NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 15 End-of-chapter exercise — Questions and activities

Book page 96 Updated on2026-09-19

Q1.

If you lived in Kannauj during the struggle between the Pālas, the Pratīhāras and the Rāṣhṭrakūṭas, how would it change your daily life and your estimate of the rulers? Write a letter on this to your friend living in Kanchipuram.

Answer

How to do this well. This is a letter, so it must sound like one person writing to another — not like a textbook. But every complaint and every observation in it should come from something the chapter actually says.

What a good answer must contain

Letter form: place and date at the top, a greeting, three or four short paragraphs, a closing.
Daily life, concretely: the market, the fields, the river route, taxes, safety on the roads, whether the temple work continues — not just “there was war”.
Why Kannauj in particular: it is the prize of the Tripartite Struggle because it commands the Ganga and the richest plain in north India.
An opinion about the rulers, with a reason. That is what “your estimate of the rulers” asks for.
Something addressed to Kanchipuram: your friend lives in a Pallava (later Chola) capital far to the south — a rich trading city that is not being fought over. The contrast is the point of the letter.
Nothing invented that contradicts the chapter — the struggle ran through the 8th and 9th centuries “with fluctuating outcomes and no lasting victor”.

Sample answer:

Kānyakubja, on the Ganga
The month of Śhrāvaṇa

Dear Ilango,

Your letter reached me only after four months, and the trader who carried it said the road from the Deccan was closed twice on the way. That will tell you most of what my life is like now.

We are on our third overlord in my lifetime. First the Pratīhāra army came from the west and everyone said the trouble was over. Then the Rāṣhṭrakūṭas came up from beyond the Narmada, and their elephants stood in our fields for a season. Now people say the Pālas are moving up the river again. My father says the flags on the fort change but the tax collector does not.

What has actually changed is this. Grain is dear, because carts do not risk the road when armies are near. My uncle, who is a boatman, does well in a quiet year and nothing in a year like this. The stonecutters were sent away in the middle of building the tank behind our street, and the pit is still open. On the other hand, the market has never had so many kinds of people in it — soldiers from Bengal, horse-dealers from the west, a scribe who writes in a Kannada hand.

You ask what I think of these kings. Honestly, I do not think any of them is wicked. They build temples, they feed Brahmins and Buddhist monks alike, they keep poets at court. But not one of them can hold this city, and each knows the other two will come back. So they take Kannauj, empty it, and leave. I have come to think that a ruler who stays is worth more than a ruler who conquers.

You are lucky in Kānchī. Your kings have to think about ships and merchants and temples, not about who is coming next year from three directions. Write to me about the new stone temples at Māmallapuram. I would like to hear about something being finished.

Your friend,
Devadatta

Why the last paragraph is the strongest part: the question asks for a change in your estimate of the rulers. A good answer does not simply say “war is bad”. It notices that these were capable, cultured kings — and that being capable was not enough, because they were evenly matched. That is exactly what the chapter concludes.

Q2.

Emperors and kings during this period controlled only core regions and governed other regions through subordinate vassals. What would be the advantages and the challenges of such a system?

Answer

The sāmanta system let a king rule far more territory than he could ever administer himself — and it made that territory permanently unreliable. The chapter states the bargain in one sentence: sāmantas “were indispensable, as they led armies and managed local administration. Yet, their loyalty could be fragile.”

