Indian History Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 12

In 1864 Sir John Lawrence made Simla the official summer capital, moving the Viceroy and his Council there from Calcutta for the hot months.

His Arthashastra advises the king, in times of famine, to start public works such as forts and irrigation projects and to pay the workers in food.

Castro came to power in Cuba only in 1959 and was not among the founders of the Non-Aligned Movement; he became prominent in it later and chaired the 1979 Havana summit.

The Singpho people of upper Assam and Arunachal Pradesh were brewing tea from the wild Assam tea plant long before the British began tea gardens.

The Treaty of Yandabo, signed on 24 February 1826, ended the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 to 1826. The war broke out when Burmese expansion into Manipur, Assam and the Cachar region brought Burma into conflict with the East India Company; Lord Amherst was Governor-General.

This Spanish conquistador overthrew the Aztec Empire and brought Mexico under Spain between 1519 and 1521. Cortés landed on the Mexican coast in 1519, allied with peoples hostile to the Aztecs such as the Tlaxcalans, and reached the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, where the ruler Moctezuma II received him.

Under the dadni system, European companies gave cash advances to weavers through middlemen to secure cloth for export. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English, Dutch and French companies bought huge quantities of cotton and silk cloth in Bengal and other regions.

A dastak was a free pass that let the English East India Company move goods without paying internal customs duties.

The Sahajiya cult grew out of late Tantric Buddhism in eastern India, especially Bengal, and is often called Sahajayana, a branch of Vajrayana.

The Gwalior Prashasti is a Sanskrit eulogy of the Gurjara-Pratihara king Mihira Bhoja (Bhoja I, about 836–885 CE), and its composer was the poet Baladitya.

The Pallavas, who ruled the Tondaimandalam region around Kanchipuram, issued their earliest copper-plate grants, such as the Mayidavolu and Hirahadagalli plates of Shivaskandavarman, in Prakrit.

Kunzru, a member of the Servants of India Society, founded the Seva Samiti at Allahabad in 1914 to organise social service: relief during famines, floods and epidemics, help to pilgrims at melas, and the spread of education and sanitation.

The Kushanas, who ruled a vast empire from Central Asia to the Ganga valley in the first centuries CE, presented their kings as god-like figures, and the clearest evidence of this comes from their coins and statues.

The Maski minor rock edict in Raichur district, Karnataka, calls the king Devanampiya Asoka, and it was the first inscription found to name him as Ashoka.

Yashovarman ruled Kannauj in the first half of the eighth century, between the age of Harsha and the rise of the Gurjara-Pratiharas.

Mrichchhakatika, meaning 'The Little Clay Cart', is a ten-act Sanskrit play attributed to King Shudraka. The play tells the love story of Charudatta, a generous Brahmin merchant of Ujjayini who has lost his wealth, and Vasantasena, a rich and noble courtesan.

All three statements correctly describe the spinning and weaving machines that drove the British cotton industry in the late eighteenth century.

The Rabatak inscription is written in the Bactrian language using the Greek script, not in Gandhari. The inscription was found in 1993 at Rabatak in northern Afghanistan.

The ploughed field at Kalibangan belongs to the Early Harappan levels, not the mature phase, so statement 2 is wrong.

All three statements about Shankardeva are correct. Shankardeva (Sankaradeva) was the leading Vaishnava saint of Assam in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.