NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 7 –166End-of-chapter exercise — Questions and activities

What a good answer must contain. Before writing, decide who you are — a trader’s daughter, a student at a vihāra, a copper-plate scribe — and then fold in at least five things the chapter actually tells us, so the letter is history and not just imagination:

• The city: Pāṭaliputra, capital of the Guptas; cities of the Gangetic plains were ‘the greatest’, with lanes ‘kept in good order’.
• Charity and medicine: Vaishya elders funded houses for charity and free medicines; the poor, orphans and the sick were cared for.
• Trade: textiles, spices, ivory and gemstones going out to the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and China; foreign merchants living in the city.
• Tax and government: land tax as the main revenue; farmers of royal land paying a share of grain; officials on salaries; grants written on copper plates.
• Learning and art: Sanskrit poetry, astronomers, the Buddhist vihāras and Nālandā, sculpture and temple-building.
• The honest bit: not everyone shared in it — the chanḍālas lived outside the city limits.

Sample answer (about 270 words):

“Greetings from Pāṭaliputra! Life here is vibrant and full of excitement. Just yesterday, I witnessed a procession of the king’s guards riding down to the river ghat, and behind them a line of carts loaded with bales of cotton cloth, sacks of pepper and small sealed boxes of gemstones, all bound for Tāmralipti. From there, my uncle says, the goods sail to the Mediterranean, to Southeast Asia and to China. A Roman-looking merchant argued with a dyer in three languages and finally paid in gold.

Our lane is swept every morning and the drains run clear. At the corner stands the charity house built by the elders of our Vaishya quarter; anyone who is ill may go in, and the physician gives food and medicine without asking for money. My mother took our neighbour’s orphaned son there last month.

Father farms land belonging to the king outside the city, so at harvest he gives a portion of the grain as tax; the officials who come to measure it are paid a salary, and they do not trouble us. Yesterday a scribe let me watch him hammer letters into a copper plate — a grant of land the king has given to a village priest, he said, so that no one can argue about it a hundred years from now.

In the evenings a teacher recites Kālidāsa in the square, and an astronomer from Kusumapura told us that the Earth itself turns, which is why the Sun seems to move! Not everyone here is fortunate, though — the chanḍālas must live outside the walls, and I think of that too. Write soon.”

Chandragupta II.

The chapter says it directly: “Chandragupta II, also known as ‘Vikramāditya’, was one of the renowned rulers of the Gupta dynasty.” Remember him by four things:

• The inscription on the Iron Pillar of Delhi speaks of a king named ‘Chandra’, identified with him; the 6-tonne pillar was erected in his reign.
• He was a devotee of Viṣhṇu, and Viṣhṇu’s mount (vāhana) Garuḍa often appears on his inscriptions.
• Art, architecture, literature and science flourished particularly during his time; he kept himself surrounded by learned men, poets and artists.
• He was the father of Prabhāvatī Gupta and the son of Samudragupta.

The Gupta Empire supports the statement almost point for point. The chapter itself supplies the mechanism: “the prolonged period of peace and stability during the Gupta period promoted notable achievements in various fields”, and “this stability strengthened the economy, allowing the state to support scholars, artists, and scientists”.

The evidence, field by field:

But examine the statement, do not just agree with it. Three qualifications are fair:

• The Gupta peace was itself won by war. Samudragupta fought many campaigns before this stability existed. Peace was the result of power, not a substitute for it.
• Peace was not equally good for everyone. The chanḍālas were still treated as outcastes and kept outside the city.
• Creativity did not stop when the Guptas declined, nor did it happen only inside their borders — the Pallavas and Kāmarūpa built temples and centres of learning at the same time, and the Ajanta caves were funded by the Vākāṭakas as well.

Method. Pick one decision for the court to take — that gives the scene a spine. Assign six to eight roles, give each speaker a fact from the chapter to carry, and keep it to three or four minutes. Use the chapter’s own vocabulary: mahārājadhirāja, praśhasti, copper plate, chauri, tribute, vihāra.

