Practice: Sources of the History of Rajasthan

(c) Epigraphic. And with a standing caveat: an inscription is always the sponsor's version of events.

Why not the others: (a) archaeology tells you how people lived and when a settlement began, not who ruled; (b) literature is good on ideas and self-image and bad on dates; (d) coins establish that a polity existed and how far it reached, and almost nothing about individuals. The skill this topic tests is matching the claim to the family.

(d) What a place was called. Names come from inscriptions and coins, not from stratigraphy. Nagari is identified as Madhyamika because of a coin legend, not because anything in the ground said so.

Why not the others: (a), (b) and (c) are precisely what excavation does well. The false option is the one that sounds like ordinary archaeology but is actually an epigraphic or numismatic question in disguise.

(a) Anything before roughly the 16th century. They are dense and continuous, but they begin late. For the ancient period they are silent, which is why that period rests on archaeology, epigraphy and coins.

Why not the others: (b), (c) and (d) are exactly what the archives are strongest on. Note the shape of the question: three strengths and one limitation, which is how source-family questions are usually built.

(b) A coin legend. Malavanam jayah — victory of the Malavas. For the ganas, numismatics is not a supporting source; it is the primary one.

Why not the others: (a) khyats begin roughly a millennium and a half too late; (c) no inscription names the constitution; (d) Nagar's second excavation, by Krishna Deva in 1942-43, was never published. Each wrong option names a source that would be decisive if it existed — and none of them does.

(c) Indian Archaeology — A Review. Every season of every excavation appears here first, often years before any monograph, and for several Rajasthan sites — Ganeshwar and Noh among them — it is the only published record.

Why not the others: (a) Memoir No. 110 is the Kalibangan report specifically; (b) Puratattva is where B. B. Lal reported the ploughed field, but it is a journal, not ASI's digest; (d) is Tod's book, which is a source about Rajasthan rather than an archaeological serial.

(d) Krishna Deva's 1942-43 report was never published. The figure everyone quotes is Carlleyle's 1871-72 surface collection, and the excavation that might have checked it produced no published report.

Why not the others: (b) the legends are legible enough that Carlleyle read forty chiefs' names and Smith twenty; (c) 110 of them are in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, which is not abroad. The general rule this teaches: when a site carries confident numbers, ask whether a final report exists. Often it does not.

(a) Individuals. A coin can prove a republic existed and asserted itself; it can rarely tell you anything about a person.

Why not the others: (b), (c) and (d) are all things coins do well, and in ancient Rajasthan they often do them alone.

(b) Dates and events. Especially in praise-poetry. The Prithviraj Raso is the standing example, with both its authorship and its date long contested.

Why not the others: (a), (c) and (d) are what literature is uniquely good for. The examinable form of this is a statement that a raso establishes a chronology, which inverts the family's strength and weakness.

(c) Prakrit, in Brahmi. Fragmentary, from near Barli in Ajmer district, and normally given as the oldest inscription found in Rajasthan.

Why not the others: (a) is the Ghosundi pairing, and the two are the most-swapped facts in this chapter because both are early, both are Brahmi and both are famous; (b) Devanagari is far too late; (d) Kharoshthi belongs to the north-west.

(d) G. H. Ojha, in 1912. Which matters twice over: the man who disciplined Rajasthan's historiography is the same man who recovered its earliest inscription.

Why not the others: (a) Bhandarkar and 1904 belong to Ghosundi; (b) Sahni is an excavator here, not an epigraphist; (c) Tod is the historiographical opposite of Ojha, and pairing him with the state's oldest inscription inverts the whole argument of section 4a.

(a) 443 BCE and the late 2nd century BCE. Ojha's reading of Vira-nirvana samvat 84 gives the early, pre-Ashokan date; palaeography gives the later one. Exam material teaches the early date. Saying which kind of evidence supports which answers better than the key does.

Why not the others: (b) 646 CE is Samoli; (c) 225 CE is the Nandsa yupa; (d) 238 CE is Badva. Every wrong option pairs the right inscription with a date belonging to a different one.

(b) The 2nd–1st century BCE. Sanskrit in Brahmi, reported by D. R. Bhandarkar in 1904, recording a Narayana-vata enclosure for Samkarshana and Vasudeva by a ruler who had performed the Ashvamedha. Among the earliest Vaishnava inscriptions in India.

Why not the others: Each wrong option is a real date from this chapter's chronology table — Nandsa, Samoli and Bijolia respectively. Learning the table as pairs rather than as a list is what defends against this.

(c) The Bhabru / Calcutta-Bairat edict, in Kolkata. One object under three names — Bhabru, Bhabra, Calcutta-Bairat — and it is not at Bairath, but in the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

Why not the others: (a) is the other Bairath edict, which is still at the site, and is the near-miss; (b) and (d) are medieval Guhila and Chauhan records with no Buddhist content at all.

