Practice: Architectural Traditions

(b) Jaisalmer. The Shukraniti classifies forts by what defends them, so the fort types are Rajasthan's physical geography restated as military architecture.

Why not the others: (a) Gagron is the jal (water) fort, (c) Siwana the van (forest) fort, (d) Chittor the airan (naturally inaccessible) fort. Every wrong option is a real fort of a different type.

(c) It is a parikh durg, defended by trenches. Bharatpur is the other parikh fort.

Why not the others: This is not a defect but a type. It answers the observation made in the administration chapter that Junagarh is unusual among Rajasthan's major forts.

(d) Mehrangarh. The six are Chittorgarh, Kumbhalgarh, Ranthambore, Gagron, Amer and Jaisalmer, inscribed in 2013.

Why not the others: Mehrangarh is the intended trap — one of the most famous forts in the state and not part of the serial property. Learn the six as a closed list.

(a) Rajsamand and Sawai Madhopur. Gagron is in Jhalawar.

Why not the others: (b) and (d) give Udaipur for Kumbhalgarh, which is the standard error — it is in Rajsamand, the district named for the lake of the sources chapter.

(b) Rajput valour, bravery, feudalism and cultural traditions. Criterion (ii) cites an interchange of Rajput fort-planning ideologies across the state's physiographic zones.

Why not the others: The inscription names feudalism — so it is partly a recognition of the jagirdari order the administration and peasant-movement chapters describe from the other end. That is worth more than the six-fort list.

(c) Adinath, the first Tirthankara. By Vimal Shah, minister of the Solanki ruler of Gujarat.

Why not the others: (a) Neminath is Luna Vasahi's dedication, built 1230 by Vastupal and Tejpal for a Vaghela ruler. The two temples, two centuries and two Tirthankaras are the question.

(d) They were built by ministers, not by kings. Vimal Shah served a Solanki ruler; Vastupal and Tejpal a Vaghela one — and both were ministers of Gujarat rulers, building on a hill now in Rajasthan.

Why not the others: Merchants and ministers built the great Jain temples; kings built forts. That division runs back to the mahajanas of the Samoli inscription of 646 CE and says where surplus actually sat.

(a) Sawai Pratap Singh, designed by Lal Chand Ustad. It extended the women's chambers of the City Palace and served as a viewing screen, with 953 jharokhas across five storeys.

Why not the others: (b) Sawai Jai Singh II founded Jaipur in 1727 and built the Jantar Mantar; (c) Vidyadhar Bhattacharya planned the city. All three belong to the same house, seventy years apart.

(b) A screen must permit sight one way and prevent it the other. The building is purdah rendered as architecture, and its form follows directly from its purpose.

Why not the others: Ventilation is the popular explanation and gives the building its nickname, but the design problem is visibility: the women of the household were to watch the bazaar unseen.

(c) Barmer, a group of five temples of the 11th-12th centuries built by vassals of the Chalukya (Solanki) rulers. Someshwara, to Shiva, is the largest.

Why not the others: (a) is Osian and (b) is Baroli, and both of those are Pratihara. Sort by dynasty and the century falls out: Osian and Baroli are the Pratihara pair and the older one; Kiradu is Solanki vassal work and later.

(d) Baroli, in Chittorgarh near Rawatbhata — a Gurjara-Pratihara complex of the 10th-11th centuries, among the earliest in Rajasthan, with Ghateshwar (Shiva) the largest and dated to the 10th century.

Why not the others: (a) is the trap worth naming: Someshwara is the largest at Kiradu, Ghateshwar is the largest at Baroli. Two Shiva temples, two complexes, two superlatives — and swapping them is the easiest option to write.

(a). Accounts describe the 961 inscription as recording a repair, and a further inscription of VS 1017 (about 960 CE) as relating to consecration. Neither is a foundation date, and a repair implies a building already standing and already worn.

Why not the others: (d) describes Chand Baori, not Jagat, and the two make an instructive pair — Jagat has an inscription that says the wrong thing, Chand Baori has no inscription at all. A dated inscription establishes that a building existed BY that date, not that it was built IN it.

(b). There is no epigraphic evidence for the construction of either Chand Baori or the adjoining Harshat Mata temple. The date is an inference from carving style.

Why not the others: (a) is the assumption the question is testing. The baori is NAMED for Raja Chanda of the Nikumbh dynasty; it is not DATED by an inscription of his. Stylistic dating is ordinary method and the date is perfectly usable — but knowing which of your dates rest on inscriptions and which on style is reading the syllabus the way a historian does.

