of the Depressed Classes, and how does his remedy differ from the one Gandhiji proposes in the passage?
Answer: Ambedkar says the Depressed Classes are economically entirely dependent on the high-caste Hindus for earning their daily bread, with no independent way of living open to them, and that Hindu society tries to bolt every door against their rising in the scale of life; his remedy is some share of political power, through separate electorates, so that the community can protect itself. Gandhiji’s remedy is different: he argues that separate electorates would perpetuate the stigma, and that what is needed is the destruction of untouchability itself, after which there would be no one to give separate electorates to.