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HCS (Haryana)Stage 2: Main Written Examination

Modern Indian History (Mid-18th Century to the Present)

What the official syllabus says

General Studies-I (Paper III), Main Written Examination:

  • Modern Indian history from about the middle of the eighteenth century until the present - significant events, personalities, issues.

Topics in detail

The line runs from about the 1750s to the present and asks for events, personalities and issues. The national movement has its own page, and so does India after 1947.

India in the mid-eighteenth century

  • The decline of the Mughal Empire after Aurangzeb (1707): causes and debates
  • Successor and regional states: Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad; the Marathas under the Peshwas; the Sikh misls and Ranjit Singh; Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan; the Jats and Rajputs
  • Nadir Shah’s invasion (1739), Ahmad Shah Abdali and the Third Battle of Panipat (1761)

The British conquest

  • The European companies: Portuguese, Dutch, English, French; the Carnatic Wars
  • Plassey (1757), Buxar (1764) and the Diwani of Bengal (1765)
  • The Anglo-Mysore, Anglo-Maratha and Anglo-Sikh wars
  • Expansion by policy: Wellesley’s Subsidiary Alliance, Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse, the annexation of Awadh (1856)

Colonial administration

  • Constitutional steps: the Regulating Act (1773), Pitt’s India Act (1784), the Charter Acts (1813, 1833, 1853), the Government of India Act (1858)
  • The later reforms: the Indian Councils Acts (1861, 1892, 1909), the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935
  • Civil services, police, army and judiciary under the Company and the Crown
  • Governors-General and Viceroys and what each is known for (Warren Hastings, Cornwallis, Wellesley, Bentinck, Dalhousie, Ripon, Curzon)

Colonial economy

  • Land revenue systems: the Permanent Settlement (1793), Ryotwari and Mahalwari
  • Commercialisation of agriculture, peasant indebtedness and famines
  • Decline of handicrafts (deindustrialisation) and the growth of modern industry (cotton, jute, steel)
  • The drain of wealth: Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt
  • Railways, posts and telegraph, irrigation canals and their purposes

Education, press and social reform

  • Education policy: the Charter Act of 1813, Macaulay’s Minute (1835), Wood’s Despatch (1854), the Hunter Commission (1882)
  • The press and its regulation (the Vernacular Press Act, 1878)
  • Reform movements: the Brahmo Samaj (Raja Rammohan Roy), the Prarthana Samaj, the Arya Samaj (Swami Dayanand Saraswati), the Ramakrishna Mission (Swami Vivekananda), the Theosophical Society, the Aligarh movement (Sir Syed Ahmad Khan), the Singh Sabha movement
  • Movements of the depressed classes: Jyotiba Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj, Sree Narayana Guru, Periyar’s Self-Respect Movement
  • Reforms for women: abolition of sati (1829), the Hindu Widows’ Remarriage Act (1856, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar), girls’ education (Savitribai Phule)

Early resistance

  • Peasant and tribal uprisings: the Sanyasi-Fakir rebellion, the Santhal rebellion (1855–56), the Indigo revolt (1859–60), the Deccan riots (1875), Birsa Munda’s movement
  • The Revolt of 1857 (see The Freedom Struggle)

Since 1947

  • The landmarks that “until the present” brings in: the Constitution, planning, the Green Revolution, the wars of 1962, 1965 and 1971, the Emergency (1975–77), the economic reforms of 1991 (detail on Post-Independence Consolidation and Reorganisation)

Overlaps

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