(c) 3,500 steps, 13 storeys, about 30 m — roughly 100 feet, among the deepest and largest stepwells in India, built as an inverted pyramid at Abhaneri, about 35 km from Dausa.

Why not the others: (a) and (b) shuffle the same three numbers between the three measures, which is exactly how this is set. Anchor one of them — 13 storeys — and the other two cannot move.

(d). Osian is Jodhpur, 8th-12th centuries, Pratihara; Jagat is Udaipur, 10th century or earlier, transitional Maru-Gurjara.

Why not the others: A nickname is not a fact about a building. If an option offers the epithet without the district, it is testing whether you learned the nickname instead of the site — and two borrowed Khajurahos in one state is precisely the confusion it is fishing for.

(a) Arnoraja. Between about 1135 and 1150. He was also called Anaji, which gives the lake its name.

Why not the others: (b) is his more famous son, and attributing a father's work to a better-known son is one of the standing errors of this unit.

(b) Maharana Raj Singh. And it is commemorated by the Raj Prashasti of 1676, on 25 black stone slabs.

Why not the others: The lake and the inscription are the same project, fourteen years apart — the investment and its advertisement. (a) Jai Singh built Jaisamand in 1685.

(c) It circulates without a stated basis or date and is not asserted here. The 1685 date and Maharana Jai Singh, damming the Gomti, are carried; the superlative is not.

Why not the others: The claim is repeated almost universally with no measure, basis or as-of date. When an option offers a record, ask whose words those are.

(d) A water fort, surrounded by water — Gagron.

Why not the others: These are the board's other types, and each has its own example. (a) Giri Durg — a hill fort, and most forts of Rajasthan are of this type. (b) Van Durg — Siwana. (c) Paaridh Durg — Chittor and Jaisalmer. The remaining types are Dhanvan Durg (desert, Jaisalmer), Airan Durg (inaccessible through ditches, thorns and stones — Chittor, Jalore), Parikh Durg (a large ditch — Bharatpur, Junagarh), Sainya Durg and Sahay Durg.

(a) Who lives inside. Sainya Durg is where soldiers skilled in planning and strategy live; Sahay Durg is where brave and mutually cordial bandhav people reside.

Why not the others: (b) is true of the first seven types and false of these two, which is the whole point. A classification that starts with water, hill, desert and forest and ends with the character of the garrison is telling you that a fort was understood as a social arrangement as much as a structure. Note too that the types overlap: Chittor has the features of Giri, Parikh and Airan Durg at once, and military forts are considered the best of all the categories.

(b) Mandan, for Maharana Kumbha — an excellent example of Giri Durg, on the Mewar-Marwar border near the village of Sadadi.

Why not the others: (a) Dharani Shah was the Jain trader who had Ranakpur built. (d) Upmendre was the Parmar ruler who built Sachchiya Mata at Osian. Carry three things about the fort: the rampart is 36 km and so broad that eight horsemen can ride side by side on it; Colonel Tod compared it to Etruscan architecture; and it saw Uday Singh's coronation and Rana Pratap's birth. Abul Fazl wrote that it is built at such a height that when one looks up to see it, the turban falls off one's head.

(c) Sahasrabahu, Vishnu the thousand-armed, worn down to Saas-Bahu. It was built in 1026 CE by the Guhil ruler Sridhar, 27 km from Udaipur, and the two shrines differ only in size.

Why not the others: (a) is what almost everyone assumes, and it is a folk etymology built on the corrupted form. Two temples differing only in size invited the story, and the story replaced the name. This is the single most satisfying correction in the chapter and exactly the kind an examiner enjoys setting.

(d) 1,444. In Pali, dedicated to the first Tirthankara Adinath, built in Maharana Kumbha's reign by Dharani Shah, a Jain trader, with a tetra-headed idol of Adinath in the sanctum.

Why not the others: All three are digit-slips of the right answer, which is how this fact is usually mis-set. Pair it with the other board temple that carries a nickname: Bhandadevara Shiva temple at Ramgarh, Baran, the Khajuraho of Hadoti, built by Malaya Varma of the Med dynasty in the 10th century in panchayatana style.

(a) Nathavati, queen of the Bundi ruler Aniruddh Singh.

