Q1.
If you could time-travel and meet Chhatrapati Shivaji, what three questions would you ask him and why?
Answer
A good answer here is not just three questions — it is three questions that only he could answer, each with a reason drawn from the chapter. Avoid questions the textbook already answers (‘when were you born?’); ask about decisions, doubts and choices, which no source records.
What makes a historical question a good one: historians distinguish what happened (which sources can tell us) from why someone chose to act (which they usually cannot). Records tell us Shivaji built a navy in 1657; no record tells us what convinced him it was worth the money. That gap is where your questions belong.
Sample answer:
- ‘What made you decide to build a navy in 1657, when neither Bijapur nor the Mughals thought a full-time fleet was worth keeping?’
Why I would ask: the chapter calls this ‘a truly revolutionary step at the time’. Bijapur had merchant ships but no force to protect the coast, and even the Mughal use of a navy was very limited. So he was spending scarce money on something every neighbouring power had judged unnecessary. I want to know whether he foresaw the European sea threat that Ramachandrapant Amatya would write about in 1715. - ‘At Purandar you had to surrender a large part of your kingdom and send your son Sambhaji into Mughal service. How did you decide that a bad treaty was better than a lost war?’
Why I would ask: this is the hardest moment in the chapter — a defeat, not a victory. Knowing how a leader judges when to stop fighting would tell us more about his strategy than any of his successes. It is also the decision that kept him alive to be crowned nine years later. - ‘You told your officials not to take even a blade of grass by force, and not to cut a villager’s mango or jackfruit tree. How did you make officials far away actually obey that?’
Why I would ask: issuing a good order is easy; enforcing it across hundreds of forts is not. The chapter gives clues — salaries from the treasury instead of land, periodic transfers — and I would like to hear from him whether that was the mechanism, or whether it rested on inspection and punishment.
Tip: when you share your three questions in class, notice how many classmates asked about battles and how many asked about governing. The chapter spends about as much space on administration as on warfare — and the administration is what let the kingdom outlive him by 138 years.