(d) The Satapatha Brahmana. An octagonal shaft, a chashala ring below the top, and a girdle round the middle.

Why not the others: (a), (b) and (c) are all real texts a candidate might associate with ritual or statecraft. The Brahmana literature is where sacrificial procedure is actually set out, which is the reasoning to carry rather than the bare name.

(a) The girdle. A small detail, and exactly the kind that separates candidates who have met the primary report from those who have met a summary of it.

Why not the others: (b) and (c) are the two features the pillars do have; (d) is wrong in the most damaging way, because being inscribed is the entire reason yupas matter — they are dated, first-hand records of sacrifices actually performed.

(b) Bhilwara. Sahara is a Bhilwara tehsil today, and the site lies 36 miles east of Bhilwara station. Its date is Krta year 282 ≈ 225 CE.

Why not the others: (a) is the princely-era citation, which was correct for its own day rather than mistaken — a distinction worth holding; (c) Baran is where Badva now falls; (d) Rajsamand is the Raj Prashasti.

(c) Baran. Three pillars, dated 238 CE.

Why not the others: (a) is the trap that catches almost everyone, because the old citation names Kotah and the modern district of that name still exists — but the site itself now falls in Baran. (b) and (d) are the other Hadoti districts, offered so the question cannot be solved by region alone.

(d) Two, two and three. With Barnala — two pillars, found by Sahni in a village tank — making Jaipur State's first.

Why not the others: Each wrong option shuffles the same three numbers, so the question cannot be answered by recognising that 2, 2 and 3 are involved. It has to be known in order.

(a) They are dated first-hand records of sacrifices actually performed. Usually naming the sacrificer and the rite. They beat any textual account of what was actually practised, because a text describes what should happen and a yupa records that it did.

Why not the others: (b) is Barli's claim; (c) is false, since Ghosundi and several medieval records are Sanskrit; (d) confuses them with the Ashokan edicts at Bairath. Only (a) states the methodological reason, which is what a Mains answer needs.

(b) Bairath. Two of them, at the modern village of Viratnagar.

Why not the others: The other three options are the chapter's other B-sites and are famous for entirely different things — the oldest inscription, the yupa pillars and the Chauhan record. Near-identical names carrying unrelated significance is the signature construction of this unit.

(c) Samoli inscription, 646 CE. VS 703, of Shiladitya.

Why not the others: (a) and (b) are also Guhila records, and later ones, which is what makes them proper distractors — the question is about earliest, not about whether; (d) Bijolia is Chauhan, not Guhila.

(d) It records a mine and a temple built by a merchant community, not a royal act. It records the opening of a mine at Aranyakupagiri by a community of migrants — the first evidence of mining in Mewar — and a devakula of the goddess Aranyavasini built at the direction of the mahajanas.

Why not the others: (a) that is the Raj Prashasti; (b) and (c) are simply wrong. An inscription about miners and traders rather than kings is rare, and it is the basis of one of this chapter's best interview angles.

(a) 1273 CE (VS 1330). Composed by the Jain acharya Ratnaprabha Suri, written by Parshvachandra and engraved by Delhan — a named division of labour, which is unusual because inscriptions are normally treated as anonymous.

Why not the others: (b) 1265 is the figure this site published and then corrected, and it is kept as an option deliberately: our own error is now a distractor. (c) 1285 is Achaleshwar and (d) 1170 is Bijolia.

(b) Bijolia inscription, 1170 CE. VS 1226, of Someshvara's reign.

Why not the others: (a) is Guhila, (c) is Pratihara, (d) commemorates a Sisodia lake-building. Dynasty-to-inscription is a one-to-one map here, and it is worth learning as one.

(c) Pratihara. From the Jodhpur area.

Why not the others: (a) is Samoli, Atpur and Chirwa; (b) is Bijolia; (d) is Achaleshwar at Abu. The Buchkala inscription of 815 CE, naming Nagabhata, is the other Pratihara record in the chronology table.

(d) Maharana Raj Singh's building of the Rajsamand lake. Engraved on 25 black stone slabs and described as the largest and longest stone inscription in India.

Why not the others: (a) Kumbhalgarh, 1460 (VS 1517), is Kumbha's; (b) Ranakpur is 1439 (VS 1496); (c) is a literary rather than an epigraphic subject. Three of the four options are real entries in the same chronology table.

(a) 57 years. Which is why so many date pairs look wrong at first glance. Chirwa's VS 1330 minus 57 gives 1273 CE; Samoli's VS 703 gives 646 CE.

Why not the others: (c) 78 years is the Saka era's offset, and it is the only distractor here that a well-prepared candidate will actually be tempted by. Test any pairing by subtracting: if it does not come out to about 57, one of the two numbers is wrong.

(b) Nagabhata. A Pratihara record.

