Sources, Chronology and Historiography

• Option (a) is correct. The Indian national calendar, adopted with effect from 22 March 1957, which was 1 Chaitra 1879 of the Saka era, was framed on the recommendations of the Calendar Reform Committee chaired by Meghnad Saha. Chaitra 1 is tied to the vernal equinox: in an ordinary year of 365 days it falls on 22 March, the day after the equinox of 21 March, and in a leap year Chaitra is given 31 days instead of 30 and begins on 21 March, so that the correspondence with the Gregorian date is preserved thereafter. The structure of the year is that Chaitra has 30 days in an ordinary year, the next five months of Vaisakha to Bhadra have 31 days each, and the remaining six months of Asvina to Phalguna have 30 days each, which gives 365.
• Options (b), (c) and (d) are simply other dates and carry no reasoning behind them. The item is straight recall with no elimination route available, but a candidate who knows that the calendar was deliberately anchored to the vernal equinox can reconstruct the answer, since only option (a) lies at an equinox at all.

James Prinsep, an assay master of the East India Company's mint and secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837, which unlocked the Ashokan edicts. The immediate historical consequence was substantial: the inscriptions name their author only as Devanampiya Piyadassi, and it was the correlation of that title with the Sri Lankan chronicles, the Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa, that identified him as Ashoka and restored the Mauryan emperor to Indian history. Hence (b).

• Option (a), Georg Bühler, was a distinguished epigraphist and Indologist who worked extensively on Indian palaeography, but he came a generation later and built on Prinsep's decipherment.
• Option (c), Max Müller, was a philologist and Sanskritist known for editing the Rig Veda and the Sacred Books of the East, not an epigraphist.
• Option (d), William Jones, founded the Asiatic Society in 1784 and established the relationship between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, but died in 1794, four decades before the decipherment. The chronological route alone eliminates Jones, and the association of Prinsep with Brahmi and Kharosthi settles the rest.

The Magadhas, along with the sutas and the vandins, were the bardic communities whose hereditary profession was the memorising and recitation of genealogies, dynastic accounts, panegyric and epic narrative at royal courts. Their importance to the historian is considerable: before the epics and puranas were committed to writing, the vamsanucharita sections preserving dynastic lists existed in the keeping of exactly these reciters, so the oral bardic tradition is the channel through which much early dynastic material survived. Hence (d).

• Option (a), shramana, denotes the wandering ascetic of the heterodox traditions, Buddhist, Jaina and Ajivika, defined by renunciation rather than by recitation.
• Option (b), parivrajaka, likewise denotes a wandering mendicant, the term used across traditions for one who has left household life.
• Option (c), agraharika, refers to the holder or resident of an agrahara, a village granted to Brahmanas, which is a category of landholding rather than an occupation of memorising. The elimination route is that three of the four options describe modes of life, ascetic or landed, and only one names a professional occupation.

• Option (b) is correct. Jean Baptiste Tavernier was a French gem merchant who made six voyages to the East between 1630 and 1668 and whose Les Six Voyages describes the diamond mines of India at first hand, including Kollur on the Krishna in Golconda, together with the methods of working them, the organisation of the labour and the trade in stones. He is the traveller who handled the stones professionally, and the Hope diamond descends from a stone he sold in France, which is why his account of diamonds is the detailed one.
• Option (a) is wrong on emphasis rather than on presence. Francois Bernier was a physician attached to Dara Shukoh and later to Danishmand Khan, and his Travels in the Mogul Empire is the great political and social account of the war of succession, of Mughal administration and of the absence of private property in land, but it is not a treatise on mining.
• Option (c) is wrong: Jean de Thevenot travelled in India in the 1660s and left useful descriptive notes on towns, routes and manners, but he was a scholarly traveller rather than a merchant and did not write on the diamond trade in comparable detail.
• Option (d) is wrong: Abbe Barthelemy Carre travelled as an emissary in the 1670s and his account is chiefly diplomatic and narrative. Governing principle for the seventeenth century French travellers, who are regularly confused: match the traveller to the occupation. Bernier was a physician and writes politics, Tavernier was a jeweller and writes gems and trade, Thevenot was a scholar and writes description, Carre was an envoy and writes missions.

Hence (b).

• 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).

• Pair 1 is incorrectly matched and is the decisive one: Burzahom in the Kashmir valley is a Neolithic site famous for its subterranean pit dwellings, associated dog burials with human remains, and a hunting scene engraving. It has no rock-cut shrines, which belong to sites such as Ellora, Ajanta and Mahabalipuram.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched: Chandraketugarh in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal is renowned for its early historic terracotta plaques and figurines.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched: Ganeshwar in the Sikar district of Rajasthan, sitting near the Khetri copper belt, yielded a very large assemblage of copper objects and is understood as a supplier of copper to the Harappan world. Hence 2 and 3, giving (d). Knowing only that Burzahom means pit dwellings eliminates (a) and (b) at once.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Dhauli is in Odisha, near Bhubaneswar, and carries one of the two separate Kalinga edicts along with the rock cut elephant, its location on the presumed field of the Kalinga war giving it particular significance.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. Erragudi, in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh, carries a major rock edict set and is the southernmost of the major rock edict sites.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched. Jaugada is in Ganjam district of Odisha, not Madhya Pradesh, and it is the second of the two sites carrying the separate Kalinga edicts, which replaced the usual edicts XI to XIII with instructions to officials on the treatment of the newly conquered population.
• Pair 4 is incorrectly matched. Kalsi is in Dehradun district of Uttarakhand, on the Yamuna, not in Karnataka, and it is the northernmost of the major rock edict sites. Exactly two pairs are correct, giving (b).
• Options (a), (c) and (d) each misjudge the count, and a candidate who recalls that both separate Kalinga edicts are in Odisha can settle pair 3 immediately.

• 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.