Exam-useful questions from this chapter, grouped by marks, each with a full model answer. Try writing the answer yourself first, then check it against this one.
1 1-Mark Questions
Q. Define epigraphy.
Answer: Epigraphy is the study of inscriptions, that is, writings engraved on hard surfaces such as stone, metal or pottery.
Q. Who deciphered the Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts, and when?
Answer: James Prinsep, an officer in the East India Company’s mint, deciphered Brahmi and Kharosthi in the 1830s; Asokan Brahmi was deciphered in 1838.
Q. What does the word “janapada” mean?
Answer: Janapada means the land where a jana, that is a people, clan or tribe, sets its foot or settles.
Q. Name the five major political centres of the Mauryan empire.
Answer: The capital Pataliputra, and the provincial centres Taxila, Ujjayini, Tosali and Suvarnagiri.
Q. What was an agrahara?
Answer: An agrahara was land granted to a Brahmana, usually with an exemption from paying land revenue and other dues to the king.
Q. Who composed the Prayaga Prashasti, and about which ruler?
Answer: It was composed by Harishena, the court poet of Samudragupta, in praise of Samudragupta.
2 2-Mark Questions
Q. What were ganas or sanghas? Name two well-known men who belonged to such ganas.
Answer: Ganas or sanghas were oligarchies in which political power was shared by a number of men, collectively called rajas, rather than held by a single king. Both Mahavira and the Buddha belonged to such ganas.
Q. Define a gahapati.
Answer: A gahapati was the owner, master or head of a household, who exercised control over the women, children, slaves and workers sharing a common residence, and who owned the household’s resources, including land and animals; the term was sometimes also used as a marker of status for men of the urban elite, including wealthy merchants.
Q. What were shrenis, and what did they do?
Answer: Shrenis, or guilds, were organisations of craft producers and merchants. They probably procured raw materials, regulated production and marketed the finished product.
Q. What is transplantation, and how did it raise paddy yields?
Answer: In transplantation, seeds are first broadcast; when the saplings have grown, they are transplanted into waterlogged fields. This raises both the survival ratio of the saplings and the final yield, and dramatically increased paddy production in parts of the Ganga valley, though it meant back-breaking work for the producer.
Q. How was the Kharosthi script deciphered?
Answer: Coins of the Indo-Greek kings who ruled the northwest (c. second-first centuries BCE) carried the same royal names in both Greek and Kharosthi. European scholars who could read Greek compared the letters, for instance finding the symbol for “a” in both scripts in a name such as Apollodotus, and once Prinsep identified the underlying language as Prakrit, longer Kharosthi inscriptions could be read as well.
3 3-Mark Questions
Q. Describe the salient features of the mahajanapadas.
Answer: Each mahajanapada had a capital city, often fortified, since maintaining fortifications, armies and an early bureaucracy required resources. There were two kinds of states: kingdoms, ruled by a single king who was ideally a Kshatriya, and ganas or sanghas, oligarchies in which power was shared collectively among a number of rajas. From about the sixth century BCE, Brahmanas composed Sanskrit texts called the Dharmasutras, laying down norms for rulers, who were advised to collect taxes and tribute from cultivators, traders and artisans; raiding neighbouring states was recognised as a legitimate way of acquiring wealth.
Q. Why did Magadha become the most powerful mahajanapada? Give both the explanation of modern historians and of early Buddhist and Jaina writers.
Answer: Modern historians point to geography: Magadha’s agriculture was especially productive, iron mines in present-day Jharkhand were accessible and provided resources for tools and weapons, elephants from the region’s forests strengthened its army, and the Ganga and its tributaries gave cheap, convenient communication. Early Buddhist and Jaina writers, in contrast, attributed Magadha’s power to the policies of individuals: ruthlessly ambitious kings, of whom Bimbisara, Ajatasattu and Mahapadma Nanda are the best known, and the ministers who helped implement their policies.
