Practice: The Revolution of 1857 in Rajasthan

(a) Nasirabad, on 28 May 1857.

Why not the others: All three are real risings, and that is the point of the question. Neemuch follows on 3 June, Erinpura on 21 August, Kota on 15 October — the four are in that order, and the order is the chapter's whole argument about why the revolt failed.

(b) Six — Nasirabad, Neemuch, Deoli, Beawar, Erinpura and Khairwada.

Why not the others: Five is the common wrong answer because only four cantonments actually feature in the narrative and a fifth is easy to lose. Learn the six as a list, not as the ones that rose.

(c) None. There were about 5,000 soldiers, not one of them a British soldier, and 30 British officers.

Why not the others: (d) 30 is the number of officers, and it is the intended trap — the option is true of a different noun. This single table explains the whole military course of 1857 in Rajasthan: a cantonment that mutinied was simply lost, because there was no British garrison to hold it, and the British had to borrow princely armies to take one back.

(d) Scindia, on the north-eastern border of Rajasthan.

Why not the others: Laswadi is the hinge of the chapter. The defeat of the Marathas gave the Rajput rulers their opportunity of freedom from Maratha subjugation — and the 1818 treaties that followed converted that relief into subordination. Rajasthan's rulers did not invite the British in order to be ruled; they invited them to be rid of the Marathas.

(a) Maharaja Prithvi Singh of Jaipur. Jodhpur attempted the same and failed.

Why not the others: (b) Man Singh of Jodhpur is named in the same chapter as a staunch opponent of the British whose efforts spread discontent to other states — the opposite pole, and the reason he makes a good distractor. (d) Kishore Singh is the Maharao the British undermined by supporting Jalim Singh, which provoked the Hada Rajputs.

(b) Suryamalla Mishran, Rajkavi of Bundi.

Why not the others: All four are named as anti-British poets — the question is which one you already have from another chapter. The court poet of the language and literature chapter and the anti-British poet of this one are the same man, and saying so is a Mains point about how Dingal literature worked politically. The poets got there before the soldiers.

(c) 28 May 1857.

Why not the others: The other three are the other three risings — Neemuch 3 June, Erinpura 21 August, Kota 15 October. Learn them as one sequence. Every option in this topic is one of the four dates attached to the wrong one of the four places.

(d) The 15th Battalion Native Infantry.

Why not the others: (a) and (b) were at Nasirabad too, which is what makes them work as options — the 15th and 30th Bengal Native Infantry, Indian artillery troops and the first Bombay Lancers were all there. It was the 15th that concluded the artillery was being prepared against them, and the 15th that took it. (c) The Shekhawati Brigade belongs to a different strand of the chapter — Dungji was once its commandant.

(a) Major Spottiswood and Colonel New Bari — names as the board textbook prints them.

Why not the others: (b) Lock and Hardy were injured, not killed — the classic one-word swap. (c) Burton is killed at Kota in October, with his two sons; Morrison is the agent who is asked to leave Bharatpur and does. (d) Captain Blake was killed by the people when the British tried to depose Rajmata Bhatiyani of Jaipur, before 1857.

(b) Beawar — itself one of the six cantonments, which is the detail worth noticing.

Why not the others: (a) Ajmer is where the armoury was that the 15th had long guarded before being moved to Nasirabad out of suspicion. (c) Deoli and (d) Neemuch are also among the six cantonments, and Neemuch rose six days later. The British in Rajasthan retreated from one cantonment to another because there was nowhere else to go.

(c) Shahpura. The route was Neemuch → Shahpura → Nimbahera → Deoli → Tonk → Agra → Delhi.

Why not the others: (a) At Nimbahera the people gave the rebels a big welcome — people, not a ruler, and the distinction is the question. (d) Bundi's army was one of the three the British used to retake Neemuch. A ruler feeding the rebels is not a small fact: the chapter's first cause of failure is that Rajasthan's kings inclined to the British, and Shahpura is the counter-example inside the same textbook.

(d) Kota, Bundi and Mewar, on the instruction of A.G.G. Lawrence.

Why not the others: (c) is the trap, and it is impossible — there were no British soldiers in Rajasthan at all. That is section 2's arithmetic playing out exactly as it must: the British retook a cantonment using princely troops because they had no troops of their own. Note also the irony in (d): Kota's army helps recapture Neemuch in June, and Kota itself rises in October.

(a) Jodhpur. The Jodhpur army contingent stationed at Erinpura rose on hearing of Nasirabad, looted the station and marched for Delhi via Marwar.