Advantages	Challenges
Size becomes possible. No 8th-century king could move messages and officials fast enough to run a subcontinental empire directly. Delegation was the only way to be large at all.	Loyalty is conditional. A sāmanta obeyed while the centre looked strong. The chapter notes that loyalty weakened “especially when they felt that the empire’s central authority was weakening”.
Local knowledge governs locally. A sāmanta already knew the region’s language, customs, families and disputes. Rule felt familiar, so it was accepted.	Sāmantas can grow stronger than their overlords. The clearest example is in this chapter: the Rāṣhṭrakūṭas were once sāmantas under the Chālukyas, and Dantidurga overthrew them.
Ready-made armies. Sāmantas came with their own troops. The emperor did not have to raise, pay and feed every soldier from the capital.	The army is borrowed. An army that belongs to your vassals can be withheld at the worst moment, or turned against you.
Cheap and quick expansion. A defeated king could be left in place as a tributary instead of being replaced — less fighting, faster settlement, immediate tribute.	Defeat is never final. A defeated ruler left on his throne remains a ruler, waiting.
Shock absorption. A rebellion in one province did not automatically shake the rest.	Uneven rule. Law, taxes and justice varied from one sāmanta’s territory to the next; the subject had no appeal beyond his local lord.
Villages kept running themselves. Below the sāmantas, villages “remained largely self-governed” under headmen, accountants and local committees — and in the south, elected sabhās.	Empires became short-lived. This is why so few kingdoms of this period “lasted more than a couple of centuries”.

Why kings accepted the risk: the alternative was to rule a small kingdom well or a large one not at all. Given the speed of a horse and the reach of a message in the 8th century, delegation was not a preference — it was the only technology of empire available. The weakness was built into the design, and every dynasty in this chapter eventually paid for it.

Tip: compare it with the directly-ruled core — provinces (bhuktis or rāṣhṭras), districts (maṇḍalas) and villages, each with its own officials appointed from above. The core is reliable and small; the sāmanta belt is large and unreliable. Every emperor in this chapter is trying to make the first grow at the expense of the second.

Q3.

In what ways were the invasions of the Hūṇas and the Arabs different in their aims, methods, and impact on the Indian subcontinent? Prepare a write-up, discuss and present it in the class.

Answer

How to do this well. The question names three headings — aims, methods, impact — so build the write-up on exactly those three, compare the two invasions under each, and finish with one conclusion. Keep every claim traceable to the chapter.

	The Hūṇas	The Arabs
Who they were	A branch of the Huns, nomadic people from Central Asia, in India from the 5th–6th centuries	Armies of the new Islamic state, spreading “far into Asia and Africa” within a few years of Muhammad’s death in 632 CE
Aims	Conquest, plunder and land to settle on. No separate religion or law to impose — they later took up Indian ones	Territorial conquest carried out in the name of faith. In the Chachnāma, bin Qasim tells Dāhar he considers it “my bounden duty to carry on this religious war”
Methods	Horse-riding, archery and “lightning-fast attacks”; deep raids into the Ganga plains by two leaders in succession	First naval raids on the coast (637: Thānā, Bhārukachchha, Debal); then, in 712, an organised state army under Muhammad bin Qasim sent by the governor of Iraq. Debal was stormed and, according to Al-Balādhurī, its temple destroyed and the slaughter kept up for three days
Who stopped them	The Aulikara kings of Daśhapura (Mandsaur); Yaśhodharma’s victory pillars still stand there (Fig. 3.25)	Rebelling Indian chiefs within two years of Qasim’s death; Nāgabhaṭa I of the Gurjara-Pratīhāras; Lalitāditya of Kashmir, three times
Impact — political	Weakened the Guptas earlier, but “could not affect India much at that time”; their power in India ended with the Aulikara defeats	Sindh conquered, but nothing beyond. After three centuries, al-Istakhri records Arab rule limited to two petty states in Sindh and Punjab
Impact — cultural	Complete assimilation: soldiers and local officials, one on a temple council (goṣhṭhika); Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions; Gupta-style titles and coins; Lakṣhmī, Viṣhṇu and Śhiva on their money	A separate faith and law remained. But the Arabs later changed policy in Sindh — temples were rebuilt, worship continued, priests kept their share of revenue; iconoclasm was given up
Impact — long term	They disappear as a people. Their story is an example of India absorbing an invader	The most lasting effect was intellectual, not military: in the 9th century Sanskrit works on mathematics, astronomy and medicine were translated into Arabic at Baghdad, and India’s decimal system and zero passed through the Arabs to Europe

The conclusion to end the write-up on. Both invasions were resisted and both were contained. The difference is what happened afterwards: the Hūṇas dissolved into India, while the Arabs remained distinct — yet even they, in Sindh, ended up governing through accommodation. And the deepest exchange between India and the Arab world was not caused by any invasion at all: it came through ships, trade and translation.

