Practice: Religious Life

(c) Tejaji. The five are Pabuji (Rathore), Mehaji (Sankhla), Harbhuji (Sankhla), Ramdevji (Tanwar) and Gogaji (Chauhan).

Why not the others: This is the most reliably set question in the chapter, and it is a negative. Tejaji is the intended trap precisely because he is among the most widely venerated folk deities in the state.

(d) 1239 CE. In Jodhpur district, of the Rathore family of Marwar, and credited with bringing camels to Marwar.

Why not the others: (a) 1485 is the Bishnoi founding, (b) 1326 Hammir Singh's recovery of Chittor, (c) 1730 Khejarli. Four dates from this unit, one of them his.

(a) A snake god and protector of cattle. Also known as Jahar Veer; his shrines are often found under Khejri trees.

Why not the others: The Khejri detail links him to Khejarli and the Bishnoi. The same tree recurs across the chapter for different reasons.

(b) Deshnoke, in Bikaner district. She is described as a warrior sage living between the 14th and 16th centuries in western Rajasthan.

Why not the others: She is placed as a historical figure, not only as a goddess — the same deification pattern as the Lok Devtas, who are historical or quasi-historical people who became gods.

(c) Samrathal Dhora. He laid down 29 principles, and the name is the number: bish (twenty) + noi (nine).

Why not the others: (b) Naraina is the Dadu Panth's main seat; (d) Khejarli is where the 1730 sacrifice took place, not where the sect was founded.

(d) Jeev Daya Palani and Runkh Lila Nahi Ghave. Compassion to all living beings, and a strict prohibition on cutting green trees.

Why not the others: The second is the doctrinal ground of Khejarli: a religious rule functioning as an ecological one, which is what makes the episode more than a nature story.

(a) Amrita Devi and 363 Bishnois died protecting Khejri trees. She embraced a tree and declared that losing one's life to save a tree was a worthy sacrifice.

Why not the others: Place it against Bijolia, which begins in 1897. Khejarli is 167 years earlier, non-violent, doctrinally grounded and directed at the state's agents — the earliest mass civil resistance in this syllabus.

(b) Naraina, near Jaipur. Dadu Dayal (1544-1603) settled first at Sambhar and then moved to Naraina.

Why not the others: (a) is where he settled first, which makes it the near-miss. (c) Shahpura is the Ramsnehi headquarters.

(c) Rejection of idol worship and temple ritual. It sits squarely in the Nirguna tradition.

Why not the others: The Nirguna–Saguna division predicts practice. Nathdwara's Shrinathji has pichwais hanging behind him; the Dadu Panth has no image at all.

(d) Vallabhacharya. With Nimbarkacharya. The Nirguna figures here are Jambhoji, Jasnathji and Dadu Dayal, alongside Kabir, Raidas and Sant Pipa in the wider tradition.

Why not the others: The division does most of the work in this topic, because it tells you what to expect at the centre of a tradition — an image, or none.

(a) Ramcharan. The collection of his teachings is the Anbhai Vani; the headquarters is at Shahpura, in Bhilwara.

Why not the others: The sampradaya is conventionally described as having four branches, but only the Shahpura branch and Ramcharan's association with it were verified, and the chapter says so.

(b) Jasnathi 36 — the chhattis niyam — and Bishnoi 29.

Why not the others: (a) is the swap the option is built for. The memory hook is that the Bishnoi number is inside the name — bish (twenty) plus noi (nine) — while the Jasnathi number is not, so if you can anchor 29 to Bishnoi by etymology, 36 has nowhere else to go.

(c) Jasnathji, given as 1482 to 1506. It is also where the fire dance belongs — the Government of Rajasthan records the fire dance as performed by the Jasnathis of Bikaner and Churu, by men, only on Janmashtami and Holi.

Why not the others: (a) is Shahpura, Bhilwara; (b) is Samrathal Dhora; (d) is Naraina, near Jaipur, after Sambhar. Four Nirguna traditions, four seats — the seats are the discriminator.

(d). With Shahpura in Bhilwara as the principal seat, the four are Shahpura–Bhilwara, Ren–Nagaur, Sinthal–Bikaner, Khedapa–Jodhpur.