Why not the others: Note what this means. A princely state's own contingent mutinied, and the same state's army later helped take Kushal Singh's rescuer by deceit. The states were not bystanders in either direction. The board textbook prints this date as 21 August 1957 — an obvious misprint for 1857, carried openly in the parent chapter rather than silently fixed.

(b) Aauwa, a village in Pali — he took them in when they reached Pali.

Why not the others: This is the single most swapped set of names in the topic. (a) Salumbar is Rawat Kesari Singh; (c) Kothariya is Rawat Jodh Singh; (d) Bathoth-Patoda in Sikar is Dungji and Jawaharji. Four thikanas, four men, and an option only has to move one.

(c) Both. He was a powerful feudatory of Marwar and an opponent of the British and of his own Maharaja.

Why not the others: (a) is the answer a candidate gives who has read a freedom-struggle narrative rather than this chapter. His revolt is aimed at two masters at once, which is exactly the double subordination — colonial and feudal — that the textbook's own foreword says distinguishes Rajasthan's struggle from British India's. Aauwa was later destroyed by the British and Kushal Singh left wandering.

(d) Kothariya, by Rawat Jodh Singh, who gave them every comfort — and who also embraced and sheltered Kushal Singh when Aauwa was destroyed.

Why not the others: This is the fact most likely to be missed and most likely to be asked. Note the textbook's own care, which the parent chapter keeps: the feudatories of Mewar did not openly participate in the revolution. What they did was give shelter — to rebel leaders, to jagirdars who fought, and to the families of the rebels. Shelter is the form resistance took in Mewar.

(a) Expulsion from Rajputana and deposition from his estate. Kesari Singh had demanded his traditional rights within eight days or he would install a rival of the Maharana on the throne of Chittor — and the threat calmed him.

Why not the others: (c) is Jaidayal's fate at Kota. But the reason to learn this question is the mechanism it exposes: a British Political Agent protects a Rajput Maharana from a Rajput feudatory, using the power to depose. That is paramountcy doing what it was designed to do, and it explains why so many rulers stayed loyal — the treaties that subordinated them also secured them against their own nobles. On 27 May 1857, Maharana Swaroop Singh had already circulated all his feudatories asking them to cooperate.

(b) At Kota, with his two sons, on 15 October 1857. The residency was surrounded and set on fire.

Why not the others: Kota is the most serious rising in Rajasthan and the only one where the Political Agent was killed — so an option that moves him to any other cantonment is testing whether you have kept the four risings apart.

(c) Jaidayal, Ratanlal and Jiyalal.

Why not the others: (a) Mir Alam Khan led the army rising at Tonk, not Kota. (b) Lothooji Nitharwal freed Dungji from Agra fort. (d) Bhairu Singh was Dungji's brother-in-law, who betrayed him at dinner. The cause of Kota was an intelligence failure: Burton's advice leaked to the Maharao's army and its officers, who resolved to take revenge.

(d) That Burton and his sons had been murdered by the Maharao's own order — and the Maharao was imprisoned in his own palace while he signed it.

Why not the others: This is the detail worth carrying into an interview. The rebels did not merely kill the Political Agent; they compelled the ruler to put his name to a document accepting responsibility for the killing. That is an attempt to make the state itself a rebel, retrospectively and on paper — and it tells you the rebels understood exactly where legitimacy lay. Only the number nine and this one condition are given in the source; any enumerated list of the other eight is an aggregator's invention.

(a) About six months — from 15 October 1857 to 22 March 1858.

Why not the others: And the parent chapter does not soften what those months were like: the revolutionaries looted and set fire to government warehouses, bungalows, shops and weapons stores, looted the district treasuries, and created a fierce terror among the people of the city, while apparently enjoying the support of most officials of the princely state. A rising can be anti-colonial and predatory at the same time, and the textbook says so.

(b) 5,500 soldiers from Nasirabad, who shelled the rebels and drove them out. Military aid had also been obtained from Karauli.

Why not the others: (a) is a dropped digit and the standard trap. Note the shape of (b): the force that retook Kota came from Nasirabad — the cantonment where the whole thing had started ten months earlier. In the aftermath, leaders and rebel soldiers were punished inhumanly, and Jaidayal was arrested and blown from a cannon.

(c) It invited the Neemuch rebels to Tonk and with their help besieged the Nawab's own fort. The Nawab was with the British, and could not intimidate his soldiers into submission.