Q. What was Asoka’s dhamma, and how did he try to spread it?
Answer: Asoka’s dhamma included respect towards elders, generosity towards Brahmanas and those who renounced worldly life, kind treatment of slaves and servants, and respect for religions and traditions other than one’s own. He spread this message by inscribing it on natural rocks and polished pillars across the empire, and by appointing special officers called dhamma mahamatta to instruct people in dhamma.
Q. Using the list of gifts brought to the chief Senguttuvan in the Silappadikaram, explain the difference between a chief and a king.
Answer: In the Silappadikaram, people bring the chief Senguttuvan forest and hill produce such as ivory, fragrant wood, sandalwood, honey, spices, fruits and animals as gifts, which he then redistributes among his supporters. A king, by contrast, collected regular taxes from his subjects, an established and compulsory demand rather than a voluntary gift, and chiefdoms generally had no standing armies or officials of the kind kingdoms maintained.
Q. How do historians reconstruct the lives of ordinary people in this period?
Answer: Inscriptions do not answer this, because ordinary people rarely left accounts of their own thoughts and experiences. Historians instead examine stories in anthologies such as the Jatakas and the Panchatantra, many of which probably began as popular oral tales later committed to writing, such as the Gandatindu Jataka, which describes how the subjects of a wicked king, including cultivators, herders and even animals, cursed him for their sufferings.
Q. What does the Sudarshana lake inscription tell us about rulers and irrigation?
Answer: It describes an artificial reservoir in Gujarat, built with embankments and water channels by a local governor under the Mauryas. When a storm broke the embankments, the Shaka ruler Rudradaman claimed to have repaired the lake using his own resources, without imposing any tax on his subjects. This shows that such inscriptions were not neutral records of public works but a ruler’s way of advertising his own generosity.
Q. List some of the problems faced by epigraphists.
Answer: Letters are sometimes very faintly engraved, making reconstruction uncertain; inscriptions may be damaged or have missing letters; the exact meaning of words is not always clear, and some terms may be specific to a particular place or time; and of the several thousand inscriptions discovered, not all have been deciphered, published or translated, so what survives is probably only a fraction of what was originally inscribed.
4 4-Mark Questions
Q. Compare the three strategies used to increase agricultural production: what did each involve, and where did each spread or fail to spread?
Answer: Plough agriculture used the iron-tipped ploughshare to turn alluvial soil, and spread from c. sixth century BCE in fertile river valleys such as the Ganga and the Kaveri; cultivators in the semi-arid parts of Punjab and Rajasthan did not adopt it until the twentieth century, while people in the hilly north-east and central subcontinent practised hoe agriculture instead. Transplantation, broadcasting seeds and later moving the saplings into waterlogged fields, dramatically raised paddy yields in parts of the Ganga valley, though at the cost of back-breaking labour. Irrigation, through wells and tanks and less commonly canals, was organised by both communities and individuals, the latter usually powerful men including kings, who often recorded such works in inscriptions.
Q. Examine both sides of the question, “How important was the Mauryan empire?”
Answer: In its favour: nineteenth-century Indian historians, writing under colonial rule, found the possibility of an early Indian empire challenging and exciting; Mauryan stone sculpture was seen as spectacular imperial art; and Asoka’s inscriptions seemed to show a ruler more industrious yet more humble than later kings with grandiose titles, which is why twentieth-century nationalists saw him as inspiring. Against this: the empire lasted only about 150 years, a short span in subcontinental history; it did not cover the entire subcontinent; control was not uniform even within its own frontiers; and by the second century BCE new chiefdoms and kingdoms had already emerged in several regions.
Q. Explain the historians’ debate about what land grants tell us about royal power.
Answer: One view holds that land grants show strength: ruling lineages used them as a strategy to extend agriculture into new, uncultivated areas, with grants ranging from small plots to vast tracts of land. The opposing view holds that land grants show weakness: as kings lost control over their samantas, they tried to win allies by granting them land, and on this reading kings also presented themselves as supermen in prashastis precisely because they were losing real control and needed at least a façade of power.
5 5-Mark Questions
Q. Discuss the evidence of craft production in Early Historic cities. In what ways is this different from the evidence from Harappan cities?
