Indian History Mixed Quiz: Set 31

The correct answer is A, Sangama Dynasty. The Vijayanagara kingdom was founded in 1336 by two brothers, Harihara and Bukka, who belonged to the Sangama family, and the line is therefore called the Sangama dynasty. Their capital, Vijayanagara, stood on the south bank of the Tungabhadra near modern Hampi in Karnataka. Four dynasties ruled the kingdom one after another, the Sangama, the Saluva, the Tuluva and the Aravidu. D is wrong because the Tuluva dynasty came third and gave the kingdom its most famous ruler, Krishnadeva Raya, who reigned in the early sixteenth century, but it did not found the state. B and C are wrong because Nagama and Soma were never ruling houses of Vijayanagara. The kingdom’s long rivalry with the Bahmani sultanate ended badly at the battle of Talikota in 1565, when the combined Deccan sultanates defeated Rama Raya. Exam tip: Vijayanagara founded in 1336 by Harihara and Bukka of the Sangama dynasty; the order of dynasties is Sangama, Saluva, Tuluva, Aravidu.

The correct answer is A, 1905. 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. The reason given in public was that Bengal had grown too large to administer, but the real aim was to weaken the nationalist movement there by dividing Hindus and Muslims. The protest against it began the Swadeshi and boycott movement, in which foreign cloth was burnt and Indian goods, schools and banks were promoted, and Rabindranath Tagore's song Amar Sonar Bangla belongs to those days. The anger was so wide that the partition was finally cancelled in 1911, when the capital was also moved from Calcutta to Delhi. B is wrong because 1901 is the year Queen Victoria died. C is wrong because 1907 is the year of the Surat split in the Congress. D is wrong because 1911 is the year the partition was revoked, not made. Exam tip: announced in 1905 by Curzon, revoked in 1911 under Hardinge.

The correct answer is A, Guru Angad Dev. The second Guru standardised and popularised Gurmukhi, the script in which the hymns of the Gurus were written down, and this made it possible to preserve the teaching of the movement in the language its followers actually spoke. Option B, Guru Amar Das, the third Guru, is remembered for strengthening the langar, the free community kitchen where people of all castes ate together, and for organising the manji system of preaching centres. Option C, Guru Ram Das, the fourth Guru, founded the city of Amritsar. Option D, Guru Nanak Dev, the first Guru and founder of the faith, preached one formless God, the remembrance of the divine name and honest labour, and travelled widely on his udasis, but the script itself is credited to his successor.

The correct answer is C, Mehrgarh. Mehrgarh, on the Bolan river in the Kachi plain of Baluchistan, is the earliest known farming village in the Indian subcontinent, occupied from about 7000 BCE. Its people were among the first in the region to grow wheat and barley and to rear sheep, goats and cattle, and the site records the long shift from hunting and gathering to settled village life. Archaeologists have found mud-brick houses, storage pits, burials with goods placed beside the dead, and some of the earliest evidence anywhere of cotton and of drilled teeth. Mehrgarh is treated as the forerunner of the Harappan civilisation. Option A is wrong because Hallur, in Karnataka, is a southern neolithic and megalithic site known for early iron. Option B is wrong because Chiraud, or Chirand, in Bihar is a neolithic site much later than Mehrgarh and famous for bone tools. Option D is wrong because Burzahom, in Kashmir, is known for pit dwellings and is also later. Exam tip: Mehrgarh of about 7000 BCE is the earliest village with wheat and barley, Burzahom has pit houses and Chirand has bone tools.

The correct answer is D, Amatya. 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. Option A is wrong because the Peshwa was the chief minister who looked after general administration and stood in for the ruler; under the later rulers the office swallowed the state, but it was never the finance department. Option B is wrong because the Sachiv, also called Surnavis or Shuru Nawis, handled royal correspondence and checked the wording of letters and grants. Option C is wrong because the Sumant, also called Dabir, was the minister for foreign affairs and dealt with envoys of other states. A useful way to hold this is to fix three pairs: Amatya with money, Sachiv with letters and Sumant with foreign states.

The correct answer is D, Charter Act – 1833. This Act ended the last trading rights of the East India Company, its monopoly of trade with China and of the tea trade, and turned the Company into a purely administrative body holding India in trust for the British Crown. The same Act made the Governor-General of Bengal the Governor-General of India, with William Bentinck the first to hold that title, gave him alone the power to legislate for the whole of British India, and added a Law Member to his council, a post first held by Macaulay, who led the work on a common code of law. A is wrong because the Regulating Act of 1773 was only the first step towards control, setting up a Supreme Court at Calcutta. B is wrong because Pitt's India Act of 1784 created the Board of Control and the system of dual government. C is wrong because the Charter Act of 1813 opened Indian trade to all British merchants but kept the Company's monopoly of trade with China and in tea. Exam tip: 1813 – Indian trade opened except tea and China; 1833 – that exception also removed.

