Society and Culture of Ancient Rajasthan

Where this sits

This is the second half of the same syllabus line that carries the prehistoric sites: "Pre-historical sites of Rajasthan- from Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic and Bronze Age, Society and Culture of ancient Rajasthan" (RPSC Prelims syllabus, notified 09-01-2026). The prehistoric chapter stops when the Bronze Age does. This one picks up where writing, coinage and organised religion begin, and runs to roughly the seventh century CE.

The join between the two is worth stating, because it is where candidates lose the thread. Rajasthan's prehistory is a story about where people could live: water in the south-east, ore in the north-east, a drying desert in the west. Its ancient history is a story about who governed and what they believed: republics that struck their own coins, an emperor who left his creed carved on a hill, and the earliest surviving inscription of a devotional cult that is still practised.

What Prelims wants from this unit is names attached to things. Which edict is in Kolkata. Which republic struck coins reading Majhimikaya. Who excavated Rairh. Which site gave the Yaksha.

What Mains wants is the argument underneath. Why does a desert-edge region carry two Ashokan inscriptions at all. What does a republic issuing its own coinage imply about political organisation. Why is Rajasthan's iron industry a better index of its ancient economy than any dynasty list.

1. What "ancient Rajasthan" is made of

Four kinds of evidence carry this unit, and knowing which kind supports which claim is most of the skill.

• Excavated sites — Bairath, Rairh, Nagari, Noh, Sunari, Rangmahal, Iswal. These give you material culture: pottery sequences, furnaces, structures.
• Inscriptions — the two Ashokan edicts at Bairath and the Hathibada–Ghosundi record near Nagari. Small in number, enormous in weight, because they are contemporary and self-dated in a way pottery is not.
• Coins — the tribal or republican issues of the Shivi, Malava, Yaudheya and Arjunayana. In a region with almost no dynastic chronicle before the medieval period, coins are frequently the only evidence a polity existed.
• Literary and foreign notice — Patanjali on the siege of Madhyamika, Xuanzang on Bhinmal, and the Sanskrit works composed at Bhinmal itself.

Notice what is missing: there is no continuous royal chronicle for ancient Rajasthan of the kind Kashmir has in the Rajatarangini. That absence is not a gap in your preparation, it is a fact about the sources, and saying so in a Mains answer is worth more than listing sites.

2. The republics: politics without kings

Before any dynasty worth the name, much of Rajasthan was held by janapadas and ganas — tribal territories, several of them republican rather than monarchical. They are known mainly from their coins.

Two points here are doing real work.

The Shivi coin legend is the single most quotable line in the unit. The coins read "Majhimikaya Sibi Janapadasa" — of the Sibi janapada of Madhyamika. That one legend fixes a people, a capital and a script in a single phrase, and it is why Nagari is identified with Madhyamika at all.

The Malavas were migrants who left their name on someone else's map. They are placed first in the Punjab, then in eastern Rajasthan around Jaipur and Tonk, and finally in the region of central India that is called Malwa after them. A republic whose name outlived its territory is a neat thing to be able to say.

Nagar, the Malava capital, and the richest coin site in the state

Nagar, in Uniara tehsil, Tonk, carried the ancient name Karkota Nagar, and its mound covers nearly 5 square kilometres. It was excavated in 1938 by Daya Ram Sahni and K. N. Puri, and again by Krishna Deva in 1942-43, though that second report was never published. The site flourished from about the second century BCE to the third or fourth century CE, with occupation continuing to the ninth or tenth.

What makes it indispensable is the coinage. Nagar is the Malava coin site, and the issues carry the Brahmi legends "Malavanam jayah" and "Malava ganasya jayah" — victory of the Malavas, victory of the Malava gana. A lead coin from the site reads "Malava Janapada".

Read that legend for what it actually is. A coin that says victory of the gana rather than naming a king is a republic announcing itself in the one medium everyone handles. That is the fact to carry, and it does not depend on any count.

The 6,000 coins are real, and here is where the number comes from. Daya Ram Sahni's Bairat monograph carries a section on Nagar which traces it: the site was surveyed by Mr Carlleyle in 1871-72, and on the portion he believed to be the local mint, he collected over 6,000 copper coins, lying in places "as thick as shells on the sea-shore". About a third were worth keeping, 400 were stolen from his possession, and 110 of the remainder reached the Indian Museum, Calcutta, where Vincent Smith catalogued them. The rest are unaccounted for.

So the figure is a 19th-century surface collection, not an excavation count — which is exactly why no excavation report can confirm it, and why it should be quoted with Carlleyle's name attached.

The same passage gives the detail worth carrying into an answer. Smith held that all but about 35 of the coins were minted at Nagar itself, by chiefs of the local Malava tribe, who need not be the same people as the Malavas of Dhara. Carlleyle read the names of no fewer than 40 chiefs on his coins; Smith could read only 20 on those that survive in Calcutta. The legends run in Brahmi from the 2nd century BC to the 4th century AD, some written in reverse, right to left, and they include "some of the smallest and lightest coins in the world".

Still unresolved: the Apollodotus coin. A single sentence — "coins of the Malava and Mitra rulers, Indo-Greek coins, and a fragmented coin of the Greek ruler Apollodotus" — appears verbatim in secondary sources attached to three different sites: Nagar, Rairh and Sambhar. It has plainly been copied between them, and which site it originally described could not be established. That claim stays flagged even though the coin total no longer needs to be.

One conflict to note: Sahni gives Nagar's area as about four square miles (roughly 10 sq km), against the 5 sq km that ASI's own page reports. Both are in circulation.

MCQ WATCH — republics and coins

Direct fact: Shivi capital Madhyamika = modern Nagari, Chittorgarh. Coin legend "Majhimikaya Sibi Janapadasa". Malava centre Nagar, in Uniara tehsil, Tonk. Yaudheyas in the Sri Ganganagar–Hanumangarh belt. Arjunayanas around Bharatpur–Alwar. Matsya capital Viratnagar.

