NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 3 End-of-chapter exercise — Questions and activities

Geography did not merely help the Marathas — it chose their strategy for them. The Sahyadri hills made forts and guerrilla warfare the cheapest way to fight; the Konkan coastline made a navy necessary; and the open Deccan plateau beyond made fast cavalry the way to project power across India.

1. Mountains made guerrilla warfare cheap and siege warfare expensive. The chapter says Shivaji ‘had recourse to the tactic of guerrilla warfare, which uses small groups of people in a focused way, with speed, surprise, and knowledge of the terrain’. That definition only works in broken country. In the Sahyadri, an army must move along narrow passes; a small local force can strike the head or the tail of the column and vanish uphill. Afzal Khan’s army was routed by Marathas ‘hidden in the mountains’ at the foot of Pratapgad, in thick forest.

2. Mountains made forts the natural form of the state. A hilltop with one steep approach can be held by a few hundred men against thousands. So Shivaji began, at sixteen, by ‘capturing neglected and unoccupied forts and strengthening their defences’, and forts became ‘the mainstay of Maratha power’. Ramachandrapant Amatya could therefore write that the kingdom ‘was created … from forts alone’.

3. The coastline forced a navy into existence. When the kingdom reached India’s west coast, Shivaji needed access to coastal resources — and a coast that cannot be defended is a coast the enemy can land on. So the Maratha navy was founded in 1657, with naval fortifications such as Sindhudurg (Fig. 3.6). This was unusual: Bijapur had merchant ships but no full-time naval force, and even Mughal use of a navy was very limited.

4. The coastline also decided who the enemy would be. Because the Marathas held ports — the map shows Dabhol, Rajapur, Malwan and Vengurla, with routes out to Muscat, Mocha and Malacca — they collided directly with European sea power, which rested on the cartaz pass system. Kanhoji Angre won ‘thanks to a clever use of geography and battle tactics’ even though Maratha ships were technologically behind European ones. Geography compensated for technology.

5. The plateau shaped expansion. Beyond the Ghats the land opens out. Open country favours mounted troops who move fast and live off the march — which is exactly how chauth and sardeshmukhi could be collected from provinces the Marathas did not garrison. The same mobility carried them to Delhi, Lahore, Attock and Peshawar in the 18th century.

6. Distance itself became a weapon. The dakṣhiṇa-digvijaya of 1677 added present-day northern Tamil Nadu and parts of Karnataka, which the chapter says ‘later gave the Marathas great strategic depth against the Mughal invasion’. When Aurangzeb took Raigad, Rajaram simply continued the war from Gingee, far to the south. A state with depth cannot be finished by capturing its capital.

What a good short biography needs: open with the person, not with the period; give the challenge early, because that is what makes a life a story; use exact dates and place names from the chapter; and finish with what survives of them today. Keep sentences short — you are writing for younger students.

Sample answer: Ahilyabai Holkar

Ahilyabai Holkar was a scion of the Holkar dynasty, one of the chief families behind the Maratha expansion into north India. During the 18th century the Holkars ruled a kingdom of considerable extent in central India, around present-day Indore. Ahilyabai was not born to rule it. She came to power in the hardest way possible — she lost her husband, and then she lost her son.

Many rulers would have handed the state to a soldier and withdrawn. Ahilyabai did not. She governed for thirty years, and the chapter’s judgement of those years is precise: she administered the state wisely while caring for the common people. That combination is rarer than it sounds. A ruler can be efficient and harsh, or kind and weak; running a large state well for three decades means being neither.

Her second achievement was to rebuild India’s sacred landscape with her own treasury. She built and restored hundreds of temples, ghats, wells and roads across the whole country — from Kedarnath in the north to Rameswaram in the south. Two of these were repairs to famous losses: she rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi, destroyed by Aurangzeb, and the Somnath temple in Gujarat, destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni. Notice what a well or a road on a pilgrim route actually is: a work of public use that serves the poorest traveller, not a monument to the ruler.