For the class presentation: put Fig. 3.26 (Toramāṇa’s coin beside Skandagupta’s) on one side of the board and the sentence about Indian numerals reaching Europe on the other. Those two images carry the whole argument — one invasion ended in a copied coin, the other in a borrowed number system.

Q4.

Imagine you are a common citizen watching the Prayāga assembly. How would you react to Harṣha giving away most of his wealth?

Answer

How to do this well. The question asks for a reaction, so write in the first person and say what you see before you say what you think. A good answer holds two feelings at once — awe at the spectacle, and a practical question about where the wealth came from. Both are honest for a common citizen.

What a good answer needs

The facts from the chapter: the assembly was held at Prayāga, at the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna; it took place every five years; after performing sacred rites the king gave away much wealth “to Buddhists, Brahmins, and the poor”.
A citizen’s viewpoint, not a historian’s — the crowd, the noise, the queues, what your family gained or did not gain.
At least one reason to admire it and one reason to question it.
An awareness that you are one of the poor to whom the giving was directed — that is what makes your reaction different from a courtier’s.

Sample answer:

I had never seen so many people in one place. We walked two days to reach the sangam and still could not get near the front. There were monks in yellow, Brahmins with their students, soldiers keeping a lane open, and people like us — potters, weavers, boatmen — standing behind everyone else in the dust.

When the giving began it went on and on. Cloth, grain, gold, vessels. They say the king kept giving until he had almost nothing left, and that he does this every five years. My mother said it was the finest thing she had seen in her life, and cried. My grandfather, who is harder to impress, said quietly, “Whose grain is it?”

I think both of them were right. It is a great thing that the king came out from behind his walls and gave with his own hands, and that he gave to the Buddhists, the Brahmins and the poor, without asking which of them we were. Nobody was turned away for the wrong belief. That is worth something. Our headman has less than the king and shares far less.

But I also thought about my grandfather’s question all the way home. This wealth was collected from villages like ours as tax. Giving some of it back in one glorious afternoon is not the same as leaving it with us in the first place. And a gift comes once in five years; the tax collector comes every harvest.

So my honest reaction is this: I was proud of my king, and I would rather he built the tank our village has been asking for.

Why the sample ends where it does: it neither flatters the king nor sneers at him — it does what the chapter does. A ceremony of public giving really did bind ruler and subject together, and it really was paid for by the subjects. Saying both is a better answer than picking one.

Q5.

Forming groups, let each group choose one Ālvār and one Nāyanār and prepare a biography poster or booklet. Include their life stories and a sample poem or two (in translation).

Answer

How to do this well. This is a research and design task, so divide the work: one pair finds the life story, one pair finds and copies out the poems from a named translation, one pair designs the layout. Never invent a verse — a bhakti poem must be quoted from a real published translation, with the translator and book named on the poster.

What the chapter gives you to start from

Two groups of Tamil poet-devotees produced devotional literature that “had an enormous impact”: the 12 Ālvārs, devotees of Viṣhṇu — one of them, Āṇḍāḷ, was a woman; and the 63 Nāyanārs or Nāyanmārs, devotees of Śhiva — including three women.
The chapter’s timeline dates the start of the bhakti tradition in south India to about 650 CE.
Fig. 3.24 shows a statue of Kāraikāl Ammaiyār, “one of the female Nāyanmār saints, who probably lived in the 6th century CE”.
The saints “emerged from diverse social backgrounds”, composed “mostly in regional languages”, and invoked “a direct personal relationship with the divine that was open to everyone — cutting across gender and social divisions”.

