EN हिं

NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 7 Fig. 7.8 — LET’S EXPLORE

Book page 151 Updated on2026-09-19

Q1.
Take a political map of India and locate the present-day states and Union territories where the Guptas ruled (see Fig. 7.8). Mark these states on the map and count how many you found. Then, compare your findings with your friends to see if everyone got the same number or discovered something different!
70°E 80°E 90°E 10°N 20°N 30°N GREAT INDIAN DESERT RANN OF KACHCHH Deccan Plateau PLATEAU OF TIBET Magadha KĀMARŪPA VĀKĀṬAKA PALLAVA GREAT HIMALAYAN RANGE Arabian Sea Bay of Bengal GREAT INDIAN DESERT RANN OF KACHCHH Deccan Plateau PLATEAU OF TIBET Magadha KĀMARŪPA VĀKĀṬAKA PALLAVA GREAT HIMALAYAN RANGE Arabian Sea Bay of Bengal Indus Indus Chenab Sutlej Ganga Ghaghara Brahmaputra Narmada Godavari Kaveri Indus Indus Chenab Sutlej Ganga Ghaghara Brahmaputra Narmada Godavari Kaveri Indraprastha Sāketa Vaiśhālī Prayāga Kāśhī Pāṭaliputra Ujjayinī Tāmralipti Kānchīpura Indraprastha Sāketa Vaiśhālī Prayāga Kāśhī Pāṭaliputra Ujjayinī Tāmralipti Kānchīpura N Gupta Empire Important Cities Rivers
Fig. 7.8, page 152 — redrawn. The extent of the Gupta Empire: the eight cities the book marks with triangles, the rivers, and the regions and neighbours named around them. Note: the book’s legend has a tan patch for ‘Gupta Empire’, but no such shading is actually printed on the map — so the empire has to be read from the cities and the names.
Answer

Method first. Put Fig. 7.8 beside a political map of India and work from the landmarks, not from guesswork:

  1. Find the cities marked with triangles on Fig. 7.8 — Indraprastha, Sāketa, Prayāga, Kāśhī, Vaiśhālī, Pāṭaliputra, Tāmralipti, Ujjayinī — and mark where each lies on the modern map.
  2. Trace the boundaries the chapter gives in words: the empire covered ‘most of present-day north and west India, along with parts of central and east India’ (page 151).
  3. Now shade outwards from the cities to those limits, and stop where the neighbours begin — Vākāṭaka in the centre-south, Pallava in the far south, Kāmarūpa in the northeast. Those three were not Gupta territory.
  4. Count the states and Union territories your shading touches.

A reasonable answer. Working this way you should land on roughly 13–14 states and 2 Union territories — about 15 in all:

RegionPresent-day states / UTsThe clue on Fig. 7.8
NorthPunjab, Haryana, Delhi (UT), Chandigarh (UT), Himachal Pradesh (lower hills), Uttarakhand, Uttar PradeshIndraprastha, Sāketa, Kāśhī; the Chenab–Sutlej–Ganga rivers
WestRajasthan, GujaratThe Great Indian Desert and the Rann of Kachchh lie inside the shaded area
CentralMadhya Pradesh, parts of ChhattisgarhUjjayinī, and the Narmada as the rough southern edge
EastBihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, parts of OdishaPrayāga, Vaiśhālī, Magadha, Pāṭaliputra and the port of Tāmralipti

Sample answer: “I marked 16 areas in all — 13 states (Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha) and 2 Union territories (Delhi and Chandigarh) — 15 in all. My friend counted 12 because she left out Odisha, Chhattisgarh and the hill states.”

Why your count and your friend’s will differ — and why that is the point: an ancient empire had frontiers, not fixed borders. Its edges moved with each reign, and a tributary kingdom was ‘inside’ the empire in one sense and independent in another. Modern state lines were drawn 1,500 years later and cut straight across those old regions. So any two honest students will get slightly different numbers.
A note on the printed map: the legend of Fig. 7.8 shows a khaki patch for ‘Gupta Empire’, but on the printed page the tint sits very faintly over the green relief and is hard to see. Use the labelled cities and the names of the neighbouring kingdoms (Vākāṭaka, Kāmarūpa, Pallava) to fix the boundary, exactly as described in the method above.
Was this helpful?