Her third achievement is the one you can still touch. Ahilyabai is credited with promoting the Maheshwar weaving industry in present-day Madhya Pradesh, reviving traditional handloom crafts that continue to thrive today. Maheshwari sarees are still woven there. That is why she is inspirational: after the worst private grief, she spent thirty years making things that were meant to outlast her — and they have.

Method first. Whichever fort you choose, organise the research under the three headings the question names, and add a fourth that makes the presentation yours:

1. History — who built or captured it, and which events in this chapter happened there.
2. Architecture — gateways, walls, water storage, and how the buildings answer the site.
3. Strategic importance — what the fort controls: a pass, a harbour, a road, a capital.
4. One question you still cannot answer — an honest open question is the best last slide.

Sample answer: I would choose Raigad.

History. Raigad is where the Maratha Empire formally began. The chapter’s opening photograph (Fig. 3.1) shows the grand entrance to the palace where Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj was crowned in 1674 — a coronation performed with full Vedic rites, after which he took the title Shri Raja Shiva Chhatrapati and began his own era, the Rājyābhiṣheka shaka. He died at Raigad in 1680, aged fifty. After Sambhaji was captured and executed, Aurangzeb captured Raigad itself.

Architecture. Raigad is a fortified hill plateau roughly 800 metres above sea level, reached by a single steep climbing path — today there is also a ropeway. What survives shows how a fort was designed as a working capital and not only as a wall: a massive main gateway (the Maha Darwaja) set so that attackers approach it sideways rather than head-on; a straight market street with rows of shop plinths; the Jagadishwar temple; rock-cut water cisterns, since a hill fort lives or dies by its stored water; and Takmak Tok, the cliff point from which the whole approach can be watched.

Strategic importance. Raigad sits in the Sahyadri behind the Konkan, so it commands the routes between the coast and the plateau while being extremely hard to attack. That is why it was chosen as a capital rather than a city in open country: the seat of government was itself a fortress. It is a physical statement of Ramachandrapant Amatya’s line that ‘forts are the core of the state’.

My open question: if Raigad was so strong, how did Aurangzeb take it? Working that out means studying supply, treachery and the length of a siege — and it shows that no fort is impregnable, only expensive.

It means that by the second half of the 18th century the Mughal Empire was an empire mostly in name, and real control over much of India had already passed to the Marathas. So when the British conquered India, the territory and the power they actually took were, in the main, Maratha — not Mughal.

Evidence from the chapter

• The Marathas, not the Mughals, were the British rival. ‘In the latter half of the 18th century, the chief rivals of the British in India were the Marathas.’
• They held the most territory. Maratha rule ‘established the largest Indian empire before the British took over the Subcontinent, controlling much of central and northern India’.
• Delhi itself was Maratha. Maratha control over Delhi began in 1754; Mahadji Shinde recaptured it in 1771, and it ‘remained under their control till the British captured it three decades later’. So the British took the Mughal capital from the Marathas.
• It took three wars and forty-three years. The Anglo-Maratha wars ran from 1775 to 1818; the Marathas won the first (1775–1782), and only the third ended Maratha power. No other Indian power required this.
• The Marathas organised the resistance. Nana Phadnavis is credited with the first pan-Indian anti-British alliance, uniting even old adversaries like Hyder Ali of Mysore and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The centre of anti-British politics was Maratha.
• Why they finally lost is stated too — ‘the Marathas’ increased internal disunity and the superior organisational and technological abilities of the British’. Note that neither reason is Mughal strength.

Both Chhatrapati Shivaji and the later Marathas followed the same rule: protect and revive one’s own tradition, without making other faiths a target. The chapter’s summing-up is that the Marathas ‘revived the local Hindu traditions without religious discrimination’.

Forts were the core of the state because they did four jobs at once — they controlled routes, sheltered a guerrilla army, stored what a state needs to survive a siege, and made the enemy’s superior numbers expensive instead of decisive.