Answer: Because people still live on most Early Historic urban sites, unlike the abandoned Harappan cities, large-scale excavation is difficult, yet a wide range of artefacts has still been recovered: fine glossy pottery known as Northern Black Polished Ware, probably used by rich people, and ornaments, tools, weapons, vessels and figurines made of gold, silver, copper, bronze, ivory, glass, shell and terracotta. From the second century BCE, short votive inscriptions in many cities name donors and sometimes their occupations, revealing washing folk, weavers, scribes, carpenters, potters, goldsmiths and blacksmiths, and mention guilds or shrenis that organised craft production and marketed finished goods. This is different from Harappan evidence, which comes almost entirely from excavated, abandoned sites and standardised artefacts such as seals and weights, with no inscriptions naming individual crafts-people or occupations; Early Historic evidence, by contrast, is patchier archaeologically but is enriched by inscriptions that name real individuals and their trades.
Q. Discuss the main features of Mauryan administration. Which of these elements are evident in the Asokan inscriptions you have studied?
Answer: The empire had five major political centres, the capital Pataliputra and the provincial centres Taxila, Ujjayini, Tosali and Suvarnagiri, chosen for their access to trade routes and resources such as gold mines. Administration was probably not uniform; control was strongest around the capital and the provincial centres, since communication along land and river routes could take weeks or months and needed provisioning and protection by the army. Megasthenes describes a committee with six subcommittees coordinating military activity, from the navy to the elephant corps. Asoka additionally held the empire together through dhamma, propagated by inscriptions on rocks and pillars and by officers called dhamma mahamatta. The inscriptions studied in this chapter show virtually the same message engraved at different political centres, the use of titles such as devanampiya and piyadassi instead of a personal name, and Asoka’s own account of a reporting system through pativedakas, all of which point to a deliberate, empire-wide effort at communication even where uniform administrative control was doubtful.
Q. Discuss the notions of kingship that developed in the post-Mauryan period.
Answer: In the south, chiefdoms such as the Cholas, Cheras and Pandyas in Tamilakam were built on gift-giving and redistribution rather than taxation. Rulers such as the Satavahanas and the Shakas drew revenue from long-distance trade and, despite often obscure social origins, claimed status once they gained power. The Kushanas went further, claiming a form of divinity: they installed colossal royal statues in shrines and adopted the title devaputra, “son of god”, possibly inspired by Chinese rulers who called themselves sons of heaven. By the fourth century, larger states such as the Gupta empire depended on samantas, who offered homage and military support in exchange for local resources and could themselves become kings if powerful enough, or be reduced to subordination if weak. Gupta kingship was also projected through Sanskrit prashastis such as the Prayaga Prashasti, which presented Samudragupta as a being equal to the gods, a strategy historians read as an attempt to present at least the appearance of power.
Q. To what extent were agricultural practices transformed in the period from c. 600 BCE to 600 CE?
Answer: From about the sixth century BCE, the iron-tipped ploughshare spread through fertile river valleys such as the Ganga and the Kaveri, though semi-arid Punjab and Rajasthan did not adopt it until the twentieth century and hilly regions continued to practise hoe agriculture. Transplantation dramatically raised paddy yields in parts of the Ganga valley, and irrigation through wells, tanks and occasionally canals was organised by both communities and powerful individuals, including kings, who recorded such works in inscriptions such as the Sudarshana lake inscription. These technologies raised production but benefited people very unevenly, producing a growing differentiation among gahapatis, village headmen, small peasants and landless labourers, and among the Tamil vellalar, uzhavar and adimai. From the early centuries CE, land grants, some to religious institutions, some creating agraharas, extended cultivation into new areas even as they created new rural elites who could obey a new lord rather than the king directly. The overall picture is one of real technological change producing an equally real, and growing, social differentiation, rather than a single uniform improvement in rural life.
6 6-Mark Questions
Q. D.C. Sircar wrote, “There is no aspect of life, culture and activities of the Indians that is not reflected in inscriptions.” Discuss.
