NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 16 End-of-chapter exercise — Questions and activities

Because for the first time a foreign power came not only to raid India but to rule part of it — and yet the rest of Indian life carried on largely as before. The chapter’s own words: “Like every transitional period, this one saw both change and continuity.”

Two examples of change.

1. Raiding became ruling. Mahmūd of Ghazni made 17 campaigns and went home each time; he “did not attempt to establish a permanent base in India beyond Punjab”. Muhammad Ghūrī, after the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192, captured Delhi and “sought territorial conquest”, leaving Qutb-ud-din Aibak behind to hold it — “the start of foreign rule in parts of north India”.
2. Great centres of learning were destroyed. Bakhtiyār Khiljī destroyed Nālandā and Vikramaśhilā. Historians of Buddhism agree that this “precipitated the decline of Buddhism in India”. This change was permanent: those universities never reopened.

Two examples of continuity.

1. Trade never stopped. “India’s trade with China and Southeast Asia kept growing during this period,” and the merchant guilds “survived and adapted”. Agriculture remained the mainstay of the economy throughout.
2. Building and learning went on. The Hoysala temples at Belur and Halebidu, Khajuraho’s Kandāriyā Mahādeva temple, the Warangal fort, the Puri Jagannātha temple — and Bhāskarāchārya’s Līlāvatī (1150) and Someśhvara III’s Mānasollāsa — all belong to these same two centuries.

Method. Fig. 3.27 puts ‘Chief Dynasties’ in the centre and sends out arms, each pointing roughly in the geographical direction of the dynasties named on it. Do the same here: write Chief Dynasties, 11th–12th centuries in the middle, then draw six or seven arms and place each dynasty on the arm that points towards its homeland (use Fig. 4.4 and Fig. 4.10 to get the directions right). Keep the invaders on the north-west arm — that is where they came from.

What a good star must contain: every dynasty the chapter actually discusses, each on the correct arm, with its capital in brackets so the star doubles as a revision sheet.

Method. The chapter itself is written as a journey — it starts at the Khyber Pass, comes down the Ganga, turns east to Bengal, follows the coast south to Kalinga, crosses the Deccan, reaches Tamil Nadu, then goes “Back to the North”. Trace that same route on an outline map of the Subcontinent, marking each capital with a dot and joining them with a numbered line. Use Fig. 4.4 and Fig. 4.10 to place the dots correctly.

What a good tour needs: a numbered route, every stop labelled with place — dynasty — one thing that happened there, and a small key. Do not draw modern state boundaries; use rivers and coastlines as your landmarks, as the book’s maps do.

About 3,000 kilometres one way — roughly 6,000 km there and back. The chapter gives no figure, so you have to work it out from a map. Here is how.

Step 1 — fix the starting point. The Cholas’ great port on the Coromandel coast was Nāgapaṭṭinam, “then an important port of the Cholas”. That is where a fleet bound for Southeast Asia would sail from.

Step 2 — fix the objective. The target was the Śhrīvijaya capital, and the quarrel was over “one of the sea routes [that] passed through the Strait of Malacca (a narrow strip of sea between Malaysia and the Indonesian island of Sumatra), which the Śhrīvijaya king controlled”. So the fleet had to cross the Bay of Bengal to Sumatra and then run down the Strait.

Step 3 — measure in two legs, using the scale bar. Lay a thread along the sea route on the map, then straighten it against the scale bar.

Step 4 — sanity-check it another way. Nāgapaṭṭinam is near 11°N, 80°E; northern Sumatra is near 6°N, 95°E. One degree of latitude is about 111 km, and near the equator one degree of longitude is nearly as much. So the crossing is roughly √[(15 × 108)² + (5 × 111)²] ≈ 1,700–1,800 km — which matches leg 1.

The matched pairs.

Method. Split the group in two: one half lists every dynasty discussed in Chapter 3 (6th–10th centuries), the other half every dynasty discussed in Chapter 4. Then put the two lists side by side and sort each name into one of three columns. Use the chapter maps (Fig. 3.27, Fig. 4.4, Fig. 4.10) so nobody is missed. Count a dynasty as “present in both” only if the book actually discusses it in both chapters, not merely mentions the name.

Three patterns your group should write under the table.