Why not the others: (a) swaps Ren and Sinthal, which is the commonest form of this question because both names are short and unfamiliar. Founders: Ramcharan at Shahpura, Dariyavji at Ren, Haridas at Sinthal, Ramdas at Khedapa.

(a). Dariyavji was born forty-four years before Ramcharan and died when Ramcharan was thirty-eight. A branch cannot be founded out of a body that does not yet exist.

Why not the others: (b) inverts the chronology. (c) is the tempting move — discarding a date to save the story — and it is exactly what this site refuses to do elsewhere. The dates are consistent across sources; it is the GLOSS that is wrong. Give the standard pairings in Prelims; the inference that Ramcharan founded all four is what fails.

(b). Performed by men, and only on Janmashtami and Holi, with fire tricks to drum beats, per the Government of Rajasthan's own description of the state's dance forms.

Why not the others: The point worth taking into a Mains answer is that this is a devotional order's dance, not a regional folk form. A question about a fire dance is underneath a question about a sect — and the Katariyasar of the Jasnathi entry is the same Katariyasar the dance belongs to.

(c) Chishti, and he was the khalifa — the spiritual successor — of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti.

Why not the others: (a) describes the other Hamiduddin Nagauri, the Qazi, a Suhrawardi buried at Mehrauli in Delhi. The burial place is the reliable discriminator, and it runs opposite to intuition: the man buried in Nagaur is the Chishti, the man buried in Delhi is the Suhrawardi.

(d) Sufi Hamiduddin Nagauri, and it means king of the renouncers, earned by a complete disregard for worldly possessions. His shrine at Nagaur, the Tarkeen Dargah, preserves the title in its name.

Why not the others: (a) is Gharib Nawaz, benefactor of the poor. If you can recall that the Nagaur dargah is called Tarkeen, the title answers itself — the name of the shrine and the name of the title are the same word.

(a) farming at Suwal, while his wife spun cotton. He was a vegetarian and required it of his disciples, and his khanqah served only vegetarian food and received people of every faith.

Why not the others: (b) and (c) both assume a saint is maintained by patronage, which is the assumption his life was a refusal of. Ajmer's dargah drew emperors; the Chishti at Suwal drew a plough — and both were Chishti, which is the comparison worth carrying into a Mains answer.

(b). A man born in 1070 would have been over 160 at the death of a master who died in 1236. The account has merged the two Hamiduddin Nagauris, and the impossible date is the tell.

Why not the others: (d) is the tempting one, because quietly repairing a date feels like scholarship. It is not — an internal contradiction is evidence that the whole entry is unreliable, not that one number slipped. Do not patch a source into plausibility; distrust it.

(c) — an urs marks the death anniversary as a union with the Divine rather than a mourning, which is precisely why it is celebratory, with qawwali and the distribution of langar.

Why not the others: (a) is the standard error and inverts the meaning of the word. (b) confuses the urs with 1192, the year Moinuddin Chishti settled at Ajmer — the same year as the Second Battle of Tarain.

(a) R is the ancient instance of A, and the same structure holds two thousand years later among folk deities, Nirguna sects and Saguna Vaishnavism.

(a) R is the case for A. It precedes Bijolia by 167 years and is the earliest mass civil resistance in the syllabus.

(d) R is true and A is false — which is exactly why the question is set. Prominence is not membership.

(a) R is the evidence for A, and it explains why the same shrines draw people the census would have counted separately.

(a) Harbhuji is the fifth, also Sankhla. Tejaji is not among them.

(a) D belongs to the tribal movements chapter as much as to this one, which is the point of including it.

(a) B's folk song is described as the longest in Rajasthan's folk literature, sung with sarangi and damru — a link to the folk-arts chapter.

(d) the guardian of a tract. The Dungarpur gazetteer records a Kshetrapal shrine at Khadagada, Sagwara tahsil, with its own fair on Chaitra Shukla 15, and a Bhairavji fair at Meradi on Kartik Vadi 14; the Nagaur gazetteer records a Bherunji ka mela at Thanwala on Bhadrapada Sudi 14.

Why not the others: (a) is the misreading the term invites — Khadagada has a Kshetrapal shrine, but that is one instance of a category, not the deity's name. The Churu gazetteer's list of what Hindus there worship besides the great gods begins with Bhaironji, so a lok devta list that begins with Pabuji has already skipped the layer underneath it. The same root runs through the revenue vocabulary: the Sikar gazetteer defines Bhom as a tenure in land, which is where Bhomiya ji comes from.