Why not the others: Tonk is the clearest single case of the split this chapter keeps describing — the ruler on one side and his own army on the other, inside one state. Tonk also sits on the Neemuch rebels' route to Delhi, which is how the two halves of the topic connect.

(d) To leave — and Morrison left. The Gurjar and Mewati people of Bharatpur openly participated, and when British power in neighbouring Agra was confined to the Red Fort, the people of Bharatpur believed British rule in India was ending.

Why not the others: A ruler advising the British agent to leave for his own safety is neither loyalty nor rebellion, and Bharatpur is the clearest case of the third position most Rajasthan states actually occupied. An option forcing you to call it one or the other is testing a distinction the chapter deliberately refuses.

(a) Amarchand Banthia (1793-1858), a businessman at Gwalior, hanged for proposing to give all his wealth to Tatya Tope.

Why not the others: (c) Jaidayal was blown from a cannon, not hanged — a different execution, and the option relies on you not noticing. (d) Dungji died in the fort of Jodhpur. (b) Kushal Singh was left wandering after Aauwa's destruction. Banthia did not fight; he offered money, and was hanged for it — which is the whole point of including him.

(b) Disguised as a marriage procession. The party was Lothooji Nitharwal of Ringus (1804-1855) with Baloo Nai, Sankhu Luhar and Karna Mina.

Why not the others: (a) belongs to Nasirabad, where monks and fakirs carried word from Bengal and Delhi into the markets and cantonments. But the reason to know this question is the composition of the rescue party: a Nai, a Luhar, a Mina and a Jat. 1857 in Shekhawati had a cross-caste social base, whatever the states did. Lothooji was retaken at Kakimadi of Girdara in Jaisalmer — by the Jodhpur army, by deceit — and died in the fort of Jodhpur. The princely states were not bystanders; they were the instrument.

(c) The Maharana of Udaipur, who organised a grand feast. The rebellion had been crushed all over India by August 1858, and in November 1858 the East India Company handed the rule of India to the British Crown.

Why not the others: That feast is the chapter's closing irony and belongs in an essay. The same Maharana whose feudatories sheltered Kushal Singh and Nana Saheb celebrates the guarantee of his own rights — because the Crown's promise was precisely what the rulers had been fighting the rebels to protect.

(a) R is the arithmetic and A is its consequence. Neemuch was retaken with the armies of Kota, Bundi and Mewar, and Kota stayed in rebel hands six months until 5,500 men came up from Nasirabad. Lead a Mains answer with this ratio rather than with the chronology.

(a) The textbook's second cause of failure is that the rebels lacked mutual unity and contact, so the British could deal with them one by one. Nasirabad had been retaken four months before Kota rose. The four dates are not a list; they are the explanation — a revolt that arrives in sequence can be defeated in sequence.

(a) R is the mechanism behind A. The treaties that subordinated the rulers also secured them against their own nobles, so a ruler weighing rebellion was weighing the loss of that protection. The textbook adds that both the Maharana and the Company feared the feudals of Mewar, so both were obliged to cooperate — fear of a common third party, not affection, is the cement.

(a) The Crown continued the Company's treaties, the states went under British patronage, and cooperation was sought from the Vaishya community, who received posts and patronage. 1857 fails, and the failure creates the class that finishes the job sixty years later in the Praja Mandal movements.

(a) The trap in this table is built into the source. Kota's ruler was Ram Singh, Bundi's was Ram Singh, and Jaipur's was Ram Singh II — three Ram Singhs in one table, and an option only has to move one. Fix Jaipur = Ram Singh II with the numeral, and the other two stop being confusable.

(a) Two of the six agents appear in the narrative and are the ones to know cold: Burton is killed at Kota with his two sons, and Morrison is asked to leave Bharatpur and does. Get those two and the rest follow.

Note a conflict inside the source, which this page reports rather than resolves. The textbook's narrative names Captain Shovers as the Political Agent who handled Mewar, while its own table gives Udaipur — Eadan. Both statements are in the same book, so no question here is set on Udaipur's agent.

(a) Aauwa is in Pali; Salumbar and Kothariya are Mewar thikanas. Kushal Singh fought; Kesari Singh threatened his own Maharana and was talked down; Jodh Singh sheltered both Kushal Singh and Nana Saheb. Three different kinds of participation, and the chapter is careful to keep them apart — so an examiner setting this is testing whether you have too.

(d) Nasirabad — the 15th and 30th Bengal Native Infantry, a native battery and the 1st Bombay Lancers.

