NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 15 Chapter opening — The Big Questions

The biggest change is that one large empire is replaced by many strong regional kingdoms. The chapter says it plainly: “You don’t see large empires in India now, but many strong kingdoms.” Around that single change, five more follow.

Politically India split into regions; culturally and religiously those same regions grew richer, and India stayed one. The three developments worked on each other.

Political → cultural. Rival kings competed not only with armies but with art. Krishna I had the Kailaśhanātha temple carved out of a hillside at Ellora — “not a construction but a gigantic sculpture”. Narasimhavarman I’s Māmallapuram was cut from living rock. Dharmapāla founded Vikramaśhilā; the Pālas kept Nālandā going. The chapter states the rule directly: “We should not imagine that the kings of such dynasties were constantly at war. In fact, they found time and resources to create wonders.”

Political → linguistic. A regional king needed his own court literature. So Kannada grew under the Rāṣhṭrakūṭas (Amoghavarṣha himself wrote in it), Telugu and Kannada under the Eastern Chālukyas, Tamil and Sanskrit together under the Pallavas and Cholas.

Religious → social. Rulers patronised Hindu, Buddhist and Jain schools of thought “regardless of their own inclinations”. The Rāṣhṭrakūṭas did all three. Harṣha gave to “Buddhists, Brahmins, and the poor”. Amoghavarṣha was drawn to Jainism yet patronised Hindu temples. This produced a cultural pluralism rather than religious wars.

Religious → cultural. The Purāṇas absorbed local deities and regional myths into pan-Indian worship of Śhiva, Viṣhṇu, Kṛiṣhṇa and the devīs. Tantric schools appeared around the 6th century. Bhakti then carried devotion into every home in the local language.

The invasions changed India far less than they changed the invaders — until the Arabs arrived, when the pattern began to shift. The chapter tells two very different stories.

1. The Hūṇas — defeat, then absorption. Two Hūṇa leaders pushed deep into the Ganga plains in the early 6th century and were defeated by the kings of the Aulikara dynasty, whose capital was Daśhapura (modern Mandsaur). Within a century they had vanished as a separate people: “many served as soldiers, others took up roles in local administrations”, one even sat on a temple’s administration council (goṣhṭhika). They wrote in Sanskrit and Prakrit, took Gupta-style titles, copied Gupta coin designs and used Lakṣhmī, Viṣhṇu and Śhiva on their money.

2. The Arabs — raids, one conquest, then a long stalemate. Naval raids hit Thānā, Bhārukachchha and Debal in 637 without lasting gain. In 712 Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sindh and killed King Dāhar. But within two years of Qasim’s death, Indian chiefs rebelled and won back most of the territory. Nāgabhaṭa I “crushed the large army of the powerful Mlechchha king”; Lalitāditya of Kashmir beat an Arab chief three times. The geographer al-Istakhri observed that after three centuries of unremitting effort the Arab dominion in India was limited to two petty states in Sindh and Punjab.

The impact, point by point

• On polity: the northwestern frontier stayed a permanent concern, and defending it became a source of prestige — the Gurjara-Pratīhāras “gained fame for pushing back Arab invasions”.
• On society: foreign groups were absorbed. The Hūṇas disappeared into the varṇa-jāti system; some communities, such as foreign traders, “remained as outsiders”.
• On religion: in Sindh the Arabs eventually changed policy — Hindus and Buddhists were allowed to rebuild temples and continue their worship, and temple priests kept their share of revenue. Elsewhere in the world Arab conquest often replaced local institutions; in Sindh its impact was “limited”.
• On knowledge — the interaction that mattered most: in the 9th century Sanskrit texts of mathematics, astronomy and medicine were translated into Arabic at Baghdad. The Arabs took India’s decimal system and the zero, and passed them to Europe, where they became known as ‘Arabic numerals’.