CDS (II) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 53 of 120

Correct — B, the pairing of Nattar with a male serpent deity. Nattar has nothing to do with snakes. A nadu, in the Tamil country, was the territorial unit formed by a cluster of settlements, and the nattar were its people in the political sense — the assembly of landholding cultivators who ran the nadu's affairs, witnessed transactions and appear again and again in Chola inscriptions as the body a king or a temple had to deal with locally. The word is simply nadu plus the plural ending. The serpent deity of the Indian tradition is the naga, remembered in village naga stones and in naga shrines, and no standard reading of nattar produces that meaning. The other three pairings hold up: the yupa is the wooden sacrificial post of Vedic ritual, several of them recorded in stone inscriptions of the early centuries CE, and viragal is the hero stone raised over a warrior who fell in battle, of which the Tamil and Kannada countries are full.

• (a)Nagarakkani : Land owned by the nagaram — The nagaram was the association of merchants of a town, and NCERT notes that such associations occasionally performed administrative functions in towns. Land held by that body is the sense the paper gives, and the key treats the pairing as sound.
• (c)Yupa : Sacrificial post — Correctly matched. The yupa is the post to which the victim was tied in a Vedic sacrifice; inscribed yupa pillars survive at sites such as Isapur and Badva and were themselves set up to record sacrifices performed.
• (d)Viragal : 'Hero stone' in the Tamil Nadu area — Correctly matched. A hero stone commemorates someone who died honourably in battle; virakkal in Tamil and viragallu in Kannada carry exactly that sense, alongside the older Tamil term nadukal.

Much of early south Indian history is read off inscriptions, and inscriptions come with their own vocabulary. Terms for units of territory and their assemblies (nadu and nattar, ur, sabha, nagaram), for categories of land (brahmadeya for land gifted to Brahmanas, shalabhoga for the maintenance of a school, devadana for land gifted to temples, vellanvagai for land of non-Brahmana peasant proprietors, pallichchhandam for land given to Jaina institutions), and for the memorials people raised (viragal or nadukal for a fallen warrior) are the working words of the subject.

In a 'not correctly matched' pairing item the useful move is to test each term against a word you already know rather than to recall a definition whole. Nattar contains nadu, which every candidate knows from the map of Tamil Nadu — the country of the Tamils — so nattar has to be about a territory and its people, not about a deity. Viragal contains vira, hero. Yupa comes straight out of the Vedic ritual vocabulary. Only nagarakkani needs specialist knowledge, and it is the one that is correctly matched, so it never has to be settled to answer the question. On that fourth pairing the honest position is that the term itself is not one this card can confirm from a primary text; the answer here rests on nattar, which can be.

• A nadu was a cluster of settlements forming a territorial unit in the Tamil country; the nattar were its assembly of landholders.
• The nagaram was the merchant association of a town and sometimes carried out administrative work there.
• Chola inscriptions name several categories of land, among them vellanvagai, brahmadeya, shalabhoga, devadana with tirunamattukkani, and pallichchhandam.
• A hero stone marks a warrior's death in battle; the Tamil words are nadukal and virakkal, and the Kannada word is viragallu.
• The yupa is the sacrificial post of Vedic ritual, and inscribed stone yupas of the early centuries CE record the sacrifices they commemorate.

• Guessing a meaning from the sound of a word. Nattar sounds nothing like naga once you notice it is nadu plus a plural ending.
• Answering the pairing you are surest about instead of the one that is wrong — the stem asks for the mismatch.
• Treating nagaram as a village assembly. It is the merchants' body of a town; the village bodies are the ur and the sabha.

As a term-and-meaning pairing, occasionally as a matching list of four inscriptional terms against four definitions.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Chola inscriptions, land set apart for the maintenance of a school was called

  • (a)brahmadeya
  • (b)shalabhoga
  • (c)devadana
  • (d)pallichchhandam

  Answer(b) shalabhoga — brahmadeya was land gifted to Brahmanas, devadana land gifted to temples and pallichchhandam land donated to Jaina institutions.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The term 'nadu' in early medieval Tamil inscriptions refers to

  • (a)a single village
  • (b)a cluster of settlements forming a territorial unit
  • (c)a merchant guild
  • (d)a temple endowment

  Answer(b) a cluster of settlements forming a territorial unit — its assembly of landholders being the nattar.