Why not the others: Deoli, Beawar, Erinpura and Kherwara held local contingents, raised and commanded by British officers but paid mainly from the revenues of particular states — Deoli the Kota Contingent, Beawar the Merwara Battalion, Erinpura the Jodhpur Legion, Kherwara the Mewar Bhil Corps (the board text prints the station as Khairwada). The six cantonments did not hold six identical garrisons, and that difference is what decides which of them mutinied.

(a) The Merwara Battalion and the Mewar Bhil Corps, raised from the Mers and the Bhils.

Why not the others: Both were local corps recruited from communities with no caste or regional tie to the Purbia sepoy of Awadh and the North-Western Provinces, and both had been raised to give those communities paid employment in place of raiding. The British were saved in Rajputana by the two regiments they had recruited from the people they had earlier been policing. Two qualifications belong with that sentence: the Bombay Cavalry at Nasirabad is separately recorded as having protected the British residents and remained loyal throughout, and the Bhil companies of the Jodhpur Legion refused to join their own regiment's mutiny. The safe formulation is that the two Rajputana local battalions held as units, while individual bodies elsewhere also stayed loyal.

(b) Sirohi State.

Why not the others: (a) is the trap, and it is half true, which is what makes it work. The Jodhpur Legion quartered at Erinpura was a Marwar obligation — by the treaty of 1818 Jodhpur owed a contingent of 1,500 horse, the obligation was commuted in 1835 to an annual payment, and the Legion was raised in 1836 on that money. The regiment was Jodhpur's; the ground was Sirohi's. The name is not Indian either: Captain Downing, its commandant, called the place Erinpura after the island of his birth.

(c) The Merwara Battalion under Lieutenant Carnell, who marched up from Beawar so fast that no word of his movement went ahead of him.

Why not the others: (a) is the guard he replaced, not the guard that held it. Two companies of the 15th Native Infantry, one of them the detachment that had long held the Ajmer armoury, were relieved in the fort — and returned to Nasirabad in time to mutiny with their comrades. Ajmer-Merwara was the only British-administered territory in Rajputana, and its fort held an arsenal large enough to supply every British soldier in the province, a siege train and the treasury, under a guard of nothing more than a company of sepoys. General Lawrence's report of 1858 attributes the preservation of Ajmer to Carnell's well-timed move and to the loyalty of the Mers.

(d) Writing from Nasirabad on 16 June 1857, against Captain Showers, who was pressing him to attack: "However much I desire to strike a blow against the mutineers with the troops here, I do not feel myself justified in running any risk in the present state of national feeling, and the destruction of the mutineers is to me very secondary to the preservation of Ajmer."

Why not the others: That sentence is why no British force intercepted either the Nasirabad or the Neemuch rebels. Two mutinous brigades were allowed to walk out of the province unmolested, because the man responsible for it had decided he could afford to lose them and could not afford to lose Ajmer. (c) is chronologically impossible — the Jodhpur Legion rises in August. A decision that looks like paralysis was a choice, and it is worth a Mains sentence.

(a) Cornet Newbury. Iltudus Thomas Prichard, a lieutenant of the 15th Native Infantry standing in the line on the Nasirabad parade ground on 28 May 1857, names Major Spottiswood, mortally wounded and carried to his house, and Cornet Newbury, cut to pieces among the guns, with Lieutenant Lock and Captain Hardy wounded.

Why not the others: The rank is the whole point. A cornet is the most junior officer in a cavalry regiment; a colonel commands one — so the garbled form does not merely misspell a name, it promotes the most junior man on the ground to the command of a regiment. An eyewitness standing in the line outranks a scanned table.

(b) The annexation of Awadh. Abbott had paraded the brigade and told the men that their own native officers had sworn in his presence to stand firm. A trooper of the cavalry stepped out of the ranks and answered: "What are our officers' oaths to us? Or even our own? Why should we keep our oaths to you who have broken your own? Have you not taken Oudh?"

Why not the others: All three are real grievances in this chapter, and all three are in the wrong place here. (c) belongs to the Mewar troops at Neemuch and the flour issued to them, a different scene. (d) belongs to Tonk, whose soldiers left for Delhi after extorting their arrears from the Nawab. That is the annexation of Awadh spoken aloud on a parade ground in Rajputana, by a trooper, to a colonel, days before the rising — the best evidence in the chapter that the grievance travelling with the Bengal army was political and not only religious.

(c) Lawrence's own mutiny report — Rs 1,31,900. Showers, on the ground as Political Agent of Mewar, gives Rs 1,77,000 from the civil treasury and the military chests; Jwala Sahai, writing in 1902 from the Residency papers, gives Rs 1,76,000.