What a good poster must contain

Panel	What goes in it
1. Name and dates	Name in Tamil and English, the century, and which deity — Viṣhṇu for an Ālvār, Śhiva for a Nāyanmār
2. Life story	Where they lived, their background, the turning point in their life, what they are remembered for. Mark clearly which parts are traditional accounts rather than documented history
3. The poems	One or two short passages in translation, with the Tamil title of the work, the translator’s name and the book or website you took it from
4. Why they matter	One paragraph linking them to the chapter — devotion in the mother tongue, open to all castes and to women
5. Picture and map	A drawing or printed image, and a small map of Tamil Nadu with their place marked

Sample answer — the plan our group made:

Our Ālvār: Āṇḍāḷ. The chapter tells us she was the only woman among the twelve Ālvārs and a devotee of Viṣhṇu. Everything else we will look up and cite: tradition connects her with Srivilliputhur, and the works attributed to her are the Tiruppāvai and the Nāchchiyār Tirumoḷi. We will take two verses of the Tiruppāvai from a published English translation in the school library and print the translator’s name under them.

Our Nāyanmār: Kāraikāl Ammaiyār. The chapter shows her statue in Fig. 3.24 and says she was one of the three women among the sixty-three Nāyanmārs and probably lived in the 6th century CE — which makes her one of the earliest bhakti poets of all. Tradition connects her with Karaikal on the Tamil coast. Her hymns to Śhiva are famous for their fearlessness; we will quote four lines from a translation we can name.

Our closing panel will hold one sentence from the chapter: their poetry “invoked a direct personal relationship with the divine that was open to everyone — cutting across gender and social divisions and reshaping Indian society and literature. Its impact is lingering to this day.” Beside it we will write one line of our own: both of the saints on this poster were women, and both were writing more than 1,300 years ago.

Why the citation rule matters here: bhakti poems are still recited every day, and many loose “translations” circulate online with no source. A poster that names its translator is doing exactly what Kalhaṇa said a good historian does — telling the reader where the material came from, so it can be checked.

Q6.

You will notice that our maps show only ancient names for the kingdoms’ capitals and main cities. Using a pencil, mark the modern names next to their original names. Refer the current map of India and try to locate those cities on it.

Fig. 3.3, page 63 — the chapter’s map of the dynasties, carrying only the ancient names of the capitals and main cities. Redrawn at true latitude and longitude.

Answer

Here is every ancient name in the chapter with the modern name the chapter itself gives. Pencil these onto Fig. 3.3 (page 63), Fig. 3.7 (page 66) and Fig. 3.16 (page 76).