The Malava migration: Punjab → eastern Rajasthan → central India, which takes the name Malwa from them. A statement that the Malavas originated in Malwa reverses the direction of travel.

Easily confused: Nagari (Chittorgarh, Shivi capital) and Nagar (Tonk, Malava centre) are different sites with almost the same name. Examiners know this.

Nagar: ancient name Karkota Nagar, in the old territory of Uniyara; area given as ~5 sq km (ASI) or about 4 sq miles (Sahni). Legends "Malavanam jayah" and "Malava ganasya jayah"; a lead coin reading "Malava Janapada". Excavated 1938 by Sahni and Puri, and by Krishna Deva, 1942-43 (report unpublished). The 6,000+ copper coins are Carlleyle's surface collection of 1871-72, not an excavation count; 110 are in the Indian Museum, Calcutta, catalogued by Vincent Smith; 40 chiefs' names read by Carlleyle, 20 by Smith; legends in Brahmi, 2nd c. BC to 4th c. AD, some reversed. The Apollodotus coin remains contested.

The legend distinction: Shivi coins say Majhimikaya Sibi Janapadasa (Nagari, Chittorgarh); Malava coins say Malavanam jayah (Nagar, Tonk). Swapping the two legends between the two sites is the obvious trap.

3. Bairath: the Mauryan empire reaches Rajasthan

If the prehistoric chapter has Bagor as its one indispensable site, this one has Bairath.

Start with the district, because it changed and almost nothing in print has caught up. Bairath is the modern village at Viratnagar, and Viratnagar is now a tehsil of Kotputli-Behror district, created in 2023 and retained through the December 2024 reorganisation. Every book, coaching note and older ASI page places Bairath in Jaipur; a few place it in Alwar. Jaipur was right until 2023 and is wrong now.

Why the site matters. Bairath is the only place in Rajasthan that has yielded Ashokan inscriptions, and it yielded two of them. It also preserves a Buddhist establishment of the Mauryan period on the hill called Bijak-ki-Pahari, the "hill of the inscription".

The two edicts, which candidates merge into one

The Bhabru edict is the more important of the two and the more likely to be asked. It is the edict in which Ashoka declares his faith in the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha, and it is the only Ashokan edict that names specific Buddhist scriptures. Its odd name comes from the accident that Burt was camped at a village called Bhabra when he recorded it, so the same object travels under three names: Bhabru, Bhabra and Calcutta-Bairat.

The circular shrine

Excavation on the terraces of Bijak-ki-Pahari, by Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni in 1935-36, exposed a Mauryan circular shrine built of brick, with twenty-six octagonal wooden pillars set around a small central stupa, inside a rectangular enclosure, and a monastery alongside with a double row of cells around an open courtyard.

Hold on to the shape. A circular free-standing shrine is unusual in early Indian architecture, which is why Bairath is cited well outside Rajasthan syllabi as one of the earliest structural Buddhist temples in the subcontinent. The pillars were wood, which is why only foundations survive, and which is itself the reason so much early Indian architecture has vanished.

MCQ WATCH — Bairath

Direct fact: Bairath is at Viratnagar, now in Kotputli-Behror district (Jaipur until 2023). Hill: Bijak-ki-Pahari. Excavated 1935-36 by Daya Ram Sahni. Structure: circular shrine, 26 octagonal wooden pillars, brick, with a monastery of double-row cells.

The edict trap: Bairath has two Ashokan inscriptions. The Bhabru / Calcutta-Bairat edict is not at the site — it is in the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata, recorded by Captain T. S. Burt in 1840. A statement that both edicts remain at Bairath is false.

The unique claim: the Bhabru edict is the only Ashokan edict that names Buddhist texts (seven of them) and that states his faith in the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha.

Matsya link: Viratnagar is identified with the capital of the Matsya janapada.

4. Nagari and Ghosundi: where the record of Vaishnavism opens

Nagari, about 11 miles north of Chittorgarh town, is ancient Madhyamika, capital of the Shivi janapada. D. R. Bhandarkar worked here, and the site is fixed to the Shivis by its coins.

Two things make it more than a regional site.

Patanjali puts it in national history. The grammarian, writing around the middle of the second century BCE in the Mahabhashya, his great commentary on Panini, uses as an example the statement that a Yavana (Indo-Greek) king besieged Madhyamika: arunad yavano madhyamikam. He pairs it with a second example, arunad yavanah saketam, the Yavana besieged Saketa (Ayodhya).

Learn the name of the work, because that is how this is asked. But the reason it counts as evidence is the grammar itself. Patanjali is illustrating a tense used for an action the speaker did not witness, but could have witnessed, and which is generally known. He needed an event recent enough to be living memory and public enough that his readers would recognise it. A Rajasthan town turning up in a Sanskrit grammar as a worked example of recent news is about as good as ancient dating evidence gets.

The Hathibada–Ghosundi inscription opens the epigraphic record of Bhagavatism. Found at Ghosundi village near Nagari and reported by D. R. Bhandarkar in 1904, it is a Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi, dated on script to the second or first century BCE. It records the building of a stone enclosure, a Narayana-vata, for the worship of Samkarshana and Vasudeva — Balarama and Krishna — by a ruler who had performed the Ashvamedha.

Why this matters beyond Rajasthan: it is among the earliest known inscriptions of the Vaishnava / Bhagavata tradition anywhere in India. A devotional cult that is alive today first surfaces in the epigraphic record on a stone in Chittorgarh district. If you write one sentence about ancient Rajasthan's religious history in Mains, that is the sentence.

MCQ WATCH — Nagari and Ghosundi

Direct fact: Nagari = ancient Madhyamika, Chittorgarh district, capital of the Shivi janapada. Associated with D. R. Bhandarkar, who reported the Ghosundi inscription in 1904.