Why not the others: The two larger figures agree with each other and the smallest is the Agent's own, which is the interesting part of the disagreement. The parent chapter prints all three rather than choosing, so an option offering a single round "Rs 1.75 lakh" as the settled figure is testing whether you know the number is disputed. Where two official figures differ, name both and name the basis of each.

(d) Jagmandir. About forty fugitives, women and children among them, reached Dungla, a village of Udaipur State roughly fifty miles from the capital, in the last stage of destitution and with cholera among them. Rao Bakht Singh of Bedla was charged with bringing them in and turned out palanquins for the women and the sick, pad elephants and horses for the officers, and carts and camels for the baggage. The Maharana came out in his state barge to see that they were comfortable and gave each of the children two gold mohurs with his own hand.

Why not the others: (a) Bedla is the escort's own thikana, not the refuge — and the castle of Bedla appears elsewhere in the chapter as the place where Captain Showers was halted for a night so that he could make his public entry into Udaipur in state on the morning of 29 May 1857. The island palace that had sheltered Prince Khurram from his father is the one that sheltered the Neemuch refugees from the Neemuch sepoys.

(a) Mohi-ud-din Khan of Nimbahera, named in the Rajasthan government's account on Showers' authority.

Why not the others: (b) is the name coaching notes attach to Nimbahera, and the state's own account contradicts it — which is exactly why it is here as an option. (c) Mir Alam Khan belongs to Tonk; (d) Mehrab Khan to Kota. Three Khans in three states on one road, and an option only has to move one.

(b) The attack on Mount Abu, and separating it from Erinpura is the single most useful thing a candidate can do with this section. The sequence runs: 19 August, a company of the Legion's infantry reaches Anadra, two miles below the Abu pass, where it had been sent to hold in check the Thakur of Rowa; 21 August before dawn, those men climb the hill in dense fog, join the Legion companies already on Abu and fire volleys into the European barracks and into Captain Hall's house, both of which miss, and H.M.'s 83rd turn out and drive them off the hill; 22 August, the rest of the Legion mutinies at Erinpura, the Bhil companies excepted, burns and plunders the station and takes the treasure; 23 August, the Abu party arrives at Erinpura and joins it.

Why not the others: (a) is a day out, and it is the version that circulates. Abu is the 21st, Erinpura the 22nd, the junction of the two the 23rd. The only European hurt on the 21st was Alexander Lawrence, the A.G.G.'s son, shot in the thigh; he recovered. Lieutenant Conolly, the adjutant at Erinpura, was carried off and released on the third day.

(c) Over three thousand. About two thousand mutineers arrived — 600 cavalry and 1,400 infantry — under Risaldar Abdul Ali, Dafedar Moti Khan, Bardi Major Makhdum Baksh, Subedar Shital Prasad and Tilak Ram, and over three thousand local men joined them: Shivnath Singh of Asop, Bishan Singh of Gular, Ajit Singh of Alaniyawas, the thakurs of Lambiya, Banta, Banjawas, Bhivalia and Ruddawas, and from Mewar the jagirdars of Salumbar, Kotharia, Lasani, Rupnagar and Asind, who supplied Kushal Singh with money and provisions.

Why not the others: (d) inverts the ratio, which is the standard error — the mutineers are the smaller half. Read that composition before writing anything about 1857 in Rajasthan being a sepoy affair. Two thousand mutineers arrived; three thousand local men joined them.

(d) The Jodhpur state army. Maharaja Takht Singh sent it against the rebels under Anar Singh, with Raj Mal, entrenched at Pali, with Lieutenant Heathcote attached to advise. The rebels would not attack an entrenched position and the Jodhpur troops would not leave one, until Lawrence lost patience and wrote to the Maharaja that his army was "dancing attendance on the rebels, like orderlies." Anar Singh then left his entrenchments and camped beside the rebels; on the early morning of 8 September his camp was surprised, his men gave way, and he was killed at his guns with a handful of men who stayed with him, Heathcote galloping from the field.

Why not the others: (a) is the error worth naming: Anar Singh is not a rebel commander, he is the man the rebels killed. The Rajasthan government's account gives the engagement its local name, Beethora, and says the fighting lasted two days and ended in complete victory for the rebels. The letter had the effect Lawrence wanted and the outcome he did not.

