Indian History Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 31

When the British left in 1947, India had, besides the provinces under direct British rule, about 565 princely states whose rulers had accepted British paramountcy.

Guru Gobind Singh died at Nanded in 1708, and before his death he had sent Banda Singh Bahadur to Punjab to lead the Khalsa against Mughal authority.

The Vernacular Press Act was enacted in 1878 by Lord Lytton to silence Indian-language newspapers, which had begun to criticise British rule sharply, especially over the famine and the cost of the Delhi Durbar.

Lord Curzon announced the partition of Bengal on 19 July 1905 and it came into effect on 16 October 1905, splitting the province into a Muslim-majority eastern half and the rest of Bengal.

Chola inscriptions use a separate term for every kind of land grant, and tirunamattukkani is the land whose produce was set apart for a temple.

Jyotirao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Truth Seekers' Society, at Pune in 1873 to fight caste rank and priestly control in Maharashtra.

After the Battle of Buxar in October 1764, Robert Clive concluded the Treaty of Allahabad with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II in 1765, and the emperor granted the Company the Diwani, the right to collect the revenue of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha.

A Portuguese fleet under Lourenco de Almeida, son of the first Portuguese Governor in India, was driven to the coast of Ceylon in 1505, and the Portuguese soon made a treaty with the ruler of Kotte and built a fort at Colombo.

The Bardoli Satyagraha began in February 1928 in Bardoli taluka of Surat district in Gujarat, after the Bombay government raised the land revenue by about twenty-two per cent in a year when the crop had already been poor.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke up in 1991: a failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in August that year destroyed the centre's authority, the republics declared independence one after another, and on 25 December 1991 Gorbachev resigned.

The Third Battle of Panipat was fought on 14 January 1761 between the Maratha army led by Sadashivrao Bhau, with Vishwasrao the Peshwa's son, and Ahmad Shah Abdali, also called Durrani, supported by the Rohillas and the Nawab of Awadh.

The Amatya, also called the Majumdar, kept the accounts of the kingdom and checked the income and expenditure of every district, which makes him the finance member of the eight.

The Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817 to 1818 was settled by a set of separate treaties with the Maratha houses, and the one with the Holkar chief of Indore was signed at Mandsaur, or Mandeshwar, in January 1818.

Jatindranath Mukherjee, known as Bagha Jatin, planned an armed rising against the British with German help during the First World War.

Ibrahim Lodi was the last ruler of the Lodi dynasty and the last Sultan of Delhi; he was killed in the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, where Babur defeated him and began Mughal rule in India.

India's village iron smelters were ruined by two pressures at once. Cheap iron and steel made in British factories was brought into India in large quantities from the middle of the nineteenth century, and local smiths could not match its price, so demand for their metal fell away.

Dharmapala, the second and greatest ruler of the Pala dynasty of Bengal and Bihar, founded the Vikramshila monastery and university in the late eighth century in what is now Bhagalpur district of Bihar, and he also restored and supported the older university at Nalanda.

The Battle of Swally was fought in November 1612 off Suvali, a village near Surat on the Gujarat coast. A small English squadron under Captain Thomas Best defeated a larger Portuguese fleet, and the victory ended the belief that the Portuguese could not be beaten at sea in Indian waters.

The town on the Bhagirathi that later became Murshidabad was founded as Maksudabad in the reign of Akbar, and it kept that name until the Bengal governor Murshid Quli Khan shifted his seat there in the early eighteenth century and renamed it after himself.

He founded the Suryavamsi Gajapati dynasty of Odisha in 1435. Kapilendra Deva was a minister who took the throne when the Eastern Ganga line ended, and he built the largest empire Odisha ever had, stretching from the lower Ganga in the north to the Kaveri in the south.