“New Lamps for the Old” was written by Aurobindo Ghosh — option 2.

What it was. It is a series of articles that the young Aurobindo published in the Bombay journal Indu Prakash in 1893–94, soon after his return from England. Written when he was barely twenty-one, they are among the earliest open attacks on the methods of the early Congress from within nationalist ranks.

What he argued. Aurobindo dismissed the Congress of the day as a body of the English-educated middle class that confined itself to petitions, prayers and protest — the “mendicant policy”. He wrote that it had no contact with the mass of the people, that appealing to British justice was futile, and that a national movement must rest on the peasantry and the poor if it was to have any force. The title inverts the tale from the Arabian Nights, in which Aladdin is tricked into giving up the old lamp with power in it for a shiny new one — his point being that India had exchanged its own sources of strength for imported and useless forms.

Why it matters historically. The series marks the beginning of the split between Moderates and Extremists that came into the open at the Surat session of 1907. The articles were cut short when the editor grew alarmed at their tone, but the argument in them — that India must rely on its own strength rather than British goodwill — became the core of the Extremist position. Aurobindo went on to edit Bande Mataram, was tried in the Alipore Bomb Case, and after 1910 withdrew to Pondicherry and to a life of philosophy and yoga.

Hence, the answer is Aurobindo Ghosh.