(a) He had assembled at Beawar 150 men of H.M.'s 83rd, part of the Mairwara battalion, the 1st Bombay Lancers, two 12-pounders, three 6-pounders and two mortars, reconnoitred Auwa in force, found a double line of defences, the inner of masonry and the outer of earthwork, both loopholed, and fell back on the village of Chelawas about three and a half miles off, hoping to draw the garrison out. He stayed three days and retired. Showers called it what it was: the highest military and political authority in Rajputana repulsed by a feudal chief and forced to retire altogether from the field.

Why not the others: He lost his Political Agent as well. Captain Monck Mason was riding to join him and never arrived, and his head was cut off and hung over the gateway of the Auwa fort. The Rajasthan government's study draws the inference that matters from that detail: Mason's head was hung at the gate and Anar Singh's was not, which is why it reads the rising as aimed at the British rather than at the Maharaja of Jodhpur, even though Kushal Singh had fought both.

(b) Marwar's Holi songs, which describe the fighting as a war between the Goras and the Kalas.

Why not the others: The name is genuinely popular rather than official — a folk song, not a despatch — and it should be attributed that way. That is worth more than the name itself: it is the one place in this chapter where you can hear how the people of Marwar described the war while it was happening, rather than how an officer reported it afterwards.

(c) 16 November 1857. After the alliance at Auwa broke — the Thakur stayed, the Legion marched for Delhi — the column under Thakur Shivnath Singh of Asop, with Bishan Singh of Gular and Ajit Singh of Alaniyawas, beat the troops of the loyal Raja of Jaipur and reoccupied Rewari, and was met at Narnaul by a column from Delhi under Colonel Gerrard. The rebels were completely defeated and the Jodhpur Legion ceased to exist. Gerrard was mortally shot at the moment the battle was won and Captain Caulfield completed it.

Why not the others: (a) is a trap built into the standard books themselves. Malleson's Rajputana chapter prints 16 October, and Jwala Sahai repeats it — while Malleson's own detailed account of the battle, in the same volume, dates it 16 November: Gerrard marched from Delhi on 10 November, reached Rewari on the 13th and Narnaul on the 16th. Shivnath Singh was afterwards besieged at Barlu, forced to surrender, pardoned and kept at Jodhpur; the Gular and Alaniyawas thakurs lost their jagirs and settled in the Sikar country.

(d) Colonel Holmes of the 12th Bombay Native Infantry invested Auwa on 19 or 20 January 1858 — Malleson gives the 19th, the Rajasthan government's account the 20th — with about eleven hundred men and guns, bombarded it for five days, made a practicable breach and ordered the assault for the following morning. That night came a storm so violent that sentries a few paces apart could neither see nor hear each other, and the garrison walked out in the dark. The British occupied the place next morning and found thirteen guns, three tons of powder and three thousand rounds of small-arms ammunition; the keep, the bastions and all the masonry works were then blown up.

Why not the others: (b) is the figure that circulates in coaching notes and no account supports it — a mass capture cannot be reconciled with an unopposed occupation of an empty fort. Auwa was not taken by assault. It was abandoned in a storm and then demolished. The state's account adds what the despatches leave out: the village was plundered, the palace destroyed, temples were not spared, and the image of Mahakali was carried off to Ajmer, where it remains in the museum.

(a) The trial opened at Ajmer on two charges — that he had given asylum to Mason's murderers, and that from August 1857 to January 1858 he had led rebels against the British Government. The commission sat under Major Taylor, examined a large number of witnesses and found the evidence did not warrant any sentence at all; by despatch No. 5562 of 10 November 1860 the Governor-General in Council confirmed the finding and granted an unconditional pardon. The punishment fell on the estates instead: ten-sixteenths of the thikana was confiscated, including Balotra, Riyan, Gura Bishnoiyan, Fitkasni, Rajpuria and Jeemda, worth an annual rekh of Rs 24,400, and Rupnagar lost fourteen villages, Gular six, Banjawas ten and a half, Asop two.

Why not the others: The man was tried and acquitted; his land was confiscated regardless. The paramount power could not prove he had led a rebellion and did not need to, because the punishment it actually cared about was administrative and required no verdict. Before the surrender he had lived quietly at Kotharia, a village in Mewar, under the protection of its Rawat, and Auwa was recovered by his son Devi Singh in V.S. 1925, that is 1868 or 1869. The Rajasthan government's study says plainly why the pardons came: these rebels were pardoned because they could not be crushed.

(b) Arjun Singh Sahiwala.