Why not the others: Every one of the other options is also a real baori patron, and three of the four are women. (b) Preimal Devi built the Naulakha Baori near Dungarpur; (c) Ramarasade built a trimukhi tri-faced baori at Udaipur; (d) a ruler named Chand is credited with Chand Baori at Abhaneri, perhaps the most artistic of all. The board states the general rule — baoris were usually constructed by queens, queen mothers and rich merchants — and then demonstrates it three times over. Evidence for women's agency in medieval Rajasthan is not thin; it is carved on the stairs, since the patron, builder and artisans are generally named on the baori's inscription.

(b) Three chhatris, each of three parts — and three threes is nine, which is what nau means. The name is the arithmetic, exactly as Terah Taali is in the folk-dance chapter.

Why not the others: (a) is the intuitive reading and the reason the question works. Carry one more thing about this lake: Rajsamand was built to provide relief to the people in a time of severe adversity — a famine work, which is a different category of public building from a palace or a fort.

(c) Jalore.

Why not the others: (a) Nagaur is the marble one — Makrana is in Nagaur — and confusing the two stones is the trap. (b) Bhilwara is the Textile City; (d) Banswara is the City of Golden Islands. The rest of the board's list: Jaipur Pink City, Udaipur City of Lakes, Jaisalmer City of Forts and Havelis, Bundi City of Kunds and Stepwells, Sri Ganganagar Grain Store of Rajasthan.

(a) R explains A. Junagarh and Bharatpur are parikh forts; height is simply not their defence.

(a) R is the evidence for A, in the citation's own wording.

(b) Both are true, but R is about the inscription's size, not its relationship to the lake. A holds because the prashasti commemorates the lake's construction, fourteen years later.

(d) R is true and A false. Hawa Mahal is Sawai Pratap Singh's, 1799, designed by Lal Chand Ustad.

(a) R explains A, and connects this chapter directly to the administration chapter's lata and kunta.

(a) Add giri (Chittorgarh, Kumbhalgarh), airan, sainya and sahay and the eight-type scheme is complete. The sahay durg is the odd one: its defence is social, not physical.

(a) Chittorgarh and Jaisalmer complete the six. Kumbhalgarh is in Rajsamand, not Udaipur, and that is the row most often wrong.

(a) Four centuries of water storage in a semi-arid state. C is commemorated by the Raj Prashasti of 1676.

(d) Parikh durg. Manu names dhanva (desert), mahi (earth or a mud rampart), jala (water), varksha or vana (trees), nri (men) and giri (a hill).

Why not the others: A trench fort is a category the later Rajasthani compilations use, not one Manu has. The six-fold list in circulation that includes parikh has quietly swapped out nri durga, the fort held by men — the same idea the board's Sainya and Sahay Durg carry, arriving from a much older text. The counts of six, seven, eight and nine are not competing readings of one text; they are separate texts.

(a) Giri. Verse 71 states the preference plainly, and the commentators say so in as many words.

Why not the others: (b) is the board's judgement, not Manu's — a defensible reading of a different scheme, in which military forts rank best. If a question names a text, the text has to be read before the answer is given, because the two schemes rank differently and both are in circulation.

(b) About 700 acres, that is 280 hectares or 2.8 sq km, with a wall of about 13 km.

Why not the others: Any figure in the region of 28 square kilometres is a decimal error, and it is the commonest one made about this fort — ten times the real extent. 700 acres is 2.8 sq km, and the arithmetic is the check.

(c) Jija, a Bagherwal Jain merchant, under Rawal Kumar Singh, about 1179-1191. It is dedicated to Adinatha, the first Tirthankara, stands about 22 m, and has seven storeys, given as six in some accounts.

Why not the others: (a) is the Vijay Stambh — 1448, Rana Kumbha, dedicated to Vishnu, nine storeys, 37.19 m or about 122 feet. Two free-standing towers three centuries apart, and confusing them is the commonest error on this fort.

(d) Jaita, with Napa, Puja and Poma, carved on the fifth storey. A building that records its craftsmen by name, on the building, is rare enough in medieval India to be worth an answer on its own — and it is the same practice the baoris follow, where patron, builder and artisans are cut into the stair.

Why not the others: (a) Karan Chand supervised Junagarh at Bikaner, and the two names are exchanged constantly; (b) Depaka built Ranakpur; (c) Mandan belongs to Kumbhalgarh. Two further inscriptions on this tower are worth carrying: the topmost storey holds a genealogical record of the rulers of Chittor composed by Kumbha's court scholar Atri and completed by his son Mahesh, and the word Allah is cut in Arabic nine times on the third storey and eight times on the eighth — in a victory tower raised against a Muslim sultan.

(a) Karan Chand. The foundation ceremony was on 17 February 1589 and the fort was completed on 17 January 1594, over 5.28 hectares.