Ancient name	Modern name	Present-day State / region	Whose city
Kānyakubja	Kannauj (Kanauj)	Uttar Pradesh	Harṣha’s capital; the prize of the Tripartite Struggle
Sthāneśhvara	Thanesar	Haryana	Earlier Puṣhyabhūti capital
Prayāga	Prayagraj	Uttar Pradesh	Harṣha’s five-yearly assembly, at the Ganga–Yamuna confluence
Ujjayinī	Ujjain	Madhya Pradesh	Later Gurjara-Pratīhāra capital
Bhillamāla	Bhinmal	Western Rajasthan	First Gurjara-Pratīhāra capital; Brahmagupta’s birthplace
Mānyakheṭa	Malkheda	Karnataka	Rāṣhṭrakūṭa capital
Vātāpi	Badami	Karnataka	Chālukya capital of Pulakeśhin II; cave temples
Āryapura / Ayyavole	Aihole	Karnataka	Earlier Chālukya capital; Meguti temple inscription
Kalyāṇī	Basavakalyan	Northern Karnataka	Capital of the Western Chālukyas from the 10th century
Kānchī / Kānchipura	Kanchipuram	Tamil Nadu	Pallava capital
Māmallapuram	Mahabalipuram	Tamil Nadu	Pallava port and rock-cut monuments
Tanjāvūr	Thanjavur	Tamil Nadu	Chola capital from Vijayālaya onward
Madurai	Madurai (name unchanged)	Tamil Nadu	Pāṇḍya capital
Vengi	In present-day Andhra Pradesh	Coastal Andhra	Eastern Chālukya capital
Daśhapura	Mandsaur	Madhya Pradesh	Aulikara capital; Yaśhodharma’s victory pillars
Prāgjyotiṣha	Close to today’s Guwahati	Assam	Varman capital of Kāmarūpa
Thānā	Thane	Maharashtra	Arab naval raid, 637
Bhārukachchha	Bharuch	Gujarat	Arab naval raid, 637
Aror / Alor	Rohri	Sindh (Pakistan)	King Dāhar’s capital
Debal	A port city in the delta of the Indus	Sindh (Pakistan)	The first town to fall to bin Qasim
Kāśhmīra	Kashmir	Jammu & Kashmir	Kārkoṭa kingdom; Lalitāditya, Queen Diddā
Gopādri Hill	Shankaracharya Hill (Takht-i-Sulaiman)	Near Srinagar	Fig. 3.14
Vikramaśhilā	In present-day Bihar, on the Ganga	Bihar	Dharmapāla’s university
Somapura	In present-day Bangladesh	Bangladesh	Pāla monastery
Kāśhī	Varanasi	Uttar Pradesh	A thriving city in Xuanzang’s account

Two the chapter leaves open: Korkai, the Pāṇḍya port on the Tamil coast, and Vengi are given only by region, not by a modern city name — write “Tamil Nadu coast” and “coastal Andhra Pradesh” in pencil and mark them with a question mark. It is better to show what a source does not tell you than to fill the gap with a guess.

Why the ancient names are worth keeping: they carry information the modern names have lost. Kānyakubja, Prāgjyotiṣha and Mānyakheṭa appear in inscriptions, in Xuanzang’s travelogue and in the Rājatarangiṇī — so when a historian reads any of these sources, the old name is the key that locates the place on a modern map.

Q7.

Match the ruler or the dynasty with the city. (a) Rāṣhṭrakūṭas (b) Gurjara-Pratīhāras (c) Cholas (d) Harṣhavardhana (e) Pallavas — (i) Kānchī (ii) Tanjāvūr (iii) Mānyakheṭa (iv) Ujjayinī (v) Kānyakubja

Answer

The matched pairs.

Ruler / dynasty	City	Why
(a) Rāṣhṭrakūṭas	(iii) Mānyakheṭa	They shifted their power centre to present-day Karnataka, “with their capital at Mānyakheṭa (modern Malkheda)”
(b) Gurjara-Pratīhāras	(iv) Ujjayinī	Their early capital was Bhillamāla; “it seems to have shifted later to Ujjayinī”
(c) Cholas	(ii) Tanjāvūr	Vijayālaya founded the revived Chola kingdom “from his new capital at Tanjāvūr (now spelt ‘Thanjavur’)”
(d) Harṣhavardhana	(v) Kānyakubja	He ascended the throne in 606 CE at Kannauj, “anciently known as Kānyakubja”
(e) Pallavas	(i) Kānchī	“With its capital at Kānchī (or Kānchipura, present-day Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu)”

Tip for matching questions: do the ones you are certain of first and cross them off both lists. Here, Harṣha–Kānyakubja and Pallavas–Kānchī are the surest, which leaves only three pairs to sort — and Cholas–Tanjāvūr is the next easiest. Then Mānyakheṭa and Ujjayinī fall into place on their own.

Notice what the list is really testing: every one of these five cities lies in a different part of India — Karnataka, Malwa, the Kāveri delta, the Ganga plain and the Tamil coast. Getting the match right is the same as remembering the chapter’s main point: power in these centuries was regional, and each region had its own capital.

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