Early medieval India

• Statement 1 is correct, since the copper plate grant of the Gurjara ruler Dadda III issued from the Sankheda or Mankani area of Gujarat and dated to the Chedi year corresponding to AD 595 to 596 carries a date written in decimal place-value notation and is conventionally cited as the earliest epigraphic instance in India.
• Statement 2 is correct, because from the ninth century onward place-value dating with the decimal figures becomes routine in inscriptions across northern, western and southern India rather than exceptional.
• Statement 3 is correct, since Sanskrit and old Khmer inscriptions from Cambodia, Sumatra and neighbouring regions carry place-value numerals from the later seventh century, the Cambodian inscription of the year corresponding to AD 683 with a symbol for zero being the standard example. All three are therefore correct and (d) follows. (a), (b) and (c) each discard one statement that the epigraphic record supports.

The term araghatta derives from ara, meaning the spoke of a wheel, and ghatta, meaning a pot. The device was a wheel fitted with earthen pots at the ends of its spokes or on a chain around its rim, which dipped into a well or tank as the wheel rotated and emptied at the top into a channel. It is the ancestor of what later came to be called the Persian wheel, and its etymology is itself the key to the answer, giving (b).

• Option (a) describes the charas or mot, a leather bag drawn over a pulley by bullocks, which is a distinct and simpler lift device.
• Option (c) describes no recognised mechanism, since a single large pot driven by bullocks does not correspond to the wheel and pot arrangement the term denotes.
• Option (d) describes ordinary manual drawing of water from a well, which requires no named device at all and would not have been recorded as a technological advance in the sources.

• Statement 1 is incorrect: the two schools of Hindu law are distinguished geographically, not by caste. Mitakshara, Vijnaneshvara's commentary on the Yajnavalkya Smriti, prevailed across most of India, while Dayabhaga, associated with Jimutavahana, prevailed in Bengal and Assam.
• Statement 2 is correct and states the central doctrinal difference: under Mitakshara a son acquires an interest in ancestral property by birth, creating a coparcenary in which he can demand partition during the father's lifetime, whereas under Dayabhaga the son's right arises only on the father's death, which gives the father unrestricted power of disposal while alive.
• Statement 3 is incorrect: the male and female distinction is not the basis on which the two schools divide, and Dayabhaga is in fact noted for admitting certain female heirs more readily, which is a different point from the one asserted. Hence (b). The birthright versus inheritance-on-death contrast is the single idea to fix.

The hundi was an indigenous credit instrument, an unconditional written order to pay a sum to a named party, which allowed merchants to transfer value across long distances without carrying coin and to obtain short term credit. Its appearance in post Harsha sources is evidence that commercial activity and merchant banking networks persisted despite the general contraction of long distance trade in the period. Hence (c).

• Options (a) and (d) describe administrative or feudal communications, which have no connection with the term.
• Option (b) describes an account book, which in the Indian mercantile tradition would be a bahi khata and is a record rather than a negotiable instrument. The key distinction the question tests is negotiability, since the hundi could be endorsed and transferred.

• Pair 1 is correct. Bhilsa is the old name of Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, near Sanchi and Udayagiri, a town of importance from Mauryan times.
• Pair 3 is correct. Girinagar is Junagadh in Gujarat, the site at the foot of Girnar bearing the Ashokan rock edicts, the Rudradaman inscription on the Sudarshana lake and the later Skandagupta inscription, one of the richest epigraphic sites in India.
• Pair 2 is incorrect. Dwarasamudra is Halebidu in Karnataka, the capital of the Hoysalas, sacked by Malik Kafur, and it lies nowhere near Maharashtra.
• Pair 4 is incorrect. Sthanesvara is Thanesar in Haryana, the seat of the Pushyabhuti dynasty from which Harshavardhana came before shifting to Kanauj, which is the Uttar Pradesh town the option is presumably meant to confuse it with. The answer is 1 and 3, giving (a).

