Indian National Congress: Early Phase & Moderates Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

How many delegates actually attended the Congress's own historic first session, in December 1885?

Question 2

What particular religious and social reform society did Mahadev Govind Ranade himself actually help lead?

Question 3

What overall picture do these several separate regional associations together actually show?

Question 4

What association was actually formed at Bombay, in 1885, just months before the Congress itself?

Question 5

What genuinely serious reason actually forced the Congress's own first session to actually move to Bombay?

Question 6

What did the Ilbert Bill of 1883 actually propose to change?

Question 7

What full-length book did Dadabhai Naoroji himself actually write, laying out the Drain of Wealth theory in full?

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About Indian National Congress: Early Phase & Moderates

Long before the Congress itself was founded, a whole series of early political associations had already begun demanding a greater Indian voice in governance. This quiz starts with those precursor bodies, the Landholders' Society and British Indian Association, the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the Indian Association, and the East India Association, and with the Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883 that helped push Indian public opinion toward a single, unified national platform.

It then covers the founding of the Indian National Congress itself in December 1885, Allan Octavian Hume's own pivotal role, the debated "safety valve" theory of its origins, and its very first sessions and presidents, from W.C. Bonnerjee at Bombay through to Badruddin Tyabji, George Yule, and William Wedderburn.

A large part of this quiz is then devoted to the individual Moderate leaders who dominated the Congress in these early decades: Dadabhai Naoroji, the "Grand Old Man of India" and author of the Drain of Wealth theory, along with Surendranath Banerjee, Pherozeshah Mehta, Mahadev Govind Ranade, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale.

It closes with the Moderates' own distinctive methods and demands, their famous reliance on petition, prayer, and protest, the Indian Councils Act of 1892 that their agitation helped bring about, and the mounting criticism, from Lord Dufferin's dismissal of the Congress as a "microscopic minority" to the more radical nationalists' own charge of "political mendicancy", that would soon give rise to a far more assertive phase of the freedom struggle.