Why not the others: (a) is Samoli's Guhila, (c) is Bijolia's Chauhan and (d) is the Raj Prashasti's Sisodia. Four rulers, four inscriptions, four dynasties — and the dates run 646, 815, 1170 and 1676, so the chronology alone can rescue you here.

(c) Guhila genealogy. One of the sequence of Guhila records running Samoli 646 → Atpur 977 → Chirwa 1273.

Why not the others: (a), (b) and (d) each describe a real kind of Rajasthan inscription, but not this one. Ranakpur, 1439, is the Jain temple record in the table.

(d) It thins out, then thickens sharply afterwards. And the crucial reading: that is a fact about surviving evidence, not about how much was happening. This distinction is exactly the kind of source criticism the topic rewards.

Why not the others: (b) is too strong; (c) is false, since Kharoshthi is a north-western script and the drift here runs the other way, towards Sanskrit and later Nagari. (a) inverts the pattern — the gap sits between the yupa inscriptions of the 3rd century and Samoli in the 7th.

(a) Kanaswa (738 CE) and Ghatiyala (861 CE). Both inscriptions are real and both dates circulate widely, but neither could be verified against a published edition, so they are listed in the Aggregator Watch rather than in the table. Absence of evidence is a publishable finding.

Why not the others: (b), (c) and (d) are all in the table with dates attached. This question is really about method — knowing what a source declines to assert, and why, is itself examinable understanding.

(b) Muhnot Nainsi, a Marwar state official. Late seventeenth century, in Marwari/Dingal. His name also appears as Munhata Nainsi — one official, two spellings.

Why not the others: (a) wrote Bankidas ri Khyat and lived 1771–1833; (c) wrote Vansh Bhaskar, which is literary rather than archival; (d) gives his name to the Bikaner khyat.

(c) It draws on local administrative records as well as Charan accounts and traditional vat. That third ingredient is the point. A chronicle built partly out of administrative paper is doing something different from one built out of bardic memory.

Why not the others: (a) is not claimed; (b) it is in Marwari/Dingal; (d) Nainsi was an official, not a ruler, which is precisely why he had access to the records.

(d) Marwar ra Pargana ri Vigat. A pargana-by-pargana survey — administrative geography rather than chronicle.

Why not the others: (a) is Ojha's, (b) is Suryamal Mishran's and (c) is Abu'l Fazl's. All four are genuine sources for Rajasthan, from four different families, which is the point of putting them together.

(a) Dynastic origins. Compilers blended legendary ancestry with recorded events, especially in the opening genealogies.

Why not the others: (b), (c) and (d) are what khyats are genuinely good for. The rule generalises: a source is rarely reliable or unreliable as a whole — it is reliable for some kinds of claim and not others, and saying which earns the mark.

(b) Haqiqat Bahi. The four are a clean one-to-one set: Haqiqat the ruler's routine, Hukumat government orders, Kamthana construction and building works, Dastur Komwar (Jaipur) the names and castes of state employees.

Why not the others: Every wrong option is a real bahi type with a real and different function, so this set has to be learned as four pairs. It is among the most directly askable things in the whole chapter.

(c) Names and castes of state employees. An employee roll, kept by caste.

Why not the others: (a) is Kamthana, (b) is Haqiqat and (d) is closer to Nainsi's Vigat. Note what a source like this makes possible: a social history of who actually staffed a state, which no chronicle will give you.

(d) Bikaner. The single most important repository, holding Mughal-period Persian records — farmans, nishans, manshurs, akhbarat, vakil reports, arzdasht, khatoot — and princely-state records: bahiat, pattas, parwanas, rukkas, chithiat.

Why not the others: (a), (b) and (c) are all former princely capitals with records of their own, which is what makes the question worth asking. This is a likely direct question and the answer is not the state capital.

(a) Farman. Farmans, nishans, manshurs, akhbarat, vakil reports, arzdasht and khatoot are the Persian series.

Why not the others: (b), (c) and (d) — parwanas, pattas and rukkas — belong with bahiat and chithiat in the princely-state series. The two groups are listed separately in the chapter for exactly this reason, and a question that mixes them is testing whether you read the list or memorised it as one blur.

(b) Few Indian regions preserve anything like the continuous bahi series. Daily orders, construction accounts and employee rolls, kept continuously by multiple states. An answer treating archives as a distinct evidentiary base rather than as background is doing something most candidates will not.

Why not the others: (a) is not claimed; (c) is false, since the princely-state series is in Rajasthani and the Persian material is one part of the holdings; (d) is exactly backwards — the archives are silent before roughly the 16th century.

(c) Lieutenant-Colonel James Tod. Built over roughly twenty years from indigenous documents, inscriptions, architecture and medieval poetry. It is the work that made Rajasthan legible to the outside world.

Why not the others: (a) wrote Rajputane ka Itihas and annotated Tod; (b) and (d) are a khyat compiler and an epigraphist. Tod and Ojha are the most reliably examined pair in this topic, so learn them together rather than separately.