The inscription: language Sanskrit, script Brahmi, date 2nd–1st century BCE. Records a Narayana-vata enclosure for Samkarshana and Vasudeva, by a ruler who performed the Ashvamedha. Among the earliest Vaishnava/Bhagavata inscriptions in India.

Statement-based trap: the deities are Samkarshana and Vasudeva, not Vishnu-by-that-name and not Shiva. An option naming Shiva, or naming Rama, is the distractor.

The Yavana siege: attested by Patanjali in the Mahabhashya, his commentary on Panini, c. mid-2nd century BCE. The line is arunad yavano madhyamikam, paired in the same passage with arunad yavanah saketam (Saketa, Ayodhya). It dates the site, and it is the reason Madhyamika appears in general Indian history at all.

Where this is asked by name: the work is the Mahabhashya, not the Ashtadhyayi (that is Panini's own grammar, which Patanjali is commenting on) and not the Gargi Samhita (a separate contemporary text that records a Yavana advance on Pataliputra). All three circulate as options together.

Barli: the oldest inscription in the state, and a dating fight worth knowing

The Barli inscription, from near Barli village in Ajmer district, is normally given as the oldest inscription found in Rajasthan. It is in Prakrit, in Brahmi script, it is fragmentary, and it was obtained by the historian Gaurishankar Hirachand Ojha in 1912. It refers to Vira and carries a reckoning read as Vira-nirvana samvat 84, which makes it one of the earliest Jaina inscriptions reported from the state and the main early evidence for Jainism in this unit.

Now the part that is usually taught as settled and is not. Ojha's reading placed it around 443 BCE, which would make it pre-Ashokan and among the oldest inscriptions in India. Later scholars, working from the palaeography of its letter forms, place it in the late second century BCE, in the Shunga period, and regard the 443 BCE date as untenable.

Both figures are in circulation. Exam material overwhelmingly repeats the pre-Ashoka / 443 BCE version, so that is the answer most likely keyed as correct; but the honest position, and the one to write in Mains, is that the early date rests on a reading of the era name while the later date rests on letter forms, and that the palaeographic case is the stronger of the two. Saying which kind of evidence supports which date is worth more than picking a number.

5. Iron: the part of the economy that actually shows up

Rajasthan's ancient economy is legible mainly through metal, and this is the strongest and least-prepared section of the unit.

• Rairh, in Niwai tehsil, Tonk — the big one, and now quoted from K. N. Puri's excavation report itself. Excavation began in 1938-39 under Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni, and after his death was continued by Dr K. N. Puri, whose report Excavation at Rairh covers the seasons of 1938-39 and 1939-40. The site had come to notice when a peasant boy chanced on 326 silver punch-marked coins on the edge of the mound. Excavation revealed a flourishing industrial town working iron, lead, bronze, silver and gold, with layers of iron slag in the sections. Rairh also gave Malava coins and a lead seal of the Malava republic, which is what ties the site to that people.

The report's own numbers, which settle three claims that have been circulating loose.

The river. Rairh stands above the Dhil Nadi — that is the report's spelling, not "Dheel" — an affluent of the Banas, which flows in the rains into the Gopalpura Bund some six miles south. A large bend of it wraps the mounds on three sides. The mounds run over 2,500 feet east to west and about 1,800 feet wide, standing 15 to 25 feet above the river bed.

The iron. The report describes "large quantities of iron refuse weighing several maunds", with one smithy chamber alone yielding over a maund, plus numerous smithies and slag scattered across the surface. Its own conclusion is that Rairh was "a metallurgical centre where industrial operations on a moderate scale were conducted". Preparation material inflates this into tonnages; the excavator wrote several maunds and moderate scale.

A Mauryan-era inscription few notes carry. Sahni reports from Rairh a copper tablet bearing a two-line Brahmi inscription of the 3rd century BC with the well-known Malava symbol, and judged that, chalcolithic sites aside, Rairh "would appear to be one of the earliest to be found anywhere in India" and "must have been an important centre of Mauryan art and culture".

The Apollodotus coin, finally placed. The report lists the collection recovered from surface scanning: a few silver punch-marked coins, over three hundred Malava coins, 14 coins of Mitra kings, 6 Senapati issues, 7 Vapu coins, a broken coin of Apollodotus, 189 uninscribed copper coins, a couple of Indo-Sassanian pieces, and a coin of Muhammad II, the Khalji Sultan of Delhi.

So the sentence that has been circulating attached to Nagar and to Sambhar — "coins of the Malava and Mitra rulers, Indo-Greek coins, and a fragmented coin of the Greek ruler Apollodotus" — describes Rairh. It was copied off this list. One caution survives even so: the report's own tabulation calls the fragmentary coin's attribution uncertain, noting the tripod device could equally suit Dionysios or Zoilos, and offers Apollodotus only as "a plausible attribution".

• Sunari, on the right bank of the Kantli in Khetri tehsil, Jhunjhunu — excavated in 1980-81 by R. C. Agrawal and Vijai Kumar of the Rajasthan Department of Archaeology and Museums, to fix the stratigraphic position of the Painted Grey Ware. Indian Archaeology — A Review reports two furnaces for smelting and forging iron, in the early phase of the Painted Grey Ware. Three periods: I grey ware painted in black with unpainted Black-and-Red Ware "different from that of Ahar", iron implements and the furnaces; II coeval with the NBPW, with a stone plaque bearing auspicious Buddhist symbols; III Shunga-Kushana, with a seal inscribed in Brahmi and cast copper coins.
• Iswal, about 20 km north-west of Udaipur — five seasons of excavation exposed six smelting and forging furnaces, with iron working reported from around the fourth century BCE. Nathara-ki-Pal, also in the south-east, is studied alongside it.

Two things the Review says about Sunari that change how it should be taught.

First, the Kantli basin context. IAR records no fewer than fifty sites from prehistoric to early historical periods in that basin, the most important being Ganeshwar, at the river's source. Sunari is the only one of them yielding Painted Grey Ware. So Sunari is not a stray iron site; it is the PGW outlier in a valley whose other headline site is the copper centre of the prehistoric chapter, on the same river.

