Consider the following pairs with reference to textiles in Southern India: (Tax) (Meaning) 1. Panjupeeli : on cotton yarn 2. Nulayam : on cotton thread 3. Tari kadamai : on silk clothes 4. Sella : on silk thread Which of the pairs given above is/are correct?

Correct — B, 1 and 2 only. Both of the first two pairs read straight off the Tamil words themselves. Panju is cotton, so panjupeeli is the levy on cotton, and nul is thread or yarn, so nulayam is the levy on thread. Pair 3 is the one that fails, and it fails on a word that is well attested in South Indian inscriptions: tari means a loom, and tari kadamai is therefore the loom tax — a charge levied on the weaver's equipment, assessed per loom on weaving households, and not a duty on silk cloth. Once pair 3 falls, options (c) and (d) go with it, and since pair 2 is unimpeachable the answer cannot be (a) either.

• (a)1 only — Drops pair 2 without reason. Nulayam is built on nul, the Tamil word for thread, and the pairing with cotton thread is the standard reading.
• (c)2, 3 and 4 only — Retains pair 3. Tari kadamai is the tax on the loom itself, which is why weaver communities petitioned repeatedly for its remission, and it was not a duty on silk cloth.
• (d)1, 2, 3 and 4 — Claims all four are matched, which cannot survive the loom tax being misdescribed.

Medieval South Indian states taxed textile production at almost every stage, and the inscriptions record the levies by name. Some fell on the raw material, some on the intermediate product, and some on the instrument of production. A loom tax is the clearest case of the last kind — it is charged on the equipment rather than on output, which makes it easy to assess and hard to escape, and which is precisely why remission of the loom tax was one of the standard concessions a temple or a ruler could grant to attract weavers to a settlement.

One honest note on the fourth pair. The key rejects it, and the route to the answer that a candidate can actually walk in the examination hall does not depend on knowing what sella was — pair 3 alone eliminates two options, and pair 2 eliminates the third. That is the safer way to work an item of this kind: find the one pair you can positively disprove from a word you know, and let the option structure do the rest. Tamil revenue vocabulary rewards this approach because the terms are transparent once the root is recognised — panju for cotton, nul for thread, tari for loom, kadamai for tax or tribute.

• Panju is the Tamil word for cotton and nul is the word for thread or yarn, which is what fixes the first two pairs.
• Tari means a loom and kadamai means a tax or tribute, so tari kadamai is a levy on looms, not on cloth.
• Remission of the loom tax was a standard concession used to attract or retain weaver communities in a locality.
• South Indian inscriptions record a dense vocabulary of professional and commodity levies, which is why examiners find pair-matching questions here.
• In this item the loom-tax pair alone eliminates two of the four options.

• Trying to settle every pair when the option structure only requires two.
• Assuming a tax named after an object must fall on the finished product; the loom tax falls on the equipment.
• Treating an unfamiliar transliteration as automatically wrong.

As a term-and-meaning pair set from South Indian inscriptions, where the roots of the Tamil words carry most of the answer.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In South Indian inscriptions, tari kadamai refers to a tax on

  • (a)looms
  • (b)salt pans
  • (c)oil presses
  • (d)cattle

  Answer(a) looms — tari is the Tamil word for a loom and kadamai for a tax.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  A nagaram in the Chola period was

  • (a)a fortified garrison
  • (b)a merchant settlement or town assembly
  • (c)a temple treasury
  • (d)a unit of irrigation management

  Answer(b) a merchant settlement or town assembly, distinct from the ur and the sabha of agrarian villages.