Araghatta is the Sanskrit term for the water-lifting wheel used in irrigation, the device known later as the rahat or Persian wheel, in which a chain of pots mounted on a wheel raises water from a well and discharges it into a channel. The word derives from ara, spoke, and ghatta, pot, which describes the mechanism exactly. Its diffusion, and the later addition of the pin-drum gearing that allowed animal power to be applied efficiently, materially raised the area that could be irrigated from wells and is treated in the economic history as one of the significant agrarian technologies of the period. Hence (c).

• Option (a) describes forced or bonded labour, for which the term is vishti or begar.
• Option (b) describes service assignments, for which the vocabulary is iqta, jagir or in the Deccan the various watan and inam grants.
• Option (d) describes reclamation of wasteland, again a distinct category in revenue records. The elimination route lies in the etymology: the pot element in the word points unmistakably to a water-lifting device, and a candidate who parses the Sanskrit needs no separate recall.

• Pair 1 is incorrect. Champaka is the old name of Chamba in the western Himalaya, in present day Himachal Pradesh, founded in the tenth century by Raja Sahil Varman and named for his daughter Champavati; it is not in Central India.
• Pair 2 is correct. Durgara is the early name of the Dogra country around Jammu, the term Dogra deriving from it, and it appears in inscriptions and in Kalhana's Rajatarangini as a hill state on the Chenab.
• Pair 3 is incorrect. Kuluta is the Kullu valley, again in Himachal Pradesh, a name known from the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta and from Varahamihira; Malabar is the Kerala coast. The official answer (b) follows. Elimination route: recognising either Champaka as Chamba or Kuluta as Kullu removes three options and leaves only (b), and the two names are close enough to their modern forms for a candidate with a feel for Sanskritic place names to make the connection. Without that, the item is unanswerable from standard preparation, which is what places it at the difficult end.

• Statement 1 is incorrect and states the opposite of feudalism. The Indian feudalism thesis associated with R. S. Sharma turns on the fragmentation of central authority: from the Gupta period land grants to brahmanas and to officials, made tax free and with administrative and judicial rights surrendered, transferred the state's revenue and coercive powers to intermediaries, producing a strong local and a weak central authority together with the decline of trade, of coinage and of towns.
• Statement 2 is correct: the defining institutional feature is an administrative structure resting on control over and possession of land rather than on a salaried bureaucracy paid in cash, service being remunerated by assignment of land revenue.
• Statement 3 is correct: the graded chain of subordination between a lord and his overlord, with obligations of military service and tribute running upward and protection running downward, is the relationship that gives feudalism its shape, mirrored in the samanta hierarchy of early medieval India. The official answer (b) follows. Elimination route: statement 1 is transparently contrary to the whole concept, and rejecting it removes options (a) and (d), after which the choice between (b) and (c) turns on statement 2, which is the least controversial proposition in the set.

• Option (b) is correct. Both terms appear in early medieval land grant inscriptions as designations of village level authority. Mahattara, literally the greater or elder one, denotes the village elder or headman, and mahattaras appear collectively as the body of leading villagers with whom royal officers dealt when a grant was made. Pattakila is the Sanskritised form that survives in the modern patel and patil of western and central India, and denotes the headman charged with revenue collection and village administration.
• Option (a) is incorrect. Military officers carried titles such as senapati, baladhikrita, mahasandhivigrahika for war and peace, and dandanayaka.
• Option (c) is incorrect. Specialists in Vedic ritual were the ritvij, purohita, hotri, adhvaryu and udgatri.
• Option (d) is incorrect. Guild heads were the shreshthi or jyeshthaka, and the guild itself the shreni or nigama. The item has no elimination route: all four options are plausible categories of medieval designation and nothing in either term is transparent to a candidate who has not met it in the epigraphic vocabulary. The one available handle is the derivation of pattakila into patel, which is a village headman title still in use, and a candidate who makes that connection can answer with confidence.