Gharib Hindustan was written by Mohd. Wali Hassan — option 2, as recorded in the Commission’s final answer key.

The context of the ban. The year 1930 was the year of the Civil Disobedience Movement. Gandhi’s Dandi March in March 1930 was followed in Bihar by a vigorous no-tax and salt satyagraha, particularly in Champaran, Saran and Patna, and by an anti-chaukidari-tax campaign that spread through the countryside. The government responded with mass arrests and with a sweeping use of its powers over the printed word.

The legal machinery of censorship. The British had built up a formidable set of press laws over seventy years. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 had singled out Indian-language newspapers for control. The Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act of 1908 and the Indian Press Act of 1910 allowed magistrates to demand security deposits from presses and to forfeit them for “objectionable” matter. Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, the sedition provision, covered the authors themselves, and the Press (Emergency Powers) Act of 1931 was passed to extend these powers still further during the Civil Disobedience years. Under such provisions hundreds of books and pamphlets in Urdu, Hindi and Bengali were proscribed, and their titles survive in the government’s own lists of banned literature.

Why such books mattered. Cheap tracts and pamphlets in the vernacular reached a far wider audience than English newspapers, particularly among those who could not read English, so the colonial administration treated them as more dangerous than the metropolitan press. The record of what was banned is now one of the main sources for what ordinary nationalist opinion in the provinces actually looked like.

Hence, the answer is Mohd. Wali Hassan.