Second, the superlative is not in the source. Preparation material calls Sunari the oldest iron furnace in Rajasthan, sometimes in India. IAR calls the two furnaces a "noteworthy feature" and says nothing about primacy. Carry "two iron smelting and forging furnaces from the early PGW phase", which is what the report actually supports.

A conflict inside the source itself: IAR gives Sunari's position as 27°53′ N, 75°56′ E, and those coordinates, read literally, fall in Patan tehsil, Sikar on the state GIS layer, while the same entry says in words "the ancient mound of Sunari in Khetri Tehsil" under the heading "District Jhunjhunu". Coordinates rounded to the whole minute near a district boundary are the weaker evidence, so Jhunjhunu stands; the discrepancy is noted rather than resolved.

Put those three together and you have an argument rather than a list: iron was being smelted in the Aravalli belt, worked into tools in an eastern industrial town, and traded under a republic's own coinage. That is a functioning economy, and it is visible without a single king's name.

MCQ WATCH — the iron economy

Direct fact: Rairh — Niwai tehsil, Tonk; Sahni 1938-39, continued by K. N. Puri; 326 punch-marked silver coins as the chance find that started it; Malava coins and a lead seal of the Malava republic. Sunari — Kantli river, Khetri tehsil, Jhunjhunu, 1980-81, Rajasthan State Department. Iswal — Udaipur, ~20 km north-west, six furnaces.

Attribution trap: Rairh is popularly credited to K. N. Puri alone. The first season was Daya Ram Sahni's; Puri took over after Sahni's death and wrote the report. Both names are correct, in that order.

Caution: the specific tonnage of iron slag at Rairh circulates widely in exam material in several different figures. Carry "layers of iron slag / a major iron-working centre" rather than a number.

6. Noh: the longest sequence in eastern Rajasthan

Noh, in Bharatpur district on the Ruparail, was excavated by the Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Rajasthan, across 1963-67. Indian Archaeology — A Review gives the two opening seasons directly:

• 1963-64, under R. C. Agrawala, and — a detail almost nobody carries — in collaboration with the Art Department of the University of California, under Professor J. LeRoy Davidson. Two cuttings, A and B; cutting A gave a 13.50 m deposit through five periods.
• 1964-65, under Vijai Kumar, assisted by P. L. Chakravarty and B. M. S. Parmar, with the stated objective of fixing the relationship between the Black-and-Red Ware and the Painted Grey Ware and the position of the NBPW in this region.

The site lies about 6.43 km west of Bharatpur on the Agra road.

It matters because of its continuity. Five periods run from Ochre Coloured Pottery, through Black-and-Red Ware, then Painted Grey Ware, then Northern Black Polished Ware, and on to the Shunga–Kushana levels.

The dating was refined across the seasons, so use the later figures. By IAR 1966-67, which set out to fix the post-PGW sequence, Period IV is placed in the early sixth to third century BC and Period V in the early second century BC to late third century AD — not the vaguer "pre-Sultanate" that circulates from the first season's provisional reading.

Two findings from that season are worth carrying:

• There is no stratigraphic gap between the PGW and NBPW phases at Noh. PGW and plain grey ware continue into the NBPW period. For a site excavated specifically to fix the position of the NBPW, that continuity is the result.
• Period V pottery carries triratna and svastika symbols resembling Hastinapura Period IV, with terracotta figurines in elaborate coiffures and jewellery, horse and bull figurines, a cast copper coin, a toy-cart, dice, flesh-rubbers, antimony rods, bangles of shell, glass and terracotta, a potter's stamp and semi-precious beads. From Period IV came a terracotta elephant incised all over the body.
• The 1965-66 season, under Vijai Kumar, recognised eight structural phases within Period V alone, with baked brick common (39 × 23 × 5.5 and 29 × 23 × 5.5 cm). It also exposed a cistern about 50 × 43 × 20 cm, read as intended for offering oblations — a reading the excavators support with a bone seal in Brahmi reading pap-nattasa found with it. A named, dated, domestic-scale ritual installation is unusually concrete evidence for religious practice, and no aggregator carries it.

One correction worth carrying: coaching material credits Noh with coins of Huvishka and Vasudeva. Those Kushana coins belong to Rangmahal, where they were excavated alongside issues of Kanishka. Noh's Kushana-period evidence is structural, not numismatic in that sense.

Two details from the Review are worth more than the period list. The Period I Ochre Coloured Ware carried incised decoration matching Atranjikhera, tying Noh to the Ganga-Yamuna sequence. And the Period II Black-and-Red Ware is unpainted, explicitly unlike Ahar's — the same ware family, a different tradition, which is exactly the distinction the Chalcolithic chapter turns on.

The 1963-64 season also produced cast copper coins of the Mitra rulers of Mathura, terracotta figurines including the goddess Vasudhara, and a fragment of Chunar sandstone bearing the typical Mauryan polish. Its Period V, assigned to the seventh–eighth century AD, yielded stone plaques and the palm of a life-size Buddha or yaksha figure in white-spotted red sandstone.

Its signature find is the colossal Yaksha image, known locally as Jakha Baba — pot-bellied, with long ear-studs, torque, armlets and an udarbandha. Yaksha worship is a folk cult older than, and absorbed by, the classical religions, and a colossal Yaksha in a Bharatpur village is direct evidence that the popular religion of ancient Rajasthan was not confined to what inscriptions record.

For a single site that demonstrates "society and culture" across two thousand years, Noh is the one to name. One mound carries the whole sequence.

Sambhar, which is not only a medieval capital

Sambhar is best known as Shakambhari, capital of the imperial Chahamanas, which is medieval and belongs to a later chapter. But the mound beside the salt lake is an ancient settlement in its own right, and it is examinable as one.