Why not the others: (b) is the claim in wide circulation, and Jaita is the sutradhara of the Vijay Stambh at Chittorgarh. Notice what those two dates give you that a century never does: a fort of that scale, on flat ground, in under five years, by a ruler in Mughal service. The speed is the evidence of the peace — the same argument as forts coming down from the hills.

(a) Jaisalmer, also Sonar Quila, Swarn Durg and Sonargarh, founded 1156 by Rawal Jaisal of the Bhatis: 99 bastions, of which 92 were built or renovated between 1633 and 1647, and a living fort, roughly a quarter of the old city's population still living inside it. Mehrangarh, about 1459, Rao Jodha, fifteenth Rathore ruler of Marwar, who moved his capital from Mandore. Nahargarh, 1734, Sawai Jai Singh. Gagron, at the confluence of the Ahu and the Kali Sindh, water on three sides and a moat on the fourth, with the mausoleum of Mitthe Shah inside and Pipaji's seat across the confluence. (b) swaps the two hills, which is the swap to expect.

(b) The largest cannon on wheels in the world at the time it was made.

Why not the others: (a) is the version usually quoted, and it is wider than the sourced claim. The superlative is dated: it is a statement about 1720, not a standing record. A superlative with a date attached is usable; one without is a slogan.

(a) R explains A. "Second longest after the Great Wall of China" names its comparator, and the Ministry of Tourism's own entry carries it alongside the 36 km perimeter, the fifteenth-century date under Rana Kumbha, Badal Mahal, Kumbha Palace, the Neelkanth Mahadev temple and the fort's record as Maharana Pratap's birthplace. That entry is also careful about the architect: the design is "often attributed to Mandan".

(c). In March 1291 Jalaluddin's forces beat a Ranthambhore army and took the town of Jhain, but he withdrew to Delhi without the fort. Hammir retook Jhain, and the 1292 attempt on it failed too. In July 1301 Hammir and his companions came out of the fort and fought to their deaths, and the women of the household performed jauhar.

Why not the others: (d) is the version in circulation, and it makes the saka look like a single act of heroism. Read 1301 against 1291 and 1292 and it becomes a story about a fort that took ten years and a change of sultan to reduce — the better answer in an interview and the better sentence in Mains.

(d) 10 November 1308, the day Sitaldev was killed. The army had arrived before the fort in August or September 1308, and it was renamed Khayrabad after the conquest. The contemporary evidence is Amir Khusrau's Dawal Rani, with the later Kanhadade Prabandha giving the Rajput account, and Sitaldev is described as a Paramara chief — consistent with the fort's construction being credited to Virnarayan of the Parmar line.

Why not the others: (a) is a rounding of 1308 and is very widely given. (b) 1303 is Chittor's year, when it became Khizrabad. Two forts, five years apart, and the years get exchanged.

(a). Both are Alauddin Khalji's, five years apart, and Khizrabad carries the name of his son Khizr Khan. A sultan who renames a Rajput fort after his own son is annexing it into a dynastic geography, not merely holding it.

Why not the others: the renamings in (b), (c) and (d) circulate widely and could not be traced to a source that states them. Note the near miss inside them: Mahmud Khalji's capture of Gagron in February 1444 is on record; the renaming to Mustafabad is not. A dated conquest does not carry a new name with it.

(b). The annexation came under Bahadur Shah I after Aurangzeb's death, with Sayyid Hussain Khan Barha placed in charge, and both names are given in the historical record itself, not merely in notes.

Why not the others: (d) is Chittor's, 1303. This is the rarer kind of question — one where the record splits and the honest answer is to carry both. An option offering one of the two as the single correct name is offering more certainty than exists.

(c). The nomenclature is M.A. Dhaky's, in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture, published by the American Institute of Indian Studies with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in 1998. Maha-Maru is the idiom of Marudesa and the Rajasthan heartland, Maha-Gurjara that of Gujarat and the Arbuda country, and the two converge into Maru-Gurjara, the shared western Indian style of the Chaulukya (Solanki) centuries, roughly the eleventh to thirteenth.

Why not the others: (a) is the reading to avoid. The word is convergence, not succession — Maru-Gurjara is not Maha-Maru at a later date, it is what two idioms produced when the political and commercial worlds of Marwar and Gujarat fused. Marudesa and Gurjaratra are the two halves of the name, which makes the label self-explanatory once you have it.