Why not the others: (c) the 27 May 1857 circular is real, but it went to the feudatories about cooperating with the Political Agent and had nothing to do with the flour. (d) Abbott's oath parade is real, at Neemuch, and it failed — it produced Mahomed Ali Beg's answer about Awadh. Two grievances, two substances, one method of contamination: the cartridge and the flour. An answer that names only the cartridge has told half the story of what the sepoy believed was being done to his caste.

(c) Lala Jai Dayal and Risaldar Mehrab Khan, who came from Karauli. Jai Dayal's brother Har Dayal was in it, as was a son of Israr Ali, an officer who had served the Maharao well in the past.

Why not the others: (a) is the other Kota list and only one name is common to both — those are the three officers whose surrender Major Burton demanded. And the report adds the motive: Jai Dayal had been a vakil in attendance on the Political Agent, and Burton had procured his removal. He is not merely one of three officers Burton wanted punished; he is the man Burton had already had dismissed once, and the man who then led the rising and ran the state. The Maharao had earlier refused to act against him even when the Political Agent pressed, because he was conscious of the strength of feeling in his own troops. (b) Mir Alam Khan belongs to Tonk; (d) are Erinpura men who came to Auwa.

(d) Five. Before the mob reached Burton it killed Dr Sadler, the Agency surgeon, and Mr Saviell, the doctor of the city dispensary, who lived in a house in the Residency grounds. Burton and his two sons, aged twenty-one and sixteen, then held the roof of the house for four hours with one servant, a camel-driver, who alone escaped. Burton offered to surrender if his sons' lives were spared; the young men refused, and all three were killed when the mob brought up scaling ladders.

Why not the others: (a) three is the count most notes give, because it counts only the Political Agent's family. (b) four British officers is Nasirabad's figure, not Kota's. Burton's head was cut off, paraded through the town, and then fired from a gun; the Maharao had the three bodies buried the same evening.

(a) Cut from seventeen to thirteen, and the full seventeen restored on his death in 1866 to his successor, Maharao Chhatar Sal. It was established beyond doubt that he had no foreknowledge, no control over his troops and was himself in great danger; the verdict was nonetheless that he might have done something had he tried, and by remaining inactive failed to perform his duty.

Why not the others: (b) is Karauli's and Tonk's — both had their salutes raised from fifteen to seventeen for their services, along with the remission of Karauli's debt of Rs 1,17,000 and the restoration of Tonk's pargana of Nimbahera, so the direction of the change is exactly what the question tests. Innocent, and punished; and the penalty attached to the office and was lifted from the next holder of it. That is the sharpest single illustration in the chapter of what the treaties of 1818 actually meant.

(b) Major-General H. G. Roberts of the Bombay army — the officer the board text prints as "Major H. G. Robertus". He marched on the 10th, encamped on the north bank of the Chambal opposite Kota on 22 March 1858, crossed on the 27th, opened a heavy fire on the 29th and carried the rebel position on the 30th. General Lawrence handed the military command over to him and reverted to his civil and political functions, accompanying the force as A.G.G.

Why not the others: (a) is a confusion that circulates with a claim attached to it — an inquiry commission into Burton's murder "under Lord Roberts". Frederick Sleigh Roberts was a subaltern in 1857 and had nothing to do with Kota; two different Robertses, thirty years apart in seniority. (c) Holmes took Auwa in January 1858 and routed Tatya Tope at Sikar a year later. (d) Gerrard died winning Narnaul. Whether Kota's people suffered under the six months is genuinely disputed: Lawrence and Malleson say the inhabitants were reduced to extreme misery, while the state's own fort records give only three private shops plundered and the civil population left alone. The page carries both.

(c) Hodal, on 31 May 1857 — three days after Nasirabad and three days before Neemuch, which makes Bharatpur the second rising in Rajasthan, not a vague later disturbance. The artillerymen pointed guns at the group of Englishmen in camp, and the tents and bungalows were fired and the property plundered.

Why not the others: (a) Mathura is where the outbreak that preceded it happened and where two companies of the Bharatpur troops later mutinied. Captain Nixon volunteered to lead the state's troops and Alwar sent 2,500 men to co-operate with him, but the Alwar contingent was either bribed or overawed into doing nothing. Major Morrison did not simply take the Maharaja's advice and go: he left under orders from Mr Colvin, Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces at Agra, given at the wish of the chiefs — and was later sent to Jodhpur as officiating Political Agent after Monck Mason was killed, which is how one officer appears in two states in one year.