It was first dug by Hendley in 1884, then excavated by Rai Bahadur Daya Ram Sahni in 1936-37 and 1937-38 for the Jaipur State Department of Archaeology, whose report is Archaeological Remains and Excavations at Sambhar. Sahni's report states it plainly: "altogether forty-five separate dwellings were exposed in all the trenches and these are found to lie on six distinct levels", each datable from portable antiquities, short epigraphs and coins. He classifies the houses as ranging from the 2nd century BC down to the 8th or 9th century AD — the latest stratum sits within two or three feet of the mound surface. The nearby site of Naliasar was worked in the same seasons.

On the coin count. Two accounts circulate: about 200 coins (six silver punch-marked, six late Indo-Sassanian copper, one Indo-Greek silver), against figures an order of magnitude larger including 3,075 punch-marked coins and 115 ring wells. Having read Sahni's report, the larger set does not describe Sambhar — the 3,075 punch-marked coins and the ring structures belong to the Rairh material, which Sahni reports in the same volume. That is how the two got mixed. Learn Hendley 1884 → Sahni 1936-38, 45 dwellings, six levels, 2nd c. BC to 8th–9th c. AD, and keep Rairh's coin hoard on Rairh's side of the ledger.

7. Rangmahal: rural life under the Kushanas, and a district worth getting right

Rangmahal was excavated in 1952-54 by a Swedish archaeological expedition under Dr Hanna Rydh — a rare instance of a foreign expedition defining an Indian regional culture, and the reason the whole ceramic style is called the Rang Mahal culture. The first settlement is placed around 250 CE, in the Kushana period, continuing to about the sixth or seventh century. Excavation produced pottery, terracotta figurines and coins including issues of Kanishka I, Huvishka and Vasudeva.

Now the district, which is genuinely messy and which most sources get wrong in an instructive way.

Rangmahal is in Pilibanga tehsil, Hanumangarh district. That is the answer, and it is confirmed geometrically: the village's coordinates (29.3885° N, 73.9565° E) fall inside the Pilibanga polygon of the Rajasthan state GIS tehsil layer.

Plenty of otherwise-reliable sources, Wikipedia among them, place it in Suratgarh tehsil, Sri Ganganagar. Two things produced that error and both are worth understanding, because the same mechanism will mislead you on other sites:

• Hanumangarh did not exist until 1994, when it was carved out of Sri Ganganagar. Anything written before that, or copied from something written before that, correctly said Sri Ganganagar. The district changed under the site.
• The village sits on the Suratgarh–Hanumangarh road, and "Suratgarh" in that phrase names the road, not the tehsil.

So the commonly-taught answer, Hanumangarh, is right — but for a reason most material cannot supply, and against a body of sources that says otherwise. If a question offers both, take Hanumangarh.

The yupa pillars: Rajasthan's hard evidence for Vedic sacrifice

This is the most under-taught item in the whole unit, and it comes straight out of Sahni's report.

At Barnala, a village about eight miles off the Lalsote–Gangapur road, Sahni discovered two complete yupa — sacrificial stone pillars — in a large tank beside the village, each broken in two at about six feet from the base. A yupa is the post to which the victim was tied in a Vedic sacrifice, and the Satapatha Brahmana prescribes its form: an octagonal shaft, a chashala (ring) below the top, and a girdle round the middle.

They are not alone. Sahni lists the yupa pillars then known: two from Mathura, two from Nandsa (Udaipur State), and three from Badva (Kotah State) — with Barnala making Jaipur State's first.

Why this matters for the syllabus: inscribed yupa pillars are dated, first-hand records of Vedic sacrifices actually performed in Rajasthan, usually naming the sacrificer and the rite. For a paper asking about religious life in ancient Rajasthan, they are stronger evidence than any text, and Badva, Nandsa and Barnala is the trio to remember.

7a. Bahaj: the excavation that changed the picture, and it is brand new

If one thing on this page is likely to appear in a 2026 paper because it is recent, it is Bahaj.

Bahaj village, Deeg district. The ASI began excavating in January 2024 and worked for roughly a year and a half, under Dr Vinay Kumar Gupta, Superintending Archaeologist. It is being described as the most significant excavation in Rajasthan since Kalibangan, and it reached about 23 metres below the surface — the deepest excavation in the state's archaeological history.

Note the district before anything else: Deeg is one of the eight districts created in 2023 that survived the December 2024 cull. A site excavated in 2024 in a district created in 2023 is exactly where older reference material has nothing to say.

What was found:

• A paleochannel about 23 m deep, which the excavators link to the Saraswati of the Rig Veda.
• Over 800 artefacts — pottery, copper coins, yajna kunds, Mauryan-period sculpture, images of Shiva and Parvati, and bone tools.
• Thirty-nine seals and sealings, running from the Painted Grey Ware phase through to the Kushan period.

And the claim that makes it nationally important. The earliest of those sealings, from PGW levels, are reported to carry Brahmi characters that pre-date the Mauryas — which the excavator reads as evidence that Brahmi was already in use before the Mauryan empire and developed indigenously. One sealing carries both Brahmi and Kharoshthi, reported as only the second such instance known from the subcontinent.

Handle this one carefully, and say why. The origin and dating of Brahmi is a long-running scholarly argument, and a pre-Mauryan Brahmi claim from a single site will be contested for years. Attribute it: the Bahaj excavators report pre-Mauryan Brahmi on PGW-level sealings. That is both accurate and, in a Mains answer, more impressive than asserting it flatly — it shows you know the claim is a claim.

8. Bhinmal: the intellectual capital

Bhinmal, in Jalore district, was anciently Srimal and served as an early capital of the Gurjara kingdom. Xuanzang, travelling in India between 631 and 645 CE, records it as Pi-lo-mo-lo.

Two names make it examinable:

• Magha, the Sanskrit poet, author of the Shishupala-vadha, one of the classical mahakavyas.
• Brahmagupta, the mathematician and astronomer, 598–668 CE. He tells us in his own text that he composed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta at Bhillamala, at the age of thirty, in Saka 550 = 628 CE, under King Vyaghramukha of the Chapa dynasty.