(d) He confused Buddhism with Jainism. An error he shared with other European writers of his generation. The criticism of Tod is as examinable as the praise: heroic, near-Homeric framing, and substantial reliance on assistants whose information he could not always check.

Why not the others: (a), (b) and (c) are all false and all flattering to the wrong side of the argument — Tod collected extensively, wrote in English and used inscriptions heavily. His weakness was interpretation, not effort.

(a) Sirohi, in 1863. He wrote Rajputane ka Itihas in Hindi and produced an annotated Hindi edition of Tod's Annals, correcting it as he went.

Why not the others: (b) Ajmer is where the Barli inscription comes from — the district he is otherwise associated with, which is what makes it the tempting wrong answer.

(b) Bal-Siva. Pointing out that no temple or image of that god was known in Rajputana. Note the method: the refutation is by absence of material evidence, which is the whole difference between the two men.

Why not the others: (a) is the goddess of the Samoli inscription, (c) is Ghosundi's and (d) is a terracotta figurine type from Noh. All three are real Rajasthan deities from these chapters, attested by evidence — which is precisely what Bal-Siva was not.

(c) From chronicle-and-legend to epigraphy-and-archive. And it is visible in what each man handled: Tod collected bardic poetry and annals, while Ojha obtained the Barli inscription — the oldest in the state — in 1912. For a Mains answer on sources, that is the sentence to build around.

Why not the others: (a) is true but trivial and misses the methodological point entirely, which is why it is the most dangerous option here; (b) reverses the direction; (d) is simply false of both men.

(d) Its authorship and date are long contested. It is magnificent as literature and as evidence of self-image, and treacherous for chronology — the standing example of what the literary family is bad at.

Why not the others: (a) it is Rajasthani/Dingal, alongside Bisaldev Raso, Khumman Raso and Vansh Bhaskar; (b) and (c) are simply false. The examinable form of this error is a statement that the Raso establishes the date of Prithviraj's battles.

(a) They are external to Rajput self-narration and can be read against it. Two accounts written from different interests, checked against each other, is better evidence than either alone.

Why not the others: (b) is false by a wide margin; (c) confuses them with the raso tradition; (d) ignores the entire inscriptional record. This is a source-criticism question dressed as a factual one, which is how the best questions in this topic are built.

(b) 326 coins. Found by a peasant boy on the edge of the mound. Puri's report calls it one of the largest such finds at any single place in India, and dates its burial to about the 1st century AD from the pottery vessel it lay in.

Why not the others: (a) 110 is the Nagar coins surviving in the Indian Museum; (d) over 6,000 is Carlleyle's Nagar surface collection. Every wrong option is a real coin figure from this chapter, belonging to a different site — which is the single most productive numeric trap in the unit.

(c) Muhammad II, the Khalji Sultan of Delhi. Alongside over 300 Malava coins, 14 of the Mitra kings, 6 Senapati issues, 7 Vapu coins, 189 uninscribed coppers and Indo-Sassanian pieces — a single site's coins spanning a thousand years.

Why not the others: (a) Kanishka is Rangmahal; (b) Ashoka issued no inscribed coinage of this kind and is represented in Rajasthan by edicts, not coins; (d) Samudragupta is not among Rairh's finds. The Khalji coin is the one that makes the point about the site's span.

(d) Muhnot Nainsi and Munhata Nainsi. One Marwar official, spelled two ways. The other cases in this family are Bhabru = Bhabra = Calcutta-Bairat, and the Barli inscription being what exam material calls "the pre-Ashoka inscription".

Why not the others: (a), (b) and (c) are each a pair of genuinely different things with confusingly similar names — the Malava and Shivi sites, two Guhila inscriptions six centuries apart, and the oldest inscription against the yupa village. Distinguishing 'two names for one thing' from 'two things with similar names' is the whole skill here.

(a) R is the reason A holds. Nagari is identified as Madhyamika on the strength of a coin legend, not on anything found in the ground.

(c) A is true and R is false — the authorship and date are long contested, which is exactly why A holds. A reason that would, if true, undermine its own assertion is a common construction, and it catches candidates who check only whether the statements sound familiar.

(a) R is the mechanism behind A. Note that this says nothing against khyats generally: on administration and near-contemporary politics they are excellent.

(d) R is true; A is false, because Samoli is from Bhomat in southern Mewar. The Tonk attribution circulates in aggregator material and appears to belong to a different inscription entirely.

(a) R is the rule and A is the arithmetic: 1330 − 57 = 1273, which is the Chirwa inscription. Any VS/CE pair in this chapter can be checked this way in a few seconds, and a pair that does not come out near 57 has an error in one of its two numbers.

(d) R is true; A is a false inference from it. What survives and what occurred are different things, and treating a gap in the evidence as a gap in history is the exact error source criticism exists to prevent.