• The three great powers of the Tripartite Struggle are all gone or going. Rāṣhṭrakūṭas vanish, Pālas fade before the Senas, Pratihāras survive only as “the last”. The contest for Kannauj exhausted all three.
• New dynasties are mostly former vassals. The Paramāras were “originally vassals of the Pratihāras and the Rāṣhṭrakūṭas”; the Ghūrids “were earlier vassals of the Ghaznavids”; the Hoysalas “broke away from Chālukya overlordship”. When an overlord weakens, his subordinates become kings.
• The far south is the most stable region. Cholas and Pāṇḍyas run right through both chapters — and by the 13th century even the Cholas are “absorbed by the Pāṇḍyas”.

Note: Nālandā and what its loss cost

1. Why such centres mattered.

• They were universities, not just monasteries. Jūzjānī’s own account, quoted in the chapter, says of the place his army took: “It was found that the whole of that fortress and city was a college.” Nālandā’s ancient name was Nālandā Mahāvihāra — a great vihāra that was also a seat of study.
• They held the books. Nālandā’s library was “spread over three multi-storey buildings” and “contained lakhs of manuscripts”. Before printing, a manuscript library was the memory of a civilisation; a text existing in a handful of copies could be lost forever.
• They were international. The Chinese pilgrims Yijing and Xuanzang “spent some time there, studying manuscripts and selecting many to take back to China”. Tibetan scholars were “both teaching and studying there”. A Śhrīvijaya ruler from Southeast Asia funded a monastery there, with the Pāla king’s permission recorded on a copper-plate.
• They trained the teachers. Scholars who studied there went out to teach elsewhere, so one centre supplied learning to a whole region for generations.

2. How their destruction affected education and culture.

• Buddhism lost its institutional base. “There is a consensus among historians of Buddhism that this destruction of its large centres of learning precipitated the decline of Buddhism in India, although a few other factors may have also played a role.” Note the honesty of that sentence — the destruction is agreed to be the trigger, but the chapter does not claim it was the only cause.
• Texts were lost, and knowledge migrated. “After Bakhtiyār Khiljī’s attack, the library is said to have burned for months. Tibetan scholars… fled back to Tibet with as many manuscripts as they could carry.” Much of what survived of this learning survived outside India — in Tibet and China.
• Learning moved away from the war zone. Al-Bīrūnī had already noticed this happening in the west a century and a half earlier: “Indian sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country conquered by us, and have fled to places which our hand cannot yet reach; to Kashmir, Varanasi, and other places.”
• The chain of teaching was broken. The saddest detail in the chapter is also the most exact: when the Tibetan monk Dharmasvāmin visited some three decades later, he found the site half ruined, and “a 90-year-old teacher, Rāhula Śhrībhadra, was still instructing a class of about 70 students — perhaps Nalanda’s last class …”

3. What did not die. The chapter is careful here, and so should your note be. Scholarship continued elsewhere in India through these very centuries — Bhāskarāchārya in the Deccan, Bhoja’s capital as “a renowned centre of learning that attracted scholars, poets, and artists from across India”, Telugu at the Kākatīya court, Kannada at the Hoysala court. “While the production and transmission of scientific knowledge did decline in north India a little later, they continued to flourish in other regions.”

Because the two men wanted different things, and each got what he came for. Mahmūd wanted wealth and prestige he could carry back to Ghazni; Muhammad Ghūrī wanted land he could hold.

Mahmūd’s motives — and here historians genuinely differ. The chapter sets out the debate rather than settling it: “As Mahmūd did not attempt to establish a permanent base in India beyond Punjab, historians have debated his motives for conducting such destructive campaigns.”

The chapter’s own position is that both are true — “it is true that… But it is also true that…” — and that the second point rests on contemporary evidence, from writers in Mahmūd’s own camp. The last detail is the one that keeps the picture from being simple: he attacked rival Muslim sects too, and he began his Indian career by “defeating a rival Muslim kingdom”.

Muhammad Ghūrī’s motive. The chapter states it flatly: “Unlike Mahmūd, who merely plundered and withdrew, he sought territorial conquest.” Everything he did follows from that — he took Delhi rather than looting it and leaving; he “left behind trusted military commanders to consolidate his gains”; and his administration was “more centralised”, granting “temporary land assignments to officers in return for revenue collection and military service”. That last point is the giveaway: you only build a revenue system for land you intend to keep.

How the motives shaped the outcomes.