That last one is the most precisely dated fact in this entire chapter, and it is dated by the author himself. A work of world mathematics — the text that gives the first systematic treatment of zero as a number and of negative quantities — was written in a town in Jalore district in 628 CE. For an interview, that is a better answer about Rajasthan's contribution to Indian civilisation than any fort.

9. What the evidence does and does not say about society

Be careful here, because this is where preparation material fills gaps with generalities. What the Rajasthan evidence actually supports:

• Religion was plural and layered. Buddhism has a Mauryan establishment at Bairath. Bhagavata Vaishnavism has its earliest epigraphic record at Ghosundi. Yaksha worship, older and more popular than either, is attested by the colossus at Noh. These coexist rather than succeed one another.
• Political forms were not uniformly monarchical. The Shivi, Malava and Yaudheya issued coinage as janapadas and ganas. Whatever their internal structure, they were not simply kingdoms with a named dynast.
• Production was specialised and organised. Furnaces at Sunari and Iswal, a metal-working town at Rairh, and eight structural phases of brick building at Noh describe communities with craft specialisation and settled urban life.
• The region was connected, not peripheral. A Yavana army at Madhyamika, Kushana coins at Rangmahal, Ashokan edicts at Bairath and a Chinese pilgrim's notice of Bhinmal all place Rajasthan inside the traffic of the subcontinent.

What the evidence here does not independently establish is the fine texture of varna practice, the position of women, or family structure in ancient Rajasthan. Those claims exist in preparation material but rest on general pan-Indian texts, not on Rajasthan's own sources. If a Mains question asks for them, say what the regional evidence shows and mark where you are generalising from the wider Indian record. That is a stronger answer than a confident paragraph with nothing under it.

10. Statement-based questions: the fault lines

Type A — Right object, wrong place

Type B — Right name, wrong site

Type C — Right fact, wrong direction

• "The Malavas moved from Malwa into Rajasthan." Reversed. They moved into central India, which took their name.
• "Vaishnavism reached Rajasthan late." The Ghosundi inscription is among the earliest Vaishnava records anywhere.
• "Ashoka's Bairath edicts prove Buddhism replaced local cults." Yaksha worship at Noh shows the older popular religion continuing.

Type D — Two names, one object

• The Bhabru, Bhabra and Calcutta-Bairat edict are the same inscription.
• Bhinmal = Srimal = Xuanzang's Pi-lo-mo-lo.
• Nagari = Madhyamika. Nagar = Karkota Nagar. Different places, and both aliases get tested.
• Bairath = Bairat = Viratnagar.

Type E — Popular but weakly sourced

• A specific tonnage of iron slag at Rairh. Several different figures circulate in exam material; none is traceable here to the excavation report.
• Nagari also being called "Tambavati Nagari". This appears in secondary sources, and it collides with Ahar's epithet Tambavati in the prehistoric chapter. If both are offered, note that the well-attested Tambavati is Ahar.
• The Apollodotus coin, and coin totals generally. One sentence naming "coins of the Malava and Mitra rulers, Indo-Greek coins, and a fragmented coin of the Greek ruler Apollodotus" appears verbatim in secondary sources attached to Nagar, to Rairh and to Sambhar. It has been copied between them and its original subject could not be established. The coin totals that travel with it ("more than 6,000" at Nagar, "3,075 punch-marked" at Sambhar) inherit the same doubt. Answer on coin legends, which are securely attested, not on counts or on Apollodotus.
• Sambhar's antiquity figures. Two irreconcilable accounts exist; see that section.
• The Gurara (Sikar) punch-marked hoard. A large silver punch-marked hoard from Sikar is real and is cited in catalogues of Rajasthan's punch-marked coinage, but the precise total is given differently across sources (figures near 2,400 and near 2,744 both circulate) and could not be pinned here. Know the site; do not commit to the number.
• The Barli inscription's date. Two defensible positions, not one. See the section above.

11. Writing this in Mains

Coins are the constitution of ancient Rajasthan. Where there is no chronicle, a coin legend such as Majhimikaya Sibi Janapadasa is simultaneously the evidence for a people, a capital, a script and a claim to sovereignty. An answer that treats numismatics as a source rather than as trivia is doing history.

Religion here is additive, not sequential. Yaksha worship at Noh, Bhagavata Vaishnavism at Ghosundi, Mauryan Buddhism at Bairath. The temptation is to narrate them as phases replacing one another; the evidence shows them overlapping. This mirrors the argument the prehistoric chapter makes about technology at Bagor, and using the same structure twice shows a grasp of method.

The economy is visible where the dynasties are not. Furnaces at Sunari and Iswal, an industrial town at Rairh, Kushana coins at Rangmahal. For a region with a thin political record, material production is the more honest index of what ancient society was actually like.

Rajasthan was a corridor, not a margin. An Indo-Greek siege, Mauryan edicts, Kushana coinage and a Chinese pilgrim's notice all land here. Any answer that frames ancient Rajasthan as isolated until the Rajput period is contradicted by its own evidence.

12. The district check, because half these sites moved

Rajasthan went from 33 districts to 50 in 2023 and back to 41 in December 2024, and eight of the 2023 creations survived. Resolve every site tehsil first.

How far this drift goes: IAR 1965-66 heads its Kalibangan entry "District Ganganagar" — correct then, wrong now, because Hanumangarh was carved out of Sri Ganganagar in 1994. The most-cited site in the syllabus has already changed district once in the printed record, three decades before the 2023 reorganisation.

13. Nowadays

Covering 1 January to 27 August 2026. This section is updated every month until Prelims and Mains. Everything in it is dated, because a current-affairs fact without a date is worse than no fact at all.

Bahaj is the live site in this chapter, and 2026 brought its publication rather than its discovery. Section 7a already carries the excavation. What follows is what reached print, and the distinction matters more than usual here.