The correct answer is B, Vishnu. The Alvars were the twelve Vaishnava saint-poets of the Tamil country, active roughly between the sixth and the ninth centuries, whose hymns were later gathered as the Divya Prabandham and sung in temples. Option A is the standard trap: the devotees of Shiva in the same region and the same centuries were the sixty-three Nayanars, and questions often swap the two groups. Options C and D are wrong because neither Surya nor Shakti had a comparable Tamil movement of this kind, though local cults existed. Two further details are worth remembering: Andal was the one woman among the Alvars and Karaikkal Ammaiyar among the Nayanars, and these singers composed in Tamil rather than Sanskrit, which is why the Bhakti movement is said to have begun in the south and travelled north.

The correct answer is B, Arikamedu. Arikamedu, on the Ariyankuppam river near Puducherry on the Coromandel coast, began as a small fishing settlement and grew into a busy port that traded with the Romans and the Greco Roman world in the first centuries of the common era. Excavations there have brought out Roman amphorae that carried wine and olive oil, red glazed Arretine ware, glass and stone beads, lamps and Roman coins, along with the local rouletted pottery, which is why the site is identified with the Poduke named in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. A is wrong because Badami in Karnataka was the inland capital of the Chalukyas, known for its rock cut cave temples. C is wrong because Lothal in Gujarat is a Harappan site with a dockyard, far older and on the western coast. D is wrong because tulapurushadana was a ritual of weighing oneself against gold and giving it away, not a place at all. Exam tip: Arikamedu near Puducherry is the Poduke of Roman trade; Lothal is the Harappan dock in Gujarat.

The correct answer is C, 1761. 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 Marathas were defeated with very heavy losses, and Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao died within months. Option A is wrong because 1781 falls in the First Anglo-Maratha War, which ended in the Treaty of Salbai in 1782. Option B is wrong because by 1851 the Maratha confederacy had already been dissolved after 1818 and Punjab too had been annexed. Option D is wrong because 1831 belongs to the period of Company dominance and no Panipat battle was fought then. The three battles of Panipat are 1526, 1556 and 1761.

The correct answer is D, A, B and C. 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. That paramountcy lapsed with independence and every ruler had to accede either to India or to Pakistan; Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon, working through the States Department, persuaded almost all of them to sign an Instrument of Accession. Statements A and B therefore both describe princely states. Statement C is also true, since several, among them Himachal Pradesh, Manipur and Tripura, were kept as separate administrative units and became full states only later. Statement D is false, because Goa, Daman and Diu were Portuguese and Pondicherry was French, European possessions and never princely states. Option A is wrong because it leaves out statement C. Options B and C are wrong because each includes the false statement D. Exam tip: about 565 princely states, Patel and V. P. Menon, the Instrument of Accession, and Goa and Pondicherry as European colonies.

The correct answer is C, Shankaracharya. Writing in the eighth century, he argued that Brahman alone is real, that the individual soul is not different from Brahman, and that the world as ordinarily perceived is the work of maya; this is Advaita, non-dualism. Option A, Ramanujacharya, taught Vishishtadvaita or qualified non-dualism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in which souls and matter are real attributes of one supreme being, and he made devotion to Vishnu central. Option B, Madhvacharya, taught Dvaita or dualism, holding that God and the soul are eternally distinct. Option D, Vallabhacharya, taught Shuddhadvaita, pure non-dualism, and founded the Pushtimarg school of Krishna devotion to which Surdas belonged. Nimbarka, with his Dvaitadvaita, completes the set of five acharyas that examiners ask students to match.

The correct answer is C, 1991. 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 next day the Soviet flag came down from the Kremlin and fifteen separate countries took the place of the USSR, with Russia as its successor state. Most of them joined the Commonwealth of Independent States formed by the Alma-Ata declaration of December 1991. Option A is wrong because 1990 saw only the reunification of Germany and the first stirrings of sovereignty in the republics. Option B is wrong because 1989 was the year the Berlin Wall fell and eastern Europe turned away from communism, while the Soviet Union itself stayed intact. Option D is wrong because by 1992 the break-up was already complete. Exam tip: Berlin Wall falls 1989 → Germany reunited 1990 → USSR dissolved 1991, ending the Cold War.

The correct answer is B, charities and religious affairs. The Panditrao was the ecclesiastical head in the Ashta Pradhan, fixing the dates of religious ceremonies, supervising grants to temples and learned men, and punishing offences against religious custom. Option A is wrong because foreign affairs belonged to the Sumant, also called the Dabir, who received and sent envoys. Option C is wrong because accounts and finance belonged to the Amatya or Majumdar, who audited district income and expenditure. Option D is wrong because justice was the work of the Nyayadhish, who decided civil and criminal cases on the basis of custom and the old law books. Note also that the Panditrao and the Nyayadhish were the two ministers who were not given a military command, unlike the other six members of the council.

