Indian History Quiz: Rajput Kingdoms and the Tripartite Struggle

The correct answer is A, Prithviraja III. The Chahamanas, known in later tradition as the Chauhans, ruled from Shakambhari and then from Ajmer, and their most famous ruler was Prithviraja III, the Rai Pithora of the ballads, who defeated Muhammad Ghori at Tarain in 1191 and was defeated and killed by him there in 1192. Option B, Vigraharaja II, was an earlier ruler of the house and is far less known than his namesake Vigraharaja IV, who took Delhi from the Tomaras. Option C, Prithviraja I, was an eleventh-century ancestor remembered only in genealogies. Option D, Vasudeva, is named in inscriptions as the founder of the line in the sixth century, but nothing of his reign is known. The question tests whether a candidate can pick the ruler of Tarain fame from similar dynastic names.

The correct answer is D, the Gurjara-Pratihara dynasty. The Pratiharas held western India and Rajasthan, the natural route from Arab-held Sindh into the Ganga plain. Nagabhata I checked the Arab advance in the middle of the eighth century, and his successors kept them confined to Sindh, which is why the Arab writer Sulaiman called the Pratihara ruler the greatest enemy of the Muslims of his time. Option A is wrong because Gupta rule had ended in the sixth century, long before the Arabs reached Sindh in 712. Option B is wrong because the Cholas were a southern power whose expansion was towards Sri Lanka and South-East Asia. Option C is wrong because the Palas ruled Bengal and Bihar in the east, far from the Arab frontier, and their wars were with the Pratiharas and Rashtrakutas over Kannauj.

The correct answer is C, Maharana Kumbha. Rana Kumbha of the Sisodia house of Mewar was both a builder and a scholar: he raised the fort of Kumbhalgarh and the Vijaya Stambha at Chittorgarh and wrote on music, the Sangeet Raj being the best known of his works, along with commentaries on the Gita Govinda. Option A is wrong because Rana Sanga is remembered as the soldier who fought Babur at Khanwa in 1527. Option B is wrong because Maharana Pratap, of the later sixteenth century, is remembered for the battle of Haldighati against Akbar's army and for refusing submission, not for writing. Option D is wrong because Udai Singh is remembered for founding Udaipur after the fall of Chittor and for the siege of 1568. Kumbha is the one Mewar ruler asked about as an author.

The correct answer is B, Kannauj. Kannauj on the upper Ganga had been Harsha's capital, and whoever held it was accepted as the paramount power of north India, so the Gurjara-Pratiharas, the Palas and the Rashtrakutas fought over it for more than a century. Option A is wrong because Pataliputra, the capital of the Mauryas and the Guptas, had already lost its importance by this period and lay within Pala territory. Option C is wrong because Ujjain was a Pratihara and later a Paramara centre in Malwa but was never the prize of the three-cornered war. Option D is wrong because Thanesar, Harsha's original seat, is remembered in this chapter only because the plain of Tarain, where Prithviraja III and Muhammad Ghori fought in 1191 and 1192, lies near it.

The correct answer is C, Gopala. He was raised to the throne about 750 by the chiefs of Bengal to end a period of disorder that the Khalimpur copper plate describes with the word matsyanyaya, the law of the fishes, in which the strong devour the weak. This election is often cited as a rare instance of a king chosen by notables. Option A is wrong because Dharmapala was Gopala's son, remembered for founding the Vikramashila monastery and for installing Chakrayudha at Kannauj. Option B is wrong because Devapala, son of Dharmapala, was the greatest ruler of the house, under whom the kingdom reached its widest extent. Option D is wrong because Ramapala was the last strong Pala ruler, whose reign the Ramacharitam of Sandhyakara Nandi records, well over three centuries after the founding.

The correct answer is A, Dharmapala. The Pala rulers were the last great royal patrons of Buddhism in India, and Dharmapala founded Vikramashila in present-day Bhagalpur district of Bihar and also revived Nalanda and founded Odantapuri. From Vikramashila the scholar Atisha Dipankara went to Tibet, which is why Tibetan sources preserve so much about Pala patronage. Option B is wrong because Mihir Bhoja was a Pratihara and a worshipper of Vishnu who took the title Adivaraha. Option C is wrong because Amoghavarsha I was a Rashtrakuta who leaned towards Jainism and is remembered for the Kavirajamarga and for founding Manyakheta. Option D is wrong because Lakshmanasena belonged to the Sena house that replaced the Palas, and his court is remembered for Jayadeva and the Gita Govinda.