(a) Churu and Hanumangarh. Dadrewa, about 16 km from Sardarshahr, is recorded by the Churu gazetteer as Gogaji's birthplace, with a fair on the 9th of Bhadon; the Gogamedi temple, in Nohar tehsil of Hanumangarh, stands over his death, was renovated by Maharaja Ganga Singh of Bikaner in 1911, and is served by priests who are Muslims of the Chayal caste. Its month-long fair runs from the Purnima of Shravan to the Purnima of Bhadrapada.

Why not the others: (b) is the swap the option is built for. (c) and (d) attach Bikaner to the shrine because Ganga Singh of Bikaner renovated it: the patron's state is not the shrine's district. On the manner of his death the Churu gazetteer gives the army of Mahmud of Ghazni; the maternal cousins that circulate in preparation material are not carried.

(b). 1405 to 1458 CE puts him in the fifteenth century; Vikram Samvat 1409 to 1462 straddles the fourteenth and the fifteenth. Give the place and the practice, which are documented, and leave the century alone.

Why not the others: (a) is the version in widest circulation, and it is the one to stop writing. (c) and (d) each take one of the two competing lifespans and promote it to a settled fact, which is what produced the fourteenth-century claim in the first place.

(c) Tanwar; Ram Shah Pir. He is "hailed as an incarnation of Lord Krishna in Marwar" and worshipped particularly by the Bhambis, the Meghwals and the Chamars; the Churu fairs run Bhadon Sudi 2 to Bhadon Sudi 11. At Ramdevra, Runicha, in Jaisalmer, the present cenotaph was built by Maharaja Ganga Singh, entry to the samadhi is allowed "without any consideration of caste and creed and religion", and the dead are buried rather than cremated.

Why not the others: Jahar Veer in (a) and (d) is Gogaji's name, and (a) also lends him Gogaji's Chauhan clan. (b) gives Pabuji's Rathore. Two Panch Peer, two clans, and the Muslim name belongs to only one of them.

(d) a Jat of Kharnal, 16 km west of Mundwa. The cure attached to him is exact: a man bitten by a snake should tie a cord round his right foot and repeat Tejaji's name. Most Jats of the district wear a silver charm showing Ramdeoji or Pabuji or Tejaji on horseback, sword drawn, with a snake biting him on the tongue.

Why not the others: (a) changes his community, and the gazetteer is plain that he was a Jat. (b) Sursura, in Kishangarh State, is the shrine the Parbatsar fair was taken away from; (c) Parbatsar is where the fair was moved to. The village to hold is Kharnal, and the two rival place-names are both real parts of the story.

(a). In the reign of Maharaja Bijai Singh of Marwar, the Hakim found his Jats travelling to Sursura and taking their revenue with them, so he "concocted a story that Tejaji had visited him in a dream", installed a statue and ordered the Jats to attend Parbatsar on pain of punishment. The Parbatsar cattle fair, the Tejaji-ka-mela, runs fifteen days from Bhadrapada Badi 11, drawing forty to fifty thousand people and about a lakh of cattle.

Why not the others: This is a fiscal decision recorded as a religious one, and it is the best illustration in the topic of how a shrine's importance can be manufactured by a state that wants the fair revenue. Bijai Singh ruled Marwar from the early 1750s until 1793.

(b). Abhay Singh succeeded Ajit Singh in 1724 and was succeeded by Ram Singh in 1750, so a temple he raised belongs to the 1720s or 1730s; the same page's line that "the construction is 268 years old" points to about 1734. The pran pratishtha was performed by his minister Vijai Raj, worship is in the Vaishnava tradition, and the deity is venerated by Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims.

Why not the others: (a) repairs the wrong half. Ajit Singh was indeed ruling in 1704, which is what makes the option tempting, but no record names him as the builder. (c) is the move this site refuses elsewhere: do not patch a source into plausibility. (d) throws away a sequence that two gazetteers and the page's own age statement agree on.

(c). The Jodhpur gazetteer records that Kolu was transferred from Shergarh tahsil to Phalodi tahsil, and that Parbatsar and Merta were tahsils of Nagaur. The tahsil is the stable label; the district is the thing that has moved.