Two Bahaj papers published, May 2026. Dr Vinay Kumar Gupta, Superintending Archaeologist of the ASI Jaipur Circle, published two studies of the Deeg excavation in Vestigia Indica: BSSS Journal of History and Archaeology, Vol. 4, Issue I (2026).

• With Shiv Pratap Singh, a catalogue of 39 seals and sealings (pp. 27-70), arguing that seals from Painted Grey Ware levels carry pre-Mauryan Brahmi characters, and reporting one sealing bearing both Brahmi and Kharoshthi, which the authors call only the second such instance known from the subcontinent. Read the paper.
• "The Earliest Coinage of Bharat as Unearthed from Bahaj Excavations" (pp. 70-116), reporting 220 coins and 47 cowries, including 7 silver punch-marked coins and 18 copper punch-marked coins from pre-Mauryan levels. Read the paper.

Now the caution, and it is the reason this entry is worded carefully. The findings are not new in 2026. The excavation ran January 2024 to July 2025, and its coin results were reported in the press in November 2025, before this window opens. What falls inside the window is the formal journal publication, not the discovery. A claim that Rajasthan produced pre-Mauryan Brahmi or India's earliest coinage in 2026 has confused the date of a paper with the date of a find.

Treat the claims themselves as arguments, not settled results. "Pre-Mauryan Brahmi" and "the earliest coinage of Bharat" are the excavator's readings, published in a young journal, and they bear on live scholarly disputes about the date of Brahmi. They are worth knowing and worth attributing; they are not yet textbook facts.

What has not changed. No date, inscription or identification in this chapter was revised. The Bairath edicts, the Ghosundi and Barli inscriptions, the coin legends of the Shivi and Malava, and Rangmahal's district all stand as given above.

Important for RAS

Prelims Focus

• Bairath (Viratnagar, Kotputli-Behror; Jaipur until 2023**)** — the only Ashokan inscriptions in Rajasthan, two of them; Bijak-ki-Pahari; circular shrine with 26 octagonal wooden pillars; Daya Ram Sahni, 1935-36
• Bhabru / Calcutta-Bairat edict — in the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata; recorded by Captain T. S. Burt, 1840; eight lines; the only edict naming Buddhist texts, and the one declaring faith in Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha
• Shivi janapada — capital Madhyamika = Nagari, Chittorgarh; coin legend "Majhimikaya Sibi Janapadasa"; Patanjali records a Yavana siege c. mid-2nd century BCE
• Ghosundi / Hathibada inscription — Sanskrit in Brahmi, 2nd–1st century BCE, reported by D. R. Bhandarkar, 1904; Narayana-vata for Samkarshana and Vasudeva; among the earliest Vaishnava records in India
• Barli inscription (Ajmer) — usually given as the oldest inscription in Rajasthan; Prakrit in Brahmi; obtained by G. H. Ojha, 1912; mentions Vira and Vira-nirvana samvat 84; an early Jaina record. Dating is disputed: 443 BCE / pre-Ashokan (the exam-standard answer) against late 2nd century BCE on palaeography
• Malava — centre Nagar, ancient Karkota Nagar (Uniara tehsil, Tonk); mound ~5 sq km; legends "Malavanam jayah" and "Malava ganasya jayah", plus a lead coin reading "Malava Janapada"; excavated 1938 by Sahni and Puri, and Krishna Deva 1942-43; migrated Punjab → eastern Rajasthan → central India, which took their name. Coin totals and the Apollodotus coin: contested, do not memorise
• Sambhar (Phulera tehsil, Jaipur) — ancient mound beside the salt lake, distinct from its later fame as Chahamana Shakambhari; Hendley 1884, then Daya Ram Sahni 1936-37 and 1937-38; 45 dwellings on six levels, c. 3rd–2nd century BCE to 10th century CE; Naliasar worked alongside
• Rairh (Niwai, Tonk) — Sahni 1938-39, continued by K. N. Puri; 326 punch-marked silver coins; iron-working town; lead seal of the Malava republic
• Sunari (Khetri, Jhunjhunu) — Kantli river; 1980-81, Rajasthan State Department; early iron-smelting furnaces
• Iswal (Udaipur) — six smelting and forging furnaces; iron working from about the 4th century BCE
• Noh (Bharatpur) — R. C. Agrawala, 1963-64; five periods OCP → BRW → PGW → NBPW/Shunga-Kushana → pre-Sultanate; the Yaksha colossus, Jakha Baba; on the Ruparail
• Rangmahal (Pilibanga, Hanumangarh — GPS-confirmed; many sources wrongly say Suratgarh/Sri Ganganagar**)** — Hanna Rydh, Swedish expedition, 1952-54; Kushana from about 250 CE; coins of Kanishka I, Huvishka, Vasudeva
• Bhinmal (Jalore) — ancient Srimal; Gurjara capital; Xuanzang's Pi-lo-mo-lo; Magha (Shishupala-vadha); Brahmagupta, who wrote the Brahmasphutasiddhanta here in 628 CE under Vyaghramukha of the Chapa dynasty
• Bahaj (Deeg) — ASI from January 2024 under Vinay Kumar Gupta; ~23 m deep, the deepest dig in the state; 23 m paleochannel linked to the Saraswati; 800+ artefacts; 39 seals and sealings from PGW to Kushan; earliest reported to carry pre-Mauryan Brahmi; one sealing with both Brahmi and Kharoshthi
• Yaudheyas — Sri Ganganagar–Hanumangarh belt; Arjunayanas — Bharatpur–Alwar

Interview and Mains Angles

• A text that gave world mathematics its systematic treatment of zero was composed at Bhinmal in 628 CE, and almost no one in Rajasthan is taught this. What does it say about how a state chooses which parts of its past to celebrate, when forts are remembered and Brahmagupta is not?
• Several of Rajasthan's ancient polities were ganas that struck their own coinage rather than kingdoms with named dynasts. Does the state's popular history, built around Rajput monarchy, make its own republican past harder to see?
• The Ghosundi inscription places the earliest epigraphic record of a living devotional tradition in Chittorgarh district, yet it is a step-well stone rather than a monument. How should a state protect evidence whose importance is textual rather than visual?