(b) Both are true. A holds because the citation is princely-era and correct for its own day; R gives the modern position but does not explain why the old citation is defensible. Dated is not the same as wrong, and this unit turns on that distinction repeatedly.

(a) R is precisely why A is true. This is the cleanest example in the syllabus of a source family carrying an entire historical claim on its own.

(b) Both statements are true, and R is the standard criticism of Tod rather than the basis of his reputation, which rests on twenty years of collection. An option pairing a true assertion with a true but unrelated — or here, opposing — reason is the hardest case in this format.

(a) R is the concrete evidence for A: the man who disciplined the state's historiography is the same man who recovered its earliest inscription. This is the sentence to build a Mains answer on.

(a) Getting this table cold is most of the topic. Every wrong code swaps two families whose outputs genuinely resemble each other on the surface.

(a) Option (b) swaps Bijolia and Chirwa, a century apart and belonging to different dynasties — Chauhan and Guhila — which is the swap worth guarding against.

(a) A clean one-to-one set and one of the most directly askable things in the chapter. Dastur Komwar is the Jaipur record and the only one of the four tied to a named state.

(a) Nainsi's is the substantial one because it draws on local administrative records as well as Charan accounts — the ingredient that separates a chronicle built from paper from one built from memory.

(a) Item 3 is the detail that marks out a reader of Sahni's report: the Barnala and Badva pillars lack the girdle that the Mathura pair retains.

(a) A and B are the two republican legends and the pair most often swapped, because the sites are called Nagar and Nagari. C and D are both about survival: how many coins were found, and how few can still be examined.

(a) None of the List I citations was wrong when written. C changed in 1994, D in 2023, and A and B at Integration. The working rule is to resolve the tehsil first and then look up its current district.

(a) Ghosundi is 2nd–1st century BCE, Badva 238 CE, Samoli 646 CE and Bijolia 1170 CE. Note the long gap between Badva and Samoli — the thinning of the epigraphic record between the 3rd and 7th centuries, visible in a single ordering question.

(a) Sarvatata, of the Gajayana family, son of a woman of the Parasara gotra. On Bhandarkar's reading, which is why he is usually cited as Gajayana Sarvatata, son of Parasari. "Who performed the Ashvamedha at Ghosundi" is a fair question, and the answer is a name rather than a description.

Why not the others: (b) Samkarshana and Vasudeva are the deities for whom the Narayana-vata enclosure was raised, not people who performed anything, and turning them into the sacrificer is the commonest slip on this record; (c) Vishnuvardhana belongs to the Bijayagadh pillar and to a Pundarika sacrifice; (d) Shiladitya is Samoli, 646 CE, eight centuries later.

(b) Its two halves were published separately, under separate titles, in Epigraphia Indica XVI and XXII. The Ghosundi half as "The Ghosundi Stone Inscription" in volume XVI, the Hathibada half as "Hathibada Brahmi Inscription at Nagari" in volume XXII. One record, two entries, two volumes — anyone who searches for one and finds nothing should search for the other.

Why not the others: (a) both halves are in print; (c) that is the Manmori inscription, the record that really does exist only in Tod; (d) both are Bhandarkar's, in Epigraphia Indica.

(c) A Tri-ratra by three brothers, sons of the Maukhari mahasenapati Bala. Balavardhana, Somadeva and Balasimha, in Krita 295 = 238-39 CE, published by A. S. Altekar as Three Maukhari Inscriptions on Yupas in Epigraphia Indica XXIII. The substantive point is bigger than the pillars: it puts a Maukhari military family in third-century Hadoti, four centuries before the Maukharis are famous at Kanauj.

Why not the others: (a) the Aptoryama is on a fourth Badva pillar, separately published — the merge exam material makes most often; (b) Bijayagadh, Krita 428; (d) Altekar's reading of Nandsa.

(d) A fourth pillar, separately published, of Dhanatrata, son of Hastin, the Maukhari. Note where it sits: a separate, later-published record, not one of the three.

Why not the others: (a) and (b) are the standard merge — all three Krita 295 pillars record a Tri-ratra, and none of them records the Aptoryama; (c) overcorrects, because the fourth pillar is genuinely from Badva, it is simply not one of the three.

(a) All three readings are in print, by three different editors, and the sacrificer is not settled. Bhandarkar's List, following Halder's transcript, reads a Shashti-ratra by Saktigunaguru; Altekar in Epigraphia Indica XXVII reads an Ekashashti-ratra sattra whose king's name "cannot be completely deciphered"; Adris Banerji has Sri Soma, son of Jayasoma. What is examinable is the site, the era and the rite family.

Why not the others: (b), (c) and (d) are each a real published reading, and each is taught somewhere as settled fact — usually the first. Naming the dispute answers better than picking a scholar to copy.

