Identify the correct chronological order of the establishment of the following…

Concept

A chronological-order question is settled entirely by each item’s own year of establishment: fix the founding year of every institution independently, then arrange those years from earliest to latest.

For colleges founded in colonial India the timeline runs in two broad phases — early Orientalist institutions sponsored by the East India Company to cultivate classical Indian learning and to train its own servants, followed much later by colleges founded by Indian socio-religious reform movements of the late nineteenth century.

Application

1. Sanskrit College, Benares — 1791. Established on the initiative of Jonathan Duncan, the Company’s Resident at Benares, to promote traditional Sanskrit learning; it later became Sampurnanand Sanskrit University.

2. Fort William College, Calcutta — 1800. Founded by Lord Wellesley to train the Company’s young civil servants in Indian languages, laws and customs.

3. Sanskrit College, Poona — 1821. Started in the Bombay Presidency under Mountstuart Elphinstone to support Sanskrit and classical Indian studies; it later grew into Deccan College.

4. Anglo-Vedic College, Lahore — 1886. Founded at Lahore by the Arya Samaj as the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (D.A.V.) institution, a memorial to Swami Dayanand Saraswati that combined Vedic learning with English education; it opened as a school in 1886 and was raised to college status in 1889.

5. Central Hindu College, Benares — 1898. Founded by Annie Besant; it later formed the nucleus of Banaras Hindu University, established in 1916.

Cross-check

• The two Company-sponsored Orientalist foundations — Benares 1791 and Calcutta 1800 — belong to the earliest phase, and the Benares one precedes the Calcutta one by nine years.

• The Poona foundation of 1821 sits in the Presidency-education phase, after the Company’s Orientalist experiments but well before any Indian reform movement had begun founding colleges.

• Lahore (Arya Samaj, 1886) and Benares (Annie Besant and the Theosophical circle, 1898) both belong to the late-nineteenth-century revivalist phase, so the whole earlier block necessarily precedes them; and whether the Lahore D.A.V. foundation is dated to its establishment in 1886 or to its upgrade to college status in 1889, it still falls after 1821 and before 1898, so the order is unaffected.

Result

Arranging the five founding years 1791, 1800, 1821, 1886 and 1898 in ascending order gives Sanskrit College, Benares → Fort William College, Calcutta → Sanskrit College, Poona → Anglo-Vedic College, Lahore → Central Hindu College, Benares, that is (E), (A), (B), (D), (C).