Sample script (opening, about one minute of playing time):

Herald: Hail the mahārājadhirāja, Chandragupta Vikramāditya! (All rise; an attendant waves the chauri.)
King: Be seated. Minister, what does the treasury say?
Minister: The land tax has come in well, mahārāja. With the dues from the mines and the trade tolls, we may build — or we may pay the army. Not both.
Commander: Then let it be the army. A campaign to the south moves ten thousand men, with elephants, horses and cooks. Even the tributary kings will complain of feeding them.
Merchant: (bowing) Mahārāja, if the roads are kept safe, the trade will pay for the army by itself. Our cloth and pepper reach the Mediterranean by way of Socotra; last season a Roman ship paid in gold.
Harisena: And when it is done, my lord, let it be written. Palm leaf rots; stone does not. Grant me a pillar and in a hundred generations they will still read what you were.
Āryabhaṭa: Grant me something smaller, mahārāja — a room at Kusumapura, and instruments. I believe it is the Earth that turns, not the sky, and I would prove it.
King: (after a pause) The roads shall be made safe. Harisena shall have his stone. And the astronomer shall have his room — a king is remembered by what his scholars discover as much as by what his soldiers take. Scribe, set it on copper.

Answer key: 1 → d, 2 → e, 3 → b, 4 → a, 5 → c.

Who they were: a dynasty that rose in south India while the Guptas ruled the north. Their origins are not clearly known, but they appear to have been a tributary power under the Sātavāhanas — met in the previous chapter — and to have gained power as the Sātavāhanas declined. They ruled until the latter half of the 9th century CE.

Where they ruled: they gradually consolidated their power over parts of present-day Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Their capital was Kānchipuram, in present-day Tamil Nadu.

What they are remembered for:

• Patrons of art and architecture — most of them were devotees of Śhiva, and they are credited with building magnificent temples and rock-cut caves.
• A great centre of learning — Kānchipuram, often called the ‘city of a thousand temples’, became one of the major centres of learning in the south, helped by the ghaṭikās, centres of learning that had first emerged under the Sātavāhanas.
• Their place in Gupta history — the Pallavas are mentioned in the prayāga praśhasti. During his southern campaigns Samudragupta defeated a Pallava ruler but did not take over the region; he let the local kings keep their thrones as long as they accepted his rule and paid tribute, which helped maintain peaceful relations.

Method — plan the trip in three stages.

1. Before you go: find out who built the site and when, and note two or three questions you want answered. Carry a notebook, a pencil (many museums do not allow pens) and, where photography is permitted, a camera. Check the rules — never touch carvings and never write on walls.
2. At the site: sketch rather than only photograph — sketching forces you to look. Copy any label or inscription exactly. Note the material (sandstone? brick? terracotta?), the condition, and anything that is obviously a later repair.
3. After: write the report within two days, while the details are fresh.

What a good report must contain — use these as your headings:

Sample answer (an extract from sections 3, 4 and 6):

“Architecture. The temple is built of dressed red sandstone blocks laid without mortar, on a raised platform about a metre high. The doorway is framed by three carved bands — a creeper, a row of small human figures, and a plain moulding — and river goddesses stand at the base of the door jambs. Our guide pointed out that one of them stands on a crocodile-like creature: the makara of the Ganga, exactly as in Fig. 7.15.3 of our textbook.

Artefacts. In the site museum we saw a case of terracotta plaques, a broken stone panel showing two warriors in a chariot, and four small gold coins. A label said the coins showed a king on one side and a seated goddess on the other. I had read that description of Gupta coins in class, but seeing how small they were — smaller than a one-rupee coin — was a surprise.

Reflection. The trip changed history from a list of names into a set of objects made by people. Standing in front of a wall someone carved fifteen hundred years ago, I understood why our chapter kept insisting that we look at sources — an inscription is not a fact printed in a book, it is a real line of letters cut into real stone by a person who wanted to be remembered. I also noticed how much has been lost: half the carvings are worn smooth. That made me understand why historians must corroborate several sources before they can say anything with confidence.”