(b) Entry number one in the Vikrama-era sequence. Bhandarkar arranged the inscriptions of northern India by era, and Nandsa, Krita 282, opens the Vikrama run. Rajasthan does not merely have yupas; it has the earliest Vikrama-dated record in the whole northern list.

Why not the others: (a) he prints it, from Halder's transcript; (c) inverts the ordering; (d) entry No. 5 in the same List is the Nagari inscription of V. 481.

(c) Ranchhod Bhatt, a Tailanga Brahmin. Of the Kathaudi line, son of Madhusudan and Veni, and named in the poem's own colophons — "iti sri Rajaprashasti-nama-mahakavye Ranchhoda Bhatta virachite dasamah sargah". He also wrote the Amar Kavya, which he left unfinished.

Why not the others: (a) Shyamaldas printed the text, inside Vir Vinod, and did not write it; (b) Menaria edited it afresh in 1973; (d) Ratnaprabha Suri composed the Chirwa inscription. Three of the four options are real people in this record's own chain — poet, printer, editor — which is exactly why the question works.

(d) The first slab carries the invocation, and each of the remaining twenty-four carries one sarga. The invocation is to Durga, Ganesha, Surya and others; the poem runs to 24 sargas and 1,106 verses, in Devanagari, on slabs of about 3 feet by 2½ feet. So "how many slabs" and "how many cantos" have different right answers, and both are askable.

Why not the others: (a), (b) and (c) all explain the gap by damage or accident. Nothing is missing, and the arithmetic works exactly.

(a) The Nauchauki embankment on the Rajsamand. Maharana Raj Singh's lake, and the ghat named in the plate captions of the Epigraphia Indica edition.

Why not the others: (b) swaps one Mewar lake for another, which is the error worth guarding against; (c) and (d) are real Mewar structures with records of their own — Kumbhalgarh's inscription is of 1460 (VS 1517).

(b) Vir Vinod → Epigraphia Indica Appendix → Menaria. First printed inside Shyamaldas's Vir Vinod, whose text its later editor calls very corrupt; then re-edited from impressions by N. P. Chakravarti and B. Ch. Chhabra as the Rajaprasasti Inscription of Udaipur, Appendix to Epigraphia Indica XXIX-XXX, pp. 1-123; then edited afresh from fresh impressions of the slabs by Motilal Menaria, 1973. A princely-state history, then the Archaeological Survey, then a university press working from the stone itself, each stage correcting the one before.

Why not the others: every other order puts a corrected text before the text it corrected.

(c) A Pundarika sacrifice by Vishnuvardhana of the Varika tribe, son of Yasovardhana. Krita 428 = 371-72 CE, edited by Fleet in Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum III, No. 59.

Why not the others: (a) is the reversal in wide circulation, and it is the only difference between the right option and the wrong one, so read the parentage rather than the names; (b) is Badva; (d) is Ghosundi.

(d) Visvavarman, an Aulikara ruler. Malava 480 = 423-24 CE, in Jhalawar; his minister Mayurakshaka built a Vishnu temple, a temple of the divine Mothers described in frankly Tantric terms, and a well. Fleet, CII III, No. 17.

Why not the others: (a) Vishvakarma is the artificer-god and sat on no fifth-century throne; the misspelling is in print and is worth recognising as an option rather than falling for; (b) Someshvara is Bijolia, 1170 CE; (c) Sivagana built the Kanaswa temple.

(a) Two Bania brothers. VS 481 = 424 CE, Bhandarkar's List, No. 5. Mahapurusha here is Vishnu.

Why not the others: (b) compilations giving three brothers circulate and are not followed here; (c) borrows Nandsa's contested Malava king; (d) the mahajanas directed the building of the Aranyavasini devakula at Samoli, 646 CE.

(b) Sivagana. A Brahmin prince's son, who built the temple at Kanvasrama and endowed it with two villages. Malava 795 = 738-39 CE, edited by Kielhorn in Indian Antiquary XIX from an impression supplied by Fleet, and read there as "when seven hundred and ninety-five years of the Malava lords had gone by".

Why not the others: (a) Dhavala is the Maurya king the record glorifies in conventional praise, and converting praise into agency is the standard misreading of this stone; (c) Mayurakshaka is Gangdhar's minister; (d) Bhetti is the Dhulev plate's grantor.

(c) A statement about the state of the surviving evidence. The stone glorifies the Maurya race and its king Dhavala; it does not say he was the last of anything. Kielhorn's own remark was that nothing else was then known of these princes from any other source, which is a fact about what survives rather than about what happened. Phrased that way the sentence is defensible; phrased the other way it is not.

Why not the others: (a) reads a modern formula back into a 738-39 CE text; (b) nothing in the record contradicts it; (d) undersells it, because there is a published edition behind the observation.

(d) VS 894 = 837 CE. Pratihara lineage, edited by R. C. Majumdar in Epigraphia Indica XVIII, No. 32. Check it by the rule: 894 − 57 = 837.