Why not the others: (b) inverts the whole point. Note the practical caveat as well: every book still prints the pre-2023 district, and for most exam purposes that is what the option will say.

(d) 1537. The samvat conversion is correct, and the builder's own dates settle it: Rao Jaitasi raised the temple to commemorate his victory over "the Mughal King Kumaran", that is Kamran, Humayun's brother, and could not have built anything in 1573. Deshnok is 35 km from Bikaner, belongs to the Shakta sampradaya, the idol is called Dewali, and the priests are the Depawats, her own descendants, of the Charan community, serving month by month in turn.

Why not the others: (c) inverts the check — Samvat 1594 does convert to 1537. (b) is the counsel of despair: a self-contradicting page is not useless, it is a page one of whose figures is testable against something outside itself. Both years are printed on this site because both are on the state's page, and the basis for preferring 1537 is stated.

(a) a Bhramari Devi temple in the rear part. Bhramari is the bee. The bee-goddess is not a stray epithet; there is a shrine. The temple stands in Danta Ramgarh tehsil, about 10 km south of Rewasa, and she is also known as Jayanti Devi.

Why not the others: (c) is a real feature put to the wrong use — an inscription found inside the temple is what dates it to the tenth century, and it does not supply the epithet. (d) is the fair that joins her shrine to her brother Harsh's on the hill now called Harshnath. Note also what is not supported: no Rajasthan government source consulted backs the claim that her folk song is the longest in Rajasthan's folk literature, and it should not be answered as fact.

(b). The Sikar gazetteer records the Sakrai temple as dedicated to Sakradevi or Shakambhari, who saved the people during a famine by feeding them on fruit, and gives the claim that it was raised in Samvat 749 in the reign of Durlabhraja. Sambhar is the Chahamana capital of the same name. They are different places and different shrines.

Why not the others: (d) Kinsariya is Kevaya Mataji, whose fair the Nagaur gazetteer records in Chaitra, and whose inscription that volume lists among the district's antiquities. An option that pairs "Shakambhari" with a single district is testing whether you know both exist.

(c). "There have been nine Siddhas in the Nath cult, the foremost of them is Shri Gorakh Nath", who "was a disciple of Matsyendra Nath".

Why not the others: (a) is the conflation to refuse. Nathamuni is the tenth-century Srivaishnava acharya who compiled the Divya Prabandham, a different tradition entirely. Do not write "Nath Muni". (b) reverses guru and disciple; (d) reverses Bhartrihari, the king of Ujjain who renounced his kingdom and took Gorakhnath as his guru.

(d). The mound gives the place its name; the Gogaji temple lies 3 km west; pilgrims visit the guru's site first and Gogaji's second; and a fair runs for the whole month of Bhadrapada. The department records that Gogaji met Gorakhnath here and became his principal disciple, which is the same record that says of Gogaji "he became a Nath".

Why not the others: Three Nath sites, three districts, and every one of them is a real option. (a) Fatehpur is the principal gaddi of the sect, from which Kishan Nath came; (c) Churu is where he founded the Bhani Nath ji ka Dhora, whose record notes that a Nath mendicant who dies is buried there and a tomb built over him; (b) is Bhartrihari Dham, with its dhuni and its Akshaydeep.

(a). Both were Chauhan kings, Vigraharaja the successor; several villages were dedicated to the temple, and a further inscription on the hill speaks of 84 temples. Samvat 1030 is 973 CE.

Why not the others: (b) reverses predecessor and successor, which is the only way this question is ever set. (c) is the Sakrai claim, a different temple in the same district, and pairing the two is exactly the confusion the Sikar volume creates for a reader skimming it.

(b). That page carries, in order, a shabad of Trilochan, one of Sri Sain, one of Peepaa and one of Dhanna; Pipa's ends "Peepaa pranvai param tat hai, satgur hoe lakhaavai". A compiled scripture, dated and unaltered, is worth more than any number of hagiographies, and it establishes that both were counted among the bhagats whose verse the Sikh tradition preserved.

Why not the others: (a) is where Laldas and Charandas are documented, not these two. Note what the scripture does not settle: Pipa's birth at Gagron and Dhanna's at Dhuwan in Tonk are not established by anything carried here, and neither is the Ramanand discipleship.

