Vijayanagara and the Bahmanis

Krishnadevaraya of the Tuluva dynasty of Vijayanagara, ruling from 1509 to 1529, permitted the Portuguese to build a fort at Bhatkal on the Kanara coast. The alliance served both sides. Vijayanagara needed a secure supply of Arabian war horses, which the Portuguese now controlled by sea after displacing Arab traders, while the Portuguese needed coastal footholds and a counterweight to Bijapur. The treaty with Albuquerque is part of the same arrangement.

• Option (b) is wrong because Narasimha Saluva ruled in the late fifteenth century, before the Portuguese arrival in 1498 and well before they were in a position to seek forts.
• Option (c) is wrong because Muhammad Shah III was a Bahmani sultan of the fifteenth century, again predating Portuguese fort building on this coast.
• Option (d) is wrong because Yusuf Adil Shah of Bijapur was the ruler from whom the Portuguese took Goa by force in 1510, an adversary rather than a grantor of permission.

Fanam was a small denomination coin of the south Indian monetary system, struck in gold and later in silver, and current over a long period across the Chera, Chola, Vijayanagara and successor states as well as in the coastal trading settlements. In the Vijayanagara currency it sat below the varaha or pagoda, the principal gold coin, with the fanam serving as the intermediate denomination and the copper kasu or jital as the small change, and European traders on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts continued to reckon in fanams well into the colonial period.

• Option (b) is therefore correct.
• Options (a), (c) and (d) are simple distractors of a familiar UPSC construction, in which a term of trade or revenue vocabulary is offered alongside categories of clothing, ornament and weaponry so that a candidate who does not recognise the word has no principled basis to choose. There is no elimination route here, which is what makes the item hard.

• Statement 1 is incorrect on chronology. The Gajapati dynasty of Odisha was broken by the middle of the sixteenth century, its territories passing to the Golconda sultans and then to the Mughals, whereas the Dutch reached the Coromandel coast only in the first decade of the seventeenth century, establishing themselves at Masulipatnam and Pulicat under grants from the Golconda rulers and local authorities. A Gajapati grant to the Dutch is therefore impossible.
• Statement 2 is correct. Afonso de Albuquerque took Goa in 1510 from Yusuf Adil Shah of Bijapur, and Goa became the seat of the Portuguese Estado da India.
• Statement 3 is correct. Francis Day obtained in 1639 a grant of the site that became Madras from the Nayak of Chandragiri, a representative of the by then much reduced Vijayanagara authority, and Fort St George was raised there.
• Statements 2 and 3 holding, (b) is correct; options (a), (c) and (d) each admit the anachronistic Gajapati grant.

• Statement 2 is correct and is the one the official key accepts: the Wodeyars of Mysore began as feudatories of Vijayanagara and asserted independence after the collapse of that empire following Talikota in 1565, so the Mysore Kingdom did emerge out of Vijayanagara.
• Statement 3 is incorrect: Rohilkhand was carved out by Afghan Rohilla settlers in the Katehar region under Ali Muhammad Khan in the 1720s and 1730s, well before Ahmad Shah Durrani's invasions began in 1748, so it was not formed out of territory he occupied.
• Statement 1 is treated as incorrect by the official key, on the view that the Nizamat of Arcot derived from Mughal authority over the Carnatic rather than emerging out of Hyderabad State as such. This is the contestable point, since the Nawab of Arcot was in practice appointed by and subordinate to the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the relationship of subordination is precisely what the later Carnatic Wars turned on.

Hence (b) per the key.

• Statement 1 is correct. Vijayanagara land revenue was assessed on classified land, the rate varying with the quality and productivity of the soil and with whether the land was wet, dry or under orchard and plantation. Krishna Deva Raya's own Amuktamalyada advises the ruler on graded assessment, and the surviving revenue records show differential rates rather than a flat levy.
• Statement 2 is also correct. Vijayanagara drew revenue from a wide range of professional and commercial imposts beyond land revenue, including levies on artisans, traders, and the owners of workshops, the last of these described in the sources as an industries tax. The empire's fiscal base was notably broad, encompassing land revenue, tributes from feudatories, customs at ports and inland, professional taxes and judicial fines. Both statements being correct, the answer is (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each require rejecting at least one true proposition. There is no elimination route: the two statements are independent, neither is intuitively false, and neither can be inferred from the other, so the candidate must know both. That is why the item is difficult despite concerning a much-taught reign.

• Option (c) is correct. Harihara I, with his brother Bukka, founded Vijayanagara in 1336 on the south bank of the Tungabhadra, a tributary of the Krishna, and the dynasty ruled in the name of the god Virupaksha of Hampi, the Sangama rulers signing their inscriptions and copper plate grants with the deity's name and describing themselves as ruling on his behalf, the land south of the Krishna being held to belong to him. Their guru Vidyaranya is credited in tradition with directing the enterprise.
• Option (a) is wrong: Amoghavarsha I was the Rashtrakuta ruler who built Manyakheta on the Kagina and wrote the Kavirajamarga, and the Rashtrakuta heartland lay north of the Krishna.
• Option (b) is wrong: Ballala II was a Hoysala of Dwarasamudra, modern Halebidu, in the twelfth century, and founded no such city.
• Option (d) is wrong: Prataparudra II was the last major Kakatiya of Warangal, defeated by the Delhi Sultanate in the 1320s, whose fall is part of the background to the rise of Vijayanagara rather than its cause. The elimination route is the phrase south bank of a tributary of the Krishna together with a deity's agency, which together identify Vijayanagara and Virupaksha uniquely.