How to get last month/year in java?

Use Joda Time Library. It is very easy to handle date, time, calender and locale with it and it will be integrated to java in version 8.

DateTime#minusMonths method would help you get previous month.

DateTime month = new DateTime().minusMonths (1); 

Your solution is here but instead of addition you need to use subtraction

c.add(Calendar.MONTH, -1);

Then you can call getter on the Calendar to acquire proper fields

int month = c.get(Calendar.MONTH) + 1; // beware of month indexing from zero
int year  = c.get(Calendar.YEAR);

java.time

Using java.time framework built into Java 8:

import java.time.LocalDate;

LocalDate now = LocalDate.now(); // 2015-11-24
LocalDate earlier = now.minusMonths(1); // 2015-10-24

earlier.getMonth(); // java.time.Month = OCTOBER
earlier.getMonth.getValue(); // 10
earlier.getYear(); // 2015