The correct answer is B, Krishna I. The Kailasa temple at Ellora, cave sixteen, was cut downwards out of a single mass of rock in his reign in the eighth century and is the largest monolithic temple in the world, dedicated to Shiva and carved with scenes from the epics. Option A is wrong because Dantidurga founded the dynasty about 753 by defeating the Badami Chalukyas but is not associated with the Kailasa temple, though Rashtrakuta work at Ellora began in his time. Option C is wrong because Govinda III is remembered for his northern campaigns during the tripartite struggle. Option D is wrong because Amoghavarsha I is remembered as an author and as the founder of Manyakheta, and crediting the Kailasa temple to him is the commonest error in this question. Ellora is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The correct answer is C, Kannada. The Kavirajamarga, meaning the royal road of poets, is the earliest surviving work on poetics in Kannada and is attributed to Amoghavarsha I, in whose long reign the Rashtrakuta court at Manyakheta became a centre of Kannada and Jain learning. Option A is wrong because the earliest Telugu literary work of this kind belongs to the later Eastern Chalukya court, Nannaya's Mahabharatam. Option B is wrong because Tamil already had the Sangam corpus and the Tolkappiyam, which have no connection with the Rashtrakutas. Option D is wrong because Amoghavarsha's Sanskrit work is the Prashnottara Ratnamalika, a different book, and naming Sanskrit here is the distractor that catches candidates who remember the king but not the language. Remember the pair in both directions: the Kavirajamarga belongs to Kannada and the Prashnottara Ratnamalika to Sanskrit, and both are credited to the same Rashtrakuta king of the ninth century.

The correct answer is B. In the First Battle of Tarain in 1191 Prithviraja III of Ajmer defeated Muhammad Ghori, who was wounded and carried from the field. Ghori returned the next year with a better organised force of mounted archers, used the feigned retreat to break the Rajput line, and in the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192 defeated and killed Prithviraja, which opened the Ganga plain to Turkish rule. Option A reverses the two results and is the trap in nearly every version of this question. Option C is wrong for the same reason. Option D is wrong because Mahmud of Ghazni raided India between about 1000 and 1027, nearly two centuries earlier, and his best-known raid was on the Somnath temple in Gujarat in 1025 and 1026 in the reign of the Solanki ruler Bhima I.

The correct answer is B, the Chandelas. The Chandelas ruled Jejakabhukti, the Bundelkhand region, from Khajuraho and Mahoba, and built the Khajuraho group of temples in the Nagara style between about 950 and 1050; the Lakshmana temple belongs to Yasovarman, the Vishvanatha temple to Dhanga and the great Kandariya Mahadeva temple to Vidyadhara. Option A is wrong because the Paramaras ruled Malwa from Dhara and are remembered for the Bhojashala and the Bhojpur temple and lake. Option C is wrong because the Chaulukyas or Solankis of Gujarat built the Sun temple at Modhera and patronised the Dilwara temples at Mount Abu. Option D is wrong because the Gahadavalas of Kannauj and Varanasi are remembered for Jayachandra's defeat at Chandawar in 1194, not for temple building on this scale.

The correct answer is B, Bhoja the Paramara, the eleventh-century ruler of Malwa who ruled from Dhara, the modern Dhar in Madhya Pradesh. He is credited with the Samaranganasutradhara on architecture and mechanics and the Saraswatikanthabharana on poetics, and with the Bhojashala at Dhar and the great lake and Shiva temple at Bhojpur. Option A is wrong because Mihir Bhoja was the ninth-century Gurjara-Pratihara ruler titled Adivaraha, and confusing the two Bhojas is the classic trap of this chapter. Option C is wrong because Munja, also called Vakpati II, was Bhoja's uncle and a patron of poets but not the author of this work. Option D is wrong because Jayasimha Siddharaja was a Chaulukya of Gujarat, remembered as the patron of the Jain scholar Hemachandra.