Which among the following events happened earliest?
- Swami Dayanand established Arya Samaj
- Dinabandhu Mitra wrote Neeldarpan
- Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Anandmath
- Satyendranath Tagore became the first Indian to succeed in the Indian Civil Services Examination
Explanation
Event (b) is correct
- Dinabandhu Mitra wrote Neel Darpan (Mirror of Indigo), a Bengali play in 1860 that depicted the oppression of indigo farmers.
- The play was translated into English by Michael Madhusudan Dutta.
Event (a) is incorrect
- Swamy Dayanand Saraswati spearheaded social and religious reform in North India.
- In 1875, he founded the Arya Samaj in Bombay to reform Hinduism. Later, its branches were established in different places, including Lahore, in 1877
Event (c) is incorrect
- Anandmath (1882), a novel by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, is based on the Sanyasi Rebellion.
- The Sanyasi Rebellion was a series of conflicts in the late 18th century between the English East India Company and a group of sannyasis and fakirs. Although the then Governor General Warren Hastings (1773-85) was able to control the Sanyasi raids, the uprisings continued until 1800
- The song Vande Mataram was composed in Sanskrit by Bankimchandra Chatterji in his novel Anand Math. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was referred to as “the sage of nationalism” by Aurobindo Ghosh for his brilliant compositions, such as Vande Mataram. Another important work of his is Devi Chaudhurani (1884). It was later translated into English by Subodh Chunder Mitter.
Event (d) is incorrect
- The Indian Civil Service (ICS) was started in 1855 and the first batch joined in 1856. Initially, the ICS was an all-white affair, but the elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore, Satyendranath Tagore, became the first Indian to qualify for the ICS in 1863. Satyendranath was allotted Bombay Presidency Cadre and retired after more than 30 years of service.