Answer: In support: inscriptions do cover an extraordinary range, from royal conquests such as Asoka’s Kalinga edict, to land grants such as Prabhavati Gupta’s donation of Danguna, to religious donations recorded in votive inscriptions, to administrative and irrigation works such as the Sudarshana lake inscription, to trade and guild activity, and even social distinctions such as gahapatis and vellalar. Against it: inscriptions do not mention routine agricultural practices or the ordinary joys and sorrows of daily existence, because they focus, more often than not, on grand and unique events; and their content almost invariably reflects the perspective of whoever commissioned them, so a farmhand’s or a labourer’s own view of these same events is missing. A balanced answer therefore agrees that inscriptions record an enormous amount, while noting that they are not a complete mirror of Indian life, which is exactly why historians read them alongside other sources such as the Jatakas and the Panchatantra.
Q. Compare and contrast the list of things given to the Pandyan chief (Source 3) with those produced in the village of Danguna (Source 8). Do you notice any similarities or differences?
Answer: Similarities: both lists include flowers, and both reflect the produce of an agricultural and forest-based society. Differences: the gifts brought to the chief Senguttuvan are mostly forest and hill luxuries, ivory, fragrant wood, sandalwood, spices, honey and wild animals, given voluntarily as tribute to a chief who then redistributed them among his own supporters. The Danguna list, by contrast, concerns the everyday produce and rights of an agricultural village handed over as part of a land grant, an agrahara that exempted the recipient from taxes on items such as milk, flowers, mines and khadira trees, and transferred to him the right to collect major and minor taxes from the village. This contrast captures the basic difference between the two economies discussed in this chapter: a chief’s gift-and-redistribution economy on one hand, and a king’s land-grant and revenue-based economy on the other.
7 Case Studies
— Megasthenes (Source 1)
(A) 2 marks Who was Megasthenes, and in what form has his account survived to us?
Answer: Megasthenes was a Greek ambassador at the court of Chandragupta Maurya; his account survives only in fragments.
(B) 3 marks According to this passage, name three functions performed by the “great officers of state”.
Answer: Any three of: (1) supervising rivers and measuring land, (2) inspecting sluices so that canal water was distributed equally, (3) rewarding or punishing huntsmen, and (4) collecting taxes and supervising land-related occupations such as woodcutters, carpenters, blacksmiths and miners.
(C) 3 marks What does this passage suggest about Mauryan administration, particularly with regard to irrigation management?
Answer: It suggests that the Mauryan state was directly involved in irrigation and land management, using officials to regulate the distribution of canal water and to oversee land-based trades and taxation, pointing towards a fairly organised bureaucratic structure. Historians nonetheless caution that this is the account of a foreign ambassador describing conditions mainly around the capital, and may not describe the whole empire uniformly.
— Prabhavati Gupta’s inscription (Source 8)
(A) 2 marks Who was Prabhavati Gupta, and why is her ability to grant away this village considered exceptional by historians?
Answer: She was the daughter of Chandragupta II, married into the Vakataka family, powerful in the Deccan. Sanskrit legal texts held that women should not have independent access to land, so her act of granting a village is considered exceptional, possibly because she was a queen, one of the very few women rulers known from early Indian history.
(B) 3 marks List three of the exemptions granted to the village of Danguna as part of this agrahara.
Answer: Any three of: exemption from entry by soldiers and policemen; exemption from providing grass, animal hides and charcoal to touring royal officers; exemption from the royal right to purchase fermenting liquor and dig for salt; exemption from rights over mines and khadira trees; exemption from supplying flowers and milk; and the grant of rights to hidden treasures, deposits, and major and minor taxes.
(C) 3 marks What does this inscription suggest about the relationship between land grants and the growth of new rural elites?
Answer: It shows that a land grant could transfer not just land but revenue rights and administrative privileges once held by the king to the grantee, here the Acharya Chanalasvamin, making him a powerful local lord whom the village’s peasants and Brahmanas were now commanded to obey. This illustrates the historians’ debate discussed in the chapter: such grants could be read either as a strategy for extending royal authority through trusted new elites, or as a sign that kings were losing direct control and needed to win allies by handing over land and privileges.