Prehistory, Harappan and Vedic India

• Statement 1 is incorrect. No structure at any Harappan site has been securely identified as a palace or a temple, and the absence of monumental religious and royal architecture is one of the defining and most discussed features of the civilisation, standing in deliberate contrast with contemporaneous Egypt and Mesopotamia. The large buildings that do survive, the Great Bath and the granary at Mohenjodaro and the warehouse at Lothal, are read as civic, ritual or storage structures, and the identification remains contested.
• Statement 2 is correct. The seal from Mohenjodaro showing a horned figure seated in a yogic posture surrounded by animals, conventionally called Pashupati, and the numerous terracotta female figurines conventionally called mother goddesses, together support the worship of both male and female divinities, alongside the evidence for tree, animal and phallic worship.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. The horse is absent from the Harappan faunal record at every mature phase site with the disputed exception of Surkotada, and the spoked wheel and the light war chariot are Vedic, appearing in the Rigveda and in the archaeology of a later horizon. The Harappan terracotta models show solid wheeled bullock carts. The official answer (b), two only, follows. The horse is the single most useful discriminator in the whole of this material, since its absence from the Harappan record and its centrality to the Vedic one is the standard basis for separating the two cultures.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Rigveda refers to varman, body armour, and to sipra, a helmet or head covering, in its battle hymns, while no armour or helmet has been recovered from Harappan sites.
• Statement 2 is incorrect on both halves. The Harappans worked gold and silver extensively, as the Mohenjodaro and Allahdino hoards and the jewellery from Harappa show, so the claim that they knew only copper and iron understates them; and iron was unknown to the Harappans altogether, the Indian Iron Age beginning around 1200 BCE, well after the mature Harappan phase. A single statement that is wrong in two independent directions is the eliminating statement here.
• Statement 3 is correct. The horse is prominent in the Rigveda, in the ashva hymns and in the horse sacrifice, whereas the Harappan animal repertoire on seals shows the humped bull, buffalo, elephant, rhinoceros and tiger but no horse, and the contested Surkotada bones are not accepted as settling the question. Rejecting statement 2 alone eliminates (b) and (d) and leaves (a) against (c), which is then decided by statement 3. The official answer (c) follows.

Dholavira, on Khadir Bet island in the Rann of Kachchh, is defined by its water engineering. Located between the seasonal Manhar and Mansar streams in an arid zone with no perennial river, it survived by damming those streams and channelling the water into a cascade of at least sixteen rock cut reservoirs ringing the settlement, which is unmatched at any other Harappan site.

• Option (b) Kalibangan is known for the ploughed field and fire altars.
• Option (c) Rakhigarhi is the largest Harappan site by area and yielded the well known ancient DNA sample.
• Option (d) Ropar is noted as the first site excavated after independence and for a human burial with a dog. Hence (a). The environmental logic is the memory hook: extreme aridity forced the hydraulic ingenuity.

• Item 1 supports both statements directly, because a stone pulley wheel and strapped pails are the physical apparatus of well lifting, which is the technology that makes cultivation away from the river margin possible and which also needs a source of pulling power.
• Item 3 supports statement II, since the established use of the ox for ploughing and for drawing carts before and during the Rigvedic period is exactly the draught-animal power that could be transferred to lifting water from a well.
• Item 2 supports neither statement and is the eliminator. An axe is a tool for clearing forest and a sickle is a harvesting implement, so both relate to the land use cycle but tell us nothing about wells or about animal power applied to water lifting. Hence 1 and 3 support the statements and (c) is correct. (a) and (b) admit the irrelevant implements item, and (d) discards the pulley and pail evidence, which is the single most direct piece of support in the set.

• Pair 1 is wrong, since Vitasta is the Jhelum and not the Chenab.
• Pair 2 is wrong, since Asikni, meaning the dark one, is the Chenab and not the Jhelum. The two names have simply been swapped, which is the trap the question is built on, and noticing the swap already eliminates (a).
• Pair 3 is correct, since Parushni is the Ravi, the river on whose bank the Battle of the Ten Kings was fought.
• Pair 4 is wrong, since the Beas is Vipasha in the Vedic lists, while Yavyavati is a minor stream mentioned in the Dasarajna context and is not identified with the Beas. Only pair 3 survives, so (c) is correct, and (b) and (d) both depend on accepting the Yavyavati identification.