(d). Often on a star-shaped plan, and the name comes from bhumi, the storey band. Menal's Mahanaleshwar, Bijolia's Undeshwar and Ramgarh's Bhand Devra are the Rajasthan examples usually named.

Why not the others: (b) confuses a mode with a regional idiom — Bhumija sits alongside the Maha-Maru to Maru-Gurjara sequence, not inside it. And the signature is worth recognising elsewhere: the Sun temple at Jhalrapatan carries its shikhara as tiers of diminishing miniature spires, which is this mode at work.

(a). Kiradu is in Barmer, a group built by vassals of the Chalukya (Solanki) rulers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Why not the others: (b) has both the style and the century wrong, and it is the version that circulates. (c) describes Osian and Baroli, the Pratihara pair. Note the exact phrasing on the temple as well: Someshvara is described as the best-preserved and most complete of the group, which is a claim about survival, not about scale — a slightly different thing from "the largest".

(a) R explains A. A repair record establishes that a temple stood at Kiradu before 1178 and had been damaged, and that a Chaulukya ruler paid to put it back. It fixes no foundation. Kiradu's ancient name was Kiratakupa, and the site is the ruins of at least five temples. Three grades of evidence now sit side by side: Vimal Vasahi's 1031 is a construction date, Jagat's 961 and Kiradu's 1178 are repair records, and Chand Baori's eighth to ninth century has no inscription at all.

(b) Kunthunath. The five are Vimal Vasahi, Luna Vasahi, Pittalhar, Parshvanatha (also called Khartar Vasahi) and Mahavir Swami. No Dilwara temple is Rana Kumbha's work, which is the other half of the same wrong option.

Why not the others: (c) and (d) are the two that get collapsed into one entry — Parshvanatha is 1458-1459 and Mahavir Swami 1582, a century and a quarter apart, and merging them loses the fifth temple. (a) Pittalhar takes its name from its material, pital, brass: its principal image is metal rather than marble, which is why it stands apart in a group otherwise defined by carved white stone.

(a) Add the dedications and the group reads as a Tirthankara sequence: Vimal Vasahi and Pittalhar both to Rishabhanatha (Adinatha), the 1st; Luna Vasahi to Neminatha, the 22nd; Parshvanatha to the 23rd; and the fifth temple, Mahavir Swami of 1582, to Mahavira, the 24th. Vimal Shah was minister of the Solanki ruler Bhima I, and no builder is recorded for the Mahavir Swami. The three later temples are dated later than most notes admit, and that is where this row is set.

(c) Two shrine niches inside the Luna Vasahi — Devrani for Tejapala's wife, Jethani for Vastupala's.

Why not the others: (a) is the version in circulation, and it is a feature of one temple promoted into the temple's own name. This is the same failure as an epithet standing in for a site: a part of a building is not an alias for the building.

(d) Viradhavala, of the Vaghela house.

Why not the others: (a) names the overlord and loses the patron. The Vaghelas held Gujarat under the nominal overlordship of the Chaulukya Bhima II, so notes that make the brothers "Bhimdev's ministers" have gone one rung too high. (b) Bhima I is Vimal Shah's master, two centuries earlier, and (c) is the Kumbha attribution that no Dilwara temple supports.

(a) Depaka, building at the direction of Dharanashah, the Jain merchant. The same record gives the temple its formal names — Chaturmukha, the four-faced, from the four-fold image of Adinatha in the sanctum, and Trailokya Dipaka, lamp of the three worlds — and it is catalogued as Chaturmukha Dharana Vihara.

Why not the others: (b) Mandan is Kumbhalgarh's and (c) Vidyadhar Bhattacharya planned the city of Jaipur three centuries later. The pairing to hold is designer to patron: a ruler's fort, a trader's temple, a ruler's city. (d) Shobhandev is the name the temple tradition gives for the Luna Vasahi's architect. On the numbers, the 1,444 pillars are agreed everywhere; eighty domes and twenty-nine halls in one account, twenty-four mandapas and eighty-four shikharas in others — an option turning on the hall count is one to leave alone.

(b) A Sun temple of the eighth century, and the Suraj Kund in front of it is the surviving evidence of that dedication. It was wrecked during Alauddin Khalji's assault in the early fourteenth century, and Maharana Hammir rebuilt it in the later fourteenth and installed the image of Kali.

Why not the others: (a) is what the present name invites you to assume. The building is a Sun temple that was re-consecrated, and the change of deity is a fact about political history as much as about worship.