(d) Patiala's 2,000 Sikhs and four guns. A combined insurgent force of 4,000 to 5,000 men from Gwalior and Indore entered Dholpur early in October; the Rana's army deserted him, and so did some of his chief officers; his authority was set at nought, his property plundered and the district put under exactions, and it was with Dholpur's guns that the rebels attacked Agra.

Why not the others: (a) relieved Kota, (c) reinforced it. The point of the question is the pairing: two states, Kota and Dholpur, were run by their rebels for months while their rulers were counted among the loyal. The chapter's first cause of failure needs that qualification — some of those rulers were loyal in the sense that they wanted the British to win, and powerless in the sense that they could not deliver anything at all.

(a) Sardar Singh of Bikaner, who went to Bahadran, next to Sirsa and Hissar, sending Dr Coleridge to Rajgarh opposite Hansi, and brought the Christian fugitives — the Skinner family of Hansi among them — into Bikaner by 15 June 1857. His troops served under General Van Cortlandt. The reward was the pargana of Tibi in Sirsa district, forty-one villages yielding Rs 14,291 a year in perpetuity, the grant taking effect from 1 May 1861.

Why not the others: The superlative survives checking, which is why it is safe to write: Jwala Sahai states it flatly, the sanad granting the Tibi villages uses the same words, that the Maharaja "came out in person", and the Imperial Gazetteer records the grant independently. He could also afford the gesture — his territory was desert, no invader had ever crossed it, and the mutineers' road ran the other way, towards Delhi. Know the reasoning as well as the fact.

(a) R is the second death, and it is the one that gets dropped. Kota is the second of the two, not the only one. How Mason died is told four different ways by four contemporaries — Malleson has him decoyed by the enemy's bugle-call, which was the same as the British call, and shot dead; Trevor has him mistake the bugles of the mutinous Jodhpur Legion for his own; Prichard has him dismount from his camel, go forward on foot with one pistol, take a shot in the breast from behind bushes and be ridden over and cut down; Jwala Sahai has him shot from behind while trying to find Lawrence; and the Auwa Thakur's own family narrative says simply that he was killed in the engagement, by no stratagem at all. The Maharaja had begged him not to go, and sent his ministers down late in the evening to say so once more. Mason laughed at the idea of danger and said he would be back in a day or two; the ministers left saying, "Auwa is not so easily taken."

(a) Both battalions had been raised to give raiding communities paid employment, and neither had any caste or regional tie to the Purbia sepoy of Awadh and the North-Western Provinces. Prichard puts the consequence in one line: in taking charge of the Ajmer fort from the sepoys of the 15th, the Mers saved Rajputana. This is the assertion to build a Mains paragraph on, because it says something about how the Bengal army was recruited rather than about who won a battle: a single-region, single-caste recruiting base broke together, and the corps recruited outside it held.

(a) Bithora and Chelawas are ten days apart in the same September and are the two battles Rajasthan actually fought — everything else in the chapter is a mutiny. (b) swaps them, which is the error that follows from remembering only "September". (d) gives Chelawas the Narnaul date, which is the other standard slip, because both are attached to the Jodhpur Legion. Fix the pair first: Bithora 8 September, the Jodhpur state army destroyed and Anar Singh killed; Chelawas 18 September, Lawrence repulsed and Monck Mason killed. Then Narnaul 16 November 1857, the Legion destroyed, and Sikar 21 January 1859, Tatya Tope routed by Colonel Holmes — after which six hundred of his men fled to Bikaner and the Maharaja obtained their pardon and sent them home.

(a) Kot Kasim had been part of the ex-King of Delhi's maintenance and yielded about Rs 50,000 a year; it went to Jaipur in perpetuity at Lord Canning's Agra darbar, with a GCSI for Maharaja Ram Singh, for 6,000 to 7,000 troops with seven guns and for trying its own rebels at home. Nimbahera, which Captain Showers had taken from the Nawab's officers, was restored to Tonk at the same darbar. Karauli got thanks, a khilat and its debt remitted for the 800 men, then 1,500 more, that it sent to free the Maharao of Kota; Bikaner got Tibi.

Why not the others: Note the state that is missing from this list and belongs in the same answer. Bundi sent 100 Hada horse with Major Burton and later shut its gates against Tatya Tope, and was nonetheless judged to have shown indifference and apathy, friendly intercourse with Maharao Raja Ram Singh being broken off for about a year. Jwala Sahai's defence of him is the useful part: Ram Singh was an old Sanskrit pandit, conservative and averse to every western innovation, and his resistance to reform was read as disloyalty. The British measured loyalty partly by willingness to modernise, and that is a distinction a good answer can use.