Why not the others: (a) is Buchkala, the other Pratihara record in the table; (b) is the Ghatiyala date that circulates in coaching notes and that this chapter does not assert; (c) is Kinsariya, of the Dadhichika (Dahiya) Chachcha.

(a) The officers through whom the order was communicated. That list is the working machinery of a state. Dhulev addresses the king's Ayuktakas, Viniyuktakas, Chatas, Bhatas, Kutumbins, Mahattaras and Drangikas, and a provincial administration falls out of one small sheet of copper. Stone records what a ruler wants remembered; copper records what somebody owns, which is why a tamrapatra is engraved on metal at all: metal survives litigation.

Why not the others: (b), (c) and (d) are all genuinely present in such a record and all much narrower. The field that changes what you can write is the address list.

(b) Maharaja Bhetti of Kishkindha consenting to the gift of the agrahara village Ubbaraka to the Brahmana Bhattinaga, of the Chandratreya gotra. A single copper sheet of seven lines, found at Kalyanpur, about four miles from Dhulev (also called Rishabhadeva), roughly forty miles south of Udaipur; the dutaka was Yajnadeva and the scribe Sambhabhata, and a last line, added later, records a second samanta's consent.

Why not the others: (a) the Raj Prashasti is on stone; (c) a Dhol plate of 1574 attributed to Maharana Pratap circulates in copper-plate lists but could not be traced to a published edition; (d) Samoli is an inscription, not a plate.

(c) The year 73 is certain, no era is named, and the CE equivalent is not settled. The plate is dated in the 73rd year since the foundation of the kingdom, in the Ashvayuja samvatsara. Read against the Harsha era it gives 679 CE, the figure printed everywhere. V. V. Mirashi, editing it in Epigraphia Indica XXX, argued that there is no evidence the Harsha era ever reached Rajputana, matched the Ashvayuja year astronomically, and referred the date to the Bhatika era of Jaisalmer, epoch 624-25 CE, which puts the plate near 696 CE. D. C. Sircar replied in the same volume, and Mirashi replied to the reply.

Why not the others: (a) and (b) are the two live positions, and stating either on its own throws away the point; (d) is false, because the year 73 is on the plate. The plate is genuine, the year is certain, the era is not.

(d) Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica (1907-1938), or the Arabic and Persian Supplement to Epigraphia Indica, which ran in annual and biennial parts through the 1950s and 1960s. From the end of the twelfth century Rajasthan's mosques, sarais, dargahs, gates and forts carry Arabic and Persian building inscriptions, and they are the dated backbone of the Sultanate and Mughal layer. This is the one epigraphic class that cannot be checked on the open web, so a list circulating without a volume number should be carried as hearsay.

Why not the others: (a) is ASI's excavation digest; (b) is Fleet's Gupta-period volume, where Gangdhar and Bijayagadh sit; (c) is a nineteenth-century history, not an epigraphic series.

(a) Its author was dismissed in December 1666 and spent his last years in confinement. He had been desh-diwan of Marwar under Maharaja Jaswant Singh from about 1658, some eight and a half years, and that post, with two decades of pargana administration before it, is where the material came from. Roughly three and three-quarter years of inactivity, imprisonment and official pressure followed, and he took his own life, before he was sixty.

Why not the others: (b) he was out of office and in custody; (c) the text survives and has been printed three times over; (d) the Vigat is his too and never displaced the khyat. The office explains both why the khyat exists and why it stops.

(b) The epithet is real, but the attribution to Munshi Devi Prasad is unconfirmed; what is recorded of Devi Prasad is an Urdu summary of parts of the khyat. His biographer carries the epithet without that attribution. The comparison to the Ain-i-Akbari is fair for the Vigat and generous for the khyat.

Why not the others: (a) is what exam material asserts, and the attribution is exactly the half the biography does not make; (c) Tod has no part in this; (d) throws away a real and standard epithet. Carrying the label and flagging the attribution is the accurate answer.

(c) Badri Prasad Sakariya, in the Rajasthan Puratan Granthmala of the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute.

Why not the others: (a) Dugar translated it into Hindi and published it in two parts in the Nagari Pracharini Sabha's Devi Prasad Aitihasik Pustakmala, which is a translation and not an edition of the original; (b) Ojha's copy circulated among friends and started the chain; (d) Devi Prasad's connection is the Urdu summary. The text a candidate meets quoted in an option is usually Sakariya's, and it is not the same text as the first printing.

(d) 22 states, seven branches. The directorate is at Bikaner, with branches at Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Kota, Alwar, Ajmer and Bharatpur. Digitisation began as a pilot in 2005-06; roughly 70 lakh records are digitised and online and about 34 lakh microfilmed, and the department has published more than 55 books from its own holdings, among them the three volumes of Rajasthan through the Ages by Dasharath Sharma, Gopinath Sharma and M. S. Jain.

