CDS (I) 2024 General Knowledge · Question 8 of 120

Correct — C, Panna. Panna in Bundelkhand is the diamond field of northern India, and it is the only name on this list that has ever been a diamond source at all. Its deposits run for roughly 240 kilometres along a branch of the Vindhya range, and Majhgawan in Panna district still holds India's only mechanised diamond mine. The other three give themselves away the moment you put them on a map: Awadh is the plain of the middle Ganga around Ayodhya and Lucknow, Khambhat is the Gujarat port at the head of its gulf, and Lakhnauti was the Sultanate capital in Bengal — deltaic alluvium. None of them sits on diamond-bearing rock. One honest note about the framing: what an ordinary check confirms is that Panna is the northern Indian diamond field and that its documented workings run from the Bundela period into the modern era. The specifically Delhi Sultanate dating comes from the economic-history literature the paper is drawing on, and this card does not certify a date for the mines — it rests the answer on geology and on the elimination of the other three.

• (a)Awadh — The agrarian plain of the middle Ganga around Ayodhya and Lucknow, later a Nawabi state. Alluvial country with no diamond-bearing rock.
• (b)Khambhat — The strongest distractor, because Khambhat — Cambay — really was a stone-working town: a great Gujarat port renowned for agate and carnelian bead-work. It handled and cut stones, and diamonds passed through it in trade, but it did not mine them.
• (d)Lakhnauti — Lakshmanavati, the Sultanate capital in Bengal, in the Gaur region on the Ganga. A political and mint centre standing on deltaic alluvium — geologically the least likely of the four.

India was the world's only significant source of diamonds until Brazilian and then South African finds displaced it, and its stones came from two distinct regions. The southern field lay in the Krishna valley around Golconda, which produced the famous historical stones. The northern field is Panna, in the Vindhyan country of Bundelkhand in modern Madhya Pradesh — the one that lay within reach of the north Indian sultanates.

Treat this as a geology question wearing a history costume. Diamonds come out of kimberlite pipes and the conglomerates weathered from them, so the answer has to be a place on old, hard rock, which rules out the Gangetic plain of Awadh and the Bengal delta at Lakhnauti at once. Khambhat is the one that needs a moment's thought, because it genuinely was a centre for working semi-precious stone and a hub for the gem trade — but handling stones and producing them are different things, and Gujarat has no diamond field. That leaves Panna, which is also the one place on the list in the Vindhyan belt. As of today Panna is still India's only meaningful diamond-producing area, worked under the National Mineral Development Corporation.

• The Panna diamond deposits extend about 240 kilometres north-east along a branch of the Vindhya Range and are known collectively as the Panna group.
• Majhgawan in Panna district holds India's only mechanised diamond mine, worked under the National Mineral Development Corporation.
• The first European to visit the Panna mines was Tieffenthaler in 1765; the most productive nineteenth-century workings were at Sakaria, about 32 kilometres from Panna town.
• Panna stones were graded locally into four types — Motichul, Manik, Panna and Bunsput — by colour and brilliance.
• Khambhat, or Cambay, in Gujarat was famous for agate and carnelian bead-work rather than for any diamond of its own.

• Choosing Khambhat because it is associated with gemstones and long-distance trade — it worked stones it did not mine.
• Assuming that because Golconda was India's famous diamond source, every historical Indian diamond question must point south.
• Marking Awadh or Lakhnauti because they are familiar Sultanate-period names, without asking what rock they stand on.

Asked as a one-line 'at which place' item where three options are famous political or commercial centres and only one lies on diamond-bearing rock.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Majhgawan, the site of India's only mechanised diamond mine, lies in which one of the following districts?

  • (a)Balaghat
  • (b)Panna
  • (c)Chhatarpur
  • (d)Satna

  Answer(b) Panna — in Madhya Pradesh; Balaghat is a manganese and copper district, not a diamond one.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Khambhat, an important port of the Sultanate and Mughal periods, was especially known for the working of which stones?

  • (a)Diamonds
  • (b)Agate and carnelian
  • (c)Emeralds
  • (d)Rubies

  Answer(b) Agate and carnelian — Khambhat's bead and stone-cutting industry supplied markets across the Indian Ocean.