Practice

• Practice: Society and Culture of Ancient Rajasthan — 83 questions built from this chapter: 65 MCQs, 10 assertion-reason and 8 match-the-following, plus flashcards and rapid one-liners. Every distractor is a real error in circulation, and every question is tagged by the kind of trap it probes.

More in This Series

• Pre-historic Sites of Rajasthan: Palaeolithic to Bronze Age — the unit that ends where this one begins
• Sources of the History of Rajasthan — the inscriptions, khyats, bahis and coins that everything here rests on

Aggregator Watch

Unresolved claims from this box are collected, with what was checked, on the Caution for Readers page.

Sources & Verification

Checked as of 18 August 2026. Primary excavation reports read directly for this chapter: Daya Ram Sahni, Archaeological Remains and Excavations at Sambhar, Samvat 1993–1994 (1936-37 and 1937-38), Jaipur State — the authority for Sambhar's 45 dwellings on six levels, for the Barnala yupa pillars and the Mathura / Nandsa / Badva comparanda, and for the Rairh copper tablet; Daya Ram Sahni, Archaeological Remains and Excavations at Bairat, Jaipur State; K. N. Puri, Excavations at Rairh, Jaipur State; and Indian Archaeology — A Review for 1963-64, 1964-65, 1965-66, 1966-67, 1980-81 and 1987-88. Other sources used: the RPSC Prelims syllabus notified 09-01-2026; ASI Jaipur Circle pages for Rairh (Newai), Noh and the Noh Yaksha colossus, and Rangmahal; K. N. Puri, Excavation at Rairh, Samvat 1995 & 1996 (1938-39 & 1939-40), Department of Archaeology and Historical Research, Jaipur State, 1941, and the contemporary review of it in Antiquity; Indian Archaeology — A Review 1963-64, 1964-65 and 1980-81 read directly (1963-64, 1964-65 and 1966-67 from Zenodo, records 3416858, 1442629 and 5184690; 1980-81 and 1987-88 supplied locally) — the last for the Sunari entry in full for the two opening Noh seasons — the University of California collaboration, the excavators, the 6.43 km bearing, the Atranjikhera and Ahar ceramic comparisons, the Mitra coins, Vasudhara, the Chunar sandstone and the Period V dating; ASI Jaipur Circle pages for the ancient mound and excavated site at Nagar, district Tonk; the record of the Barli inscription and G. H. Ojha's 1912 report of it, together with the later palaeographic re-dating; published scholarship on the Bairat inscriptions and the archaeology of Bijak-ki-Pahari; the Hathibada–Ghosundi inscription record and D. R. Bhandarkar's 1904 report of it; scholarship on the Rang Mahal culture and on Hanna Rydh's expedition; published work on iron smelting at Iswal and Nathara-ki-Pal; Brahmagupta's own dating statement in the Brahmasphutasiddhanta (chapter XXIV), corroborated by standard reference works; and the Rajasthan Board of Revenue SDO-wise tehsil enumeration (22-01-2026), cross-checked against the state master-data portal and the RajDhara GIS tehsil layer, for every district in this chapter.

Two district corrections this chapter makes against standard material, both verified tehsil-first:

1. Bairath / Viratnagar is placed in Jaipur by essentially all preparation material and by older ASI pages. Viratnagar has been a tehsil of Kotputli-Behror since 2023, and that district survived the December 2024 cull. Jaipur is the pre-2023 answer.
2. Rangmahal was given in this chapter's first version as Sri Ganganagar (Suratgarh tehsil), following Wikipedia and similar sources. That was wrong, and it was corrected the same day. The village's coordinates fall inside Pilibanga tehsil, Hanumangarh, in the state GIS tehsil layer. The Sri Ganganagar attribution is an artefact of Hanumangarh having been carved out of Sri Ganganagar only in 1994, compounded by the village sitting on the Suratgarh–Hanumangarh road. The commonly-taught answer, Hanumangarh, is the correct one.

One claim was published and then withdrawn on 17 August 2026, within this chapter's first day. The first version of this page credited Nagar with "more than 6,000 Malava coins" including a fragmentary Apollodotus coin. A follow-up check found the identical sentence attached to Rairh and to Sambhar in other secondary sources, word for word. Since the same passage cannot describe three excavations, the attribution has been withdrawn from Nagar rather than left standing, and the associated totals with it. The coin legends are unaffected and remain the thing to learn.

One gap closed on 27 August 2026. The chapter described Patanjali's reference to the Yavana siege of Madhyamika without ever naming the work it appears in, which is how the fact is most often asked. Added: the Mahabhashya, Patanjali's commentary on Panini; the line itself, arunad yavano madhyamikam; the companion example arunad yavanah saketam (Saketa, Ayodhya); and the grammatical point that makes the passage usable as dating evidence, namely that Patanjali is illustrating a tense reserved for an action the speaker did not witness but which was public and recent. The distinction between the Mahabhashya, Panini's Ashtadhyayi and the Gargi Samhita (which records a Yavana advance on Pataliputra, not Madhyamika) has been added to the MCQ box, because the three appear together as options.

Flagged rather than asserted: (a) the tonnage of iron slag at Rairh, which circulates in several conflicting figures and is given here only as "layers of iron slag"; (b) precise counts of Malava coins from Nagar and Rairh; (c) the description of Nagari as "Tambavati Nagari", which appears in secondary sources and collides with Ahar's well-attested epithet Tambavati; (d) the exact regnal and internal constitution of the Shivi, Malava and Yaudheya ganas, which the coins establish as self-governing issuers but do not describe in detail; and (e) claims about varna practice, family structure and the position of women in ancient Rajasthan specifically, which rest on pan-Indian texts rather than on the region's own evidence and are marked as such in the body rather than presented as regional findings.