The correct answer is A, 1896 INC session. Vande Mataram was first sung on a political occasion at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896, and it was Rabindranath Tagore who set the tune and sang it there. The song had been written earlier by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in Sanskritised Bengali and placed in his novel Anandamath, published in 1882. After the partition of Bengal in 1905 it became the cry of the Swadeshi movement, and the Constituent Assembly later gave it the status of the national song, to be honoured equally with the national anthem. B is wrong because the 1903 session came seven years after that first singing. C is wrong because the Calcutta session of 1911 is remembered for the first singing of Jana Gana Mana. D is wrong because the 1900 session has no such first to its name. Exam tip: Vande Mataram was written in 1882 in Anandamath and first sung in 1896; Jana Gana Mana was first sung in 1911.

The correct answer is B, Awadhi. Tulsidas retold the story of Rama in the Awadhi speech of eastern Uttar Pradesh, which put the epic within reach of people who could not read Sanskrit and made the Ramcharitmanas the most widely recited devotional work of north India. Option A, Braj, was the language of Surdas, whose Sursagar sings of the childhood of Krishna, and of much of the Krishna poetry of the Ashtachhap poets. Option C, Maithili, was the language of Vidyapati of Mithila. Option D is wrong, and it is the trap in this question: the Sanskrit Ramayana of Valmiki is a different and far older work, and the whole point of Tulsidas was to compose in the spoken language. Tulsidas also wrote the Vinay Patrika and the Hanuman Chalisa is traditionally attributed to him.

The correct answer is C, Satyashodak Samaj – Maharashtra. Jyotirao Phule founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Truth Seekers' Society, at Pune in 1873 to fight caste rank and priestly control in Maharashtra. Phule, helped by his wife Savitribai, had already opened schools for girls and for children of the castes then called low, and in his book Gulamgiri he compared the state of the Shudras with that of slaves. The Samaj arranged marriages without Brahmin priests and spoke for peasants, workers and women. A is wrong because the Satnami movement was led by Guru Ghasidas among the leather-working castes of Chhattisgarh, not in Punjab. B is wrong because the Matua sect was started by Harichand Thakur among the Namasudras of Bengal, not in Tamil Nadu. D is wrong because the Arya Samaj was founded by Dayanand Saraswati in 1875 and was strongest in Punjab and north India, not Kerala. Exam tip: Phule – Satyashodhak Samaj, Pune 1873, Gulamgiri; Ghasidas – Satnami, Chhattisgarh.

The correct answer is C, 1699. On Baisakhi in 1699 at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh initiated the first five volunteers, the Panj Pyare, with the ceremony of the double-edged sword and created the Khalsa, giving its members the five articles of faith and the names Singh and Kaur. Option A is wrong because 1604 is the year Guru Arjan Dev completed the Adi Granth and installed it at the Harmandir Sahib. Option B is wrong because 1675 is the year Guru Tegh Bahadur was executed at Delhi under Aurangzeb, the event that preceded Guru Gobind Singh's accession. Option D is wrong because 1708 is the year Guru Gobind Singh died at Nanded, after declaring the Guru Granth Sahib the eternal Guru. Holding these four years in order is the quickest way to clear a whole family of questions.

The correct answer is B, the Suhrawardi order. Established in India at Multan by Shaikh Bahauddin Zakariya, it held that a mystic could accept land, wealth and office from the state and still lead a spiritual life, and its shaikhs worked closely with the Sultans of Delhi. Option A, the Chishti order, took the opposite view: its masters refused state grants, lived on futuh or unasked offerings, kept their hospices open to all and deliberately stayed away from court, which is one reason the order became the most popular in India. Option C, the Firdausi order, was a smaller branch that flourished mainly in Bihar under Shaikh Sharafuddin Yahya Maneri. Option D, the Naqshbandi order, arrived later, in the Mughal period, and is associated with Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and with opposition to practices it considered un-Islamic, including sama.

The correct answer is C, Guru Arjan Dev. The fifth Guru gathered the hymns of his predecessors along with verses of saints such as Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and Sheikh Farid, and completed the Adi Granth in 1604, installing it in the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar with Baba Buddha as the first granthi. Option A is wrong because Guru Nanak composed a large part of the hymns but did not compile the volume; the collection was made four Gurus later. Option B is wrong because Guru Angad is remembered for giving the Gurmukhi script its standard form and for continuing the langar, not for compiling scripture. Option D is wrong because Guru Hargobind, the son of Guru Arjan Dev, is remembered for the two swords of miri and piri and for building the Akal Takht in front of the Harmandir Sahib.

The correct answer is B, Ajmer. Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, remembered as Gharib Nawaz or helper of the poor, brought the Chishti order to India towards the end of the twelfth century and settled at Ajmer in Rajasthan, where his tomb became one of the most visited shrines in the subcontinent for Hindus and Muslims alike. Option A, Delhi, holds the tombs of his successors Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki, Nizamuddin Auliya and Nasiruddin Chiragh-i-Dehlavi, which is why it is the most tempting wrong answer. Option C, Multan, was the seat of Shaikh Bahauddin Zakariya of the rival Suhrawardi order. Option D, Fatehpur Sikri, is where Shaikh Salim Chishti lived; Akbar built his new capital near the saint’s hospice in the sixteenth century, and the white marble tomb there is his, not Moinuddin’s.