Ramachandrapant Amatya, Shivaji’s finance minister, put the argument in the Ādnyāpatra:

Why forts mattered so much

1. They controlled movement. The chapter says forts ‘were essential to strategically control important routes’. In hill country there are only a few usable passes; hold the fort above a pass and you decide who uses it. That is how a small state taxes and polices a large area.
2. They made guerrilla warfare possible. Forts ‘shelter the army when engaging in guerrilla warfare’. Small raiding groups must have somewhere to rest, re-arm and take their wounded. Without a base, guerrillas are just fugitives.
3. They stored the state. Grain, water in rock-cut cisterns, weapons and treasure could sit safely on a hilltop. A state that can keep its resources out of reach cannot be knocked out in one campaign.
4. They reversed the arithmetic of numbers. A hill fort with one steep approach can be held by a small garrison against a very large army, because the attacker can only bring a few men to the wall at a time. Meanwhile the besieger must feed thousands of men and horses on the spot. Time and hunger work for the defender.
5. They were political statements. Shivaji chose the ‘strong mountain fortress of Raigad’ for his coronation in 1674. The capital of the kingdom was itself a fort.
6. Coastal forts extended the same idea to the sea. Sindhudurg and Vijaydurg protected harbours and gave the Maratha fleet safe bases (Fig. 3.6, Fig. 3.9).

How this let them survive larger enemies — the proof is 1682–1707. Aurangzeb brought the whole Mughal army into the Deccan. He did conquer the two great sultanates, Bijapur and Golconda. He captured Sambhaji and executed him, and he captured Raigad, the capital. By the usual rules of that age, the Maratha state should have ended there. Instead:

• Rajaram moved to Gingee, far south, and the war went with him — the state was not tied to one place.
• The Marathas ‘staunchly defended their fortresses and often had the upper hand over the Mughals in battles and skirmishes’.
• Because every fort had to be besieged separately, Aurangzeb ‘was unable to leave the Deccan and died without having succeeded in subduing the Marathas’.

First, look at what real Maratha coins actually did, because the chapter gives you two examples and both carry a clear idea:

• Chhatrapati Shivaji’s coins (Fig. 3.12) were gold and copper, struck in his own name — which signified sovereignty — and used the Devanagari script, which the chapter calls ‘an assertion of his cultural identity’ at a time when Persian was the normal language of coinage.
• The ‘Gaṇapatī-Pantapradhān rupee’ (Fig. 3.14), minted in the early 19th century by the Patwardhans, kept the popular Mughal style but added Maratha symbols: an invocation to Gaṇapati on one side, loyalty to the Peshwa on the other, in two scripts, Devanagari and Persian.

Sample answer: the symbols and why I chose each

Three answers can be defended from this chapter, and you should know all three before choosing one.

Sample answer (model paragraph):

The most important Maratha contribution to Indian history was not the size of their empire but the proof they supplied that a mighty empire could be defeated and that Indians could build, expand and administer an empire of their own. The chapter says exactly this, and the evidence for it runs right through the chapter. Chhatrapati Shivaji began as a sixteen-year-old taking neglected forts and ended crowned at Raigad in 1674 with his own era; Aurangzeb brought the full Mughal army into the Deccan for twenty-five years, conquered Bijapur and Golconda, executed Sambhaji and captured Raigad, and still died without subduing the Marathas. The proof spread beyond Maharashtra almost immediately: the Bundela prince Chhatrasal, inspired by Shivaji’s struggle, created an independent kingdom of Bundelkhand, and the Hindi poet Bhushan travelled to Maharashtra to write in his praise. It also survived the empire’s fall. The chapter’s closing judgement is that the fiery ideal of Swarājya ‘inspired many Indians to believe they could govern themselves, planting the early seeds for India’s freedom movement’. Territory can be lost in a single war — Maratha territory was, in 1818. A demonstration cannot be taken back.