(c) at Amer, about 1586. The same record has him born at Ahmedabad in 1544, in contact with the sage Vriddhanand at eleven, founding at Sambhar the Brahma Sampradaya, renamed the Parabrahma Sampradaya and then the Dadu Panth, and dying at Naraina in 1603.

Why not the others: (a) is the version in preparation material, and it is wrong in both particulars. Give the state's place and year; the forty days and the Sikri setting are not carried. (b) is his death, not the meeting; (d) attaches Sambhar, where the sampradaya really did begin, to a founding year the record does not give.

(d). The Naraina record calls Dadu's collected utterances "Anabhai Vani", with "Kayabeli" as his second book; the Shahpura record says the book read at Phuldol is "Anabhei Waniji", meaning Ramcharan's. Two temple records of one department attach the same title to two saints. If the question is set anyway, the Ramsnehi answer is the one this site has always given.

Why not the others: (b) is half right, and it is the half that gets you into trouble: Kayabeli genuinely is named as Dadu's second book, which does nothing to clear the first title. (c) assumes an error where the honest finding is a shared title.

(a). The tomb stands in white marble, and Samrathal, the mound of his asceticism, is about 3 km away. Fairs are held on the Amavasya of Ashwin and of Phalgun. The departmental record gives the sect's establishment as Samvat 1542, which is 1485, his birth as Samvat 1508 and his living entombment as Samvat 1593, which are 1451 and 1536.

Why not the others: (b) is the swap the option exists for, and it is the commonest single error on this saint. (d) is Jasnathji's birthplace and samadhi, the other Nirguna seat in the same district. One arithmetic warning goes with this entry: the departmental page prints "born in Samvat 1508 (1499 A.D.)", and Samvat 1508 is 1451, not 1499. The samvat is the datum and the bracket is the slip — when a page gives you both, check the subtraction before you memorise either.

(b). The Devasthan record calls him "a Tanwar Rajput of the village Peepasar"; the Churu and Nagaur gazetteers both describe the Bishnois as taking their name from the creed of twenty nine (bis + nau) tenets adopted at the instance of the Panwar Rajput ascetic named Jambha, and both add that the Bishnois "were originally Jats". Both attributions are official, so both are printed.

Why not the others: (a) and (c) each promote the first source you happened to read. The same two gazetteers add that the Bishnois are vegetarians and teetotallers, have discarded the scalp-lock, and bury their dead, sometimes in a sitting posture.

(c). Samvat 1597 is 1540, the death is given as Samvat 1705, 1648 A.D., and the gazetteer's own two dates work out at exactly 108 years. His son Pahara and daughter Sarupa are named; his sayings were preserved as a gutka in an admixture of Urdu and Brijbhasha; he condemns begging vehemently; his followers are the Lal Dasi Sadhs, and "many consider him a Pir".

Why not the others: (a) is the account in preparation material, and it is in conflict with the state record rather than settled against it: the gazetteer calls his followers Hindu Laldasis and puts him on the Kabirpanthi path, while separately recording Meo devotion at his shrine. Both descriptions are on the table and neither is written here as fact.

(d). The Alwar gazetteer names "the two ladies, Sahajo Bai and Daya Bai", the former composing Sahaj Prakash and the latter Daya Bodh. Charandas was born Samvat 1760, 1703 A.D., at Dehra about six miles from Alwar, his actual name was Ranjeet, his guru was Shukdev, he migrated to Delhi, and he died Samvat 1839, 1782 A.D.; his twenty available works are preserved in the Charan Das gutka. The same gazetteer classes him a Kabirpanthi, which cuts against filing the Charandasi order on the Saguna side.

Why not the others: (a) swaps the two books, which is the form this question always takes. A named guru, two named women disciples and their two named books, on a state gazetteer's authority, is the most securely sourced fact about women's devotional authorship in this topic.

(a). It contains "the most revered Shiva Linga of the area", stands on a delta about 1.5 km from Nawa Tapra village, and its fair runs from Magh Shukla Ekadashi to Magh Shukla Purnima. The gazetteer describes the confluence as that of the Som and the Mahi.