(c) Sitaleshwar, seventh century, with its pillared hall added in the tenth. It belongs to the Chandrabhaga group, which is a Monument of National Importance — so it sits on the central side of the protection split, with Badoli and Abaneri, rather than with Osian, Kiradu and Jagat. A seventh-century temple in Jhalawar district is earlier than anything else this chapter names.

Why not the others: (a) is the tenth-century one, and its distinguishing feature is an image combining Surya with Vishnu, on a shikhara of diminishing miniature spires. (b) attaches a precise year and a named ruler that are not established — carry the seventh century, not the year. (d) is in Baran, the Khajuraho of Hadoti.

(d) Henry Vaughan Lanchester, for Maharaja Umaid Singh: 347 rooms, golden-yellow Chittar sandstone on Chittar hill, which is why it is also the Chittar Palace. Its origin is the fact worth an answer: it was a famine work, running through a long drought and employing thousands of people for well over a decade. Rajasthan's rulers built reservoirs as famine relief in the seventeenth century and a palace as famine relief in the twentieth.

Why not the others: (a) Swinton Jacob, Chief Engineer of Jaipur State, designed the Albert Hall, whose foundation stone was laid in 1876 by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and which was completed in 1887; the two names are frequently merged. (b) is the spelling trap — Lanchester, not Lancaster. And the sourced description of the palace is one of the world's largest private residences, which is not the claim "Asia's largest residential palace".

(a). It is managed under the Rajasthan Archaeological Sites and Monuments Act since 1961 and protected as a National Monument of Rajasthan since 1968.

Why not the others: (b) is the assumption this question exists to break. A World Heritage inscription does not transfer custody to the centre, so the observatory sits on the same side of the line as Osian, Kiradu and Jagat, not with Badoli and Abaneri. (c) 1948 is the year in circulation; the year is 1968.

(b). At 27 metres, 88 feet, it is the largest stone sundial in the world, and it reads Jaipur local time to about two seconds. Its shadow moves visibly, about a millimetre a second, roughly a hand's breadth every minute.

Why not the others: Jai Singh's whole design programme was the replacement of small brass instruments with masonry ones for exactly this reason. The size is not grandeur; it is precision. The observatory around it holds nineteen instruments, covers 1.8652 hectares or about 18,700 square metres, was completed between 1728 and 1734, restored in 2006 and inscribed by UNESCO in 2010.

(c) Hawa Mandir. From the bottom the five storeys are Sharad Mandir, Ratan Mandir, Vichitra Mandir, Prakash Mandir and Hawa Mandir — the building takes its name from its topmost floor, and the sequence is set as a matching question.

Why not the others: (b) is the popular explanation and the reason it is called a palace of winds. Carry the silhouette as well: the pyramidal profile is built as the crown of Krishna, and Sawai Pratap Singh was a Krishna devotee — the form of the screen and the devotion of the man who commissioned it are the same fact seen twice.

(d). The ground lies about 6 km north of Jaisalmer and holds the rulers' chhatris of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A cenotaph field that grades its domes by the rank of the dead is a court hierarchy rendered in stone, and a burial ground that can be read as a table of precedence tells you what the dynasty thought it was.

Why not the others: (a) is true of the dates and false of the sizes — the three centuries are real, the grading is by rank. Three other grounds carry the same weight: Ahar, near Udaipur, with about nineteen Mewar cenotaphs including Maharana Amar Singh's, on the Sisodia clan's ancient seat; Mandore, the old Marwar capital, where the Rathore dewals stayed after Rao Jodha left for Mehrangarh in 1459; and Devikund Sagar, about 9 km from Bikaner, whose oldest chhatri is Rao Kalyanmal's (r. 1539-1571) and whose latest is Maharaja Karni Singh's (d. 1988), with Anup Singh's in white marble on sixteen pillars.

(a). The Government of India's own description gives the steps and names no builder and no date. The nine-storey figure attached to it everywhere comes from the state's tourism publicity rather than from a record, and the Todarmal attribution has no support at all.

Why not the others: Neemrana is useful precisely because the record is thin. A stepwell with two hundred steps and no named patron is the normal condition of the type, and the named baoris are the exceptions that got remembered — which is where the rule that queens, queen mothers and merchants built them comes from. (c) borrows Toorji ka Jhalra's date: Jodhpur, the 1740s, in the reign of Maharaja Abhay Singh of Marwar, a principal water source for the city, where the further attribution to his queen is travel writing rather than record. (d) borrows Chand Baori's patron, and Chand Baori's closest architectural relative is Panna Meena ka Kund at Amer, a sixteenth-century stepwell built to harvest and store rainwater.