Why not the others: each moves one number at a time, which is how numeric options are usually built. Both halves have to be known, and the branch list is worth learning as a list.

(a) English-language administrative records of the states. Mahkama Khas Bikaner 1891-1914, PWD 1914-1948, the Army Department 1914-1947, Bikaner classified files 1896-1927, Jaipur Secretariat confidential records 1894-1940, and the corresponding English series for Alwar. An answer that stops at farmans and bahis has skipped the material on which everything from the treaties of 1818 to the Praja Mandal period is actually written.

Why not the others: (b), (c) and (d) are the classes every list does carry. Note the working point underneath: each series carries a date range — Dastur Komwar 1708-1866, vakil reports 1681-1688, Khatoot Maharajgan 1677-1718, draft kharitas 1725-1897 — and a date range is what tells you whether a source can answer your question at all.

(b) The Manmori inscription. It stood on a column on the bank of the lake Mansarovar near Chittor, and Tod printed his translation in the appendix to the Annals under the heading "Inscription in the Nail-headed character of the Mori Princes of Cheetore". From it come the four Mori rulers Maheshwar, Bhima, Bhoja and Mana, the statement that the lake was made by Mana and carries his name, the composer Pushya, son of Naga Bhut, and the engraver Sevadit (Shivaditya), grandson of Khetri Karug. Tod dated it Samvat 770, which he equated to 713-14 CE, and used it as the fixed point for rebuilding the chronology of Bappa Rawal, because the annals of the house put Bappa's birth four centuries too early. The story that he lost the stone at sea is not in his own account of the record.

Why not the others: (a), (c) and (d) all have published editions independent of Tod. The lesson cuts both ways: a single translated inscription let Tod correct a dynasty's own chronicle, and a body of Rajasthan's early history rests on one man's reading of one stone, made before Indian epigraphy had a method.

(c) Tod collects → Shyamaldas prints → Ojha edits → the state commissions. Kaviraja Shyamaldas (1836-1893) wrote Vir Vinod, the history of Mewar commissioned by Maharana Sajjan Singh, and ran what was in effect a state history department; Vir Vinod is where several Mewar records, the Raj Prashasti among them, were first printed at all, which is why later editors keep having to correct it. Ojha worked in his shadow, and the professional generation shows in the state's own publishing. Four stages, four kinds of authority, each one checking the last, and a better Mains frame than the two-man story.

Why not the others: each shuffles the same four names into an order in which somebody corrects a text that has not been printed yet.

(d) A silver coin, its name descended from the Greek drachma. Cunningham identified the small thick silver pieces of Gujarat and Malwa, weighing 60 grains and upwards, as the plain dramma, and those are the same pieces known locally as Gadhia coins. The named variety, the Srimad Adi Varaha dramma, carries the Varaha on the obverse and the title borne by Bhoja Deva of Kanauj, which dates the type to roughly 850-900 CE and ties it to the Gurjara-Pratiharas. Inscriptions name other kinds, the Vigraha Pala and Panchiyaka among them.

Why not the others: (a) is the line in circulation and it is wrong on the first count, since where a gold coin appears in the same lists it is the dinara; writing "gold dramma" copies an error a nineteenth-century numismatist had already ruled out. (b) the Malava coins are copper but are not drammas; (c) Rairh's coin of Muhammad II, the Khalji Sultan, is the Sultanate issue in this chapter.

(a) Only the publication falls there — the excavation ran January 2024 to July 2025, and the coin results were in the press in November 2025. Dr Vinay Kumar Gupta, Superintending Archaeologist of the ASI Jaipur Circle, published in Vestigia Indica Vol. 4, Issue I (2026) a catalogue, with Shiv Pratap Singh, of 39 seals and sealings said to carry pre-Mauryan Brahmi from Painted Grey Ware levels, one of them bearing both Brahmi and Kharoshthi, and a numismatic study reporting 220 coins and 47 cowries.

Why not the others: (b) and (c) collapse publication into discovery, which are separate events with separate dates; (d) the seal claims bear on a live dispute about the date of Brahmi, so attribute them to their authors rather than treating them as settled.

(b) Rajasthan has two excavating authorities, the ASI and the state Department of Archaeology and Museums, and they keep separate registers. The ASI Jaipur Circle's excavations register, last updated 7 August 2026, still ends at Bahaj (2024-25). The state department, meanwhile, began digging at Reedh ka Teela, Tyonda village, Khetri tehsil, Jhunjhunu, in January 2026 under Dr Vineet Godhal, exposing a temple structure it attributes in the field to the 11th to 12th centuries, with finds reported through April 2026. No excavation report has been published, so that dating is a field attribution quoted in the press.

Why not the others: (a) is true of the discipline in general but is not what makes the question ambiguous; (c) and (d) are both false, and (d) inverts the point. Ask which body is meant before answering.