Why not the others: (b) is the standard account, and it is what the volume that documents Mavji most fully contradicts. Baneshwar is a Shaiva site with its own history; Mavji's connection to the area runs through Sabla, 7 km away. (c) is his own seat, the Hari Mandir at Sabla. (d) inverts the Shiv Singh story: the Maharawal summoned and tested him, and Mavji left for Sheshpur, or Sahaspur, in Mewar. Mavji himself is a Brahmin of Sabla revered as a pre-incarnation of Kalki, his effigy on horseback the main object of worship, with five books called Choparas in Devanagari mixing Hindi, Gujarati and Wagdi.

(b). The Svetambar Terapanth is the order behind Jain Vishva Bharati Institute, Tulsi Gram, Ladnun 341306, Nagaur, which the University Grants Commission lists as a Deemed University with effect from 20.03.1991. The Sikar gazetteer's schedule of registered temple trusts includes "Shri Digambar Jain Terapanthi, Naya Mandir, Sikar", a separate tradition with a separate history. Ask which one.

Why not the others: (a) misreads what 1991 dates, which is the deemed-university status and not a renaming. Note also what is not carried here: the Svetambar order's 1760 founding by Bhikhanji, the thirteen monks the name is usually derived from, and the Anuvrat movement are not established by any source used on this site, so a question resting on them is not one to answer with confidence.

(c). The volume states that Ajmer "was not a well known centre of Muslim pilgrimage even up to the middle of the 15th century", that "no masonry tomb was built over the remains of Khwaja Muin-ud-din Chisti up to 1464 A.D.", and that for two hundred and fifty years the saint remained almost forgotten, his reputation surviving in the songs of minstrels.

Why not the others: (a) is what preparation material commonly credits, and Iltutmish died in 1236; (b) was credited by one source consulted earlier, and Humayun reigned in the sixteenth century. On the state's own record there was no masonry tomb there at all until 1464, so neither can be right as stated. (d) is the wrong end of the same journey: Akbar heard the songs while hunting near Midhakur, set out for Ajmer in January 1562, returned via Sambhar, where he received the hand of the Amber princess, and was back in Agra on Friday 13 February 1562 — a pilgrimage, not a construction. And Ajmer is not the only Muslim pilgrimage in the syllabus: Galiakot, in Sagwara tahsil of Dungarpur, draws Dawoodi Bohras from the 25th day of Moharram to the tomb of Syedi Fakhruddin.

(a). The worshippers meditate on Shabda Brahma, the revealed word, and the ultimate reality is a Rama devoid of attributes. The Bhilwara gazetteer, working from the census returns of 1931 and 1961, files the Ram Snehis within the Nimbarka Sampradaya, and both documents are official. One classifies a community, the other describes a shrine; they are not answering the same question. For an exam, give Nirguna.

(a). R names three traditions and one common source. Burial runs across the topic and the state traces it to the Naths, which is a link a Nirguna and Saguna table cannot show.

(a). R carries both halves of A, which is why it explains it: a shrine two communities used and neither owned, and the day it failed, both on the same government's records.

(a). The safe answer is what does not depend on the disagreement: born at Kudki, in Marwar, with Merta the family seat. The same gazetteer dates the Charbhuja temple at Merta to 1458 A.D. (V.S. 1515), built by Rao Duda, the founder of the town, and records the tradition that Mira first took inspiration there; a fair is held at the temple on Shrawan Sudi 11 for seven days.

(a). Note the two places each of the first and last entries has. Gogamedi, in Nohar tehsil of Hanumangarh, is the shrine over Gogaji's death and not his birthplace; Samrathal, about 3 km from Mukam, is the mound of Jambhoji's asceticism and not his samadhi.

(a). Salemabad was founded by the Bhati chiefs Sheoji and Gopal Singh of Khejarli on the instruction of Parashuram Devacharya, its deity is Shri Sarveshwar Prabhu and Nimbarka Jayanti falls on Kartika Purnima; Raiwasa was built by Agradeva ji Maharaj, its deity is Sita Ram, its rite madhuropasana and its sentiment Sakhi Bhava; Nathdwara was built by Tilkayat Damodarji in haveli form for an image brought from Jatipura, Govardhan; Shahpura's Ramdwara has a twelve-doored hall on 108 pillars. (b) swaps the two oldest seats, which is the usual form, and it is worth noticing that the Nimbarka seat of 1463 is the earlier of the pair.