With reference to the history of India, the word “kopeki” is associated with:

Correct — B, Coins. Kopeki is a coin name, and it reaches Indian history through Central Asia rather than through any Indian language. Hobson-Jobson, the standard glossary of Anglo-Indian words, treats the modern Russian kopeck as a survival of the dinar-i Kopeki that turns up repeatedly in the chronicles of Timur and his descendants, and notes that kopek is Turki for dog. That Timurid coin is the yardstick a Timurid envoy naturally reached for when he had to explain Indian money to readers at home. Abd-ur-Razzaq, sent by Shah Rukh to the Vijayanagara court and writing of his visit of 1443, sets out the South Indian scale — three copper jitals to a silver tar, six tars to a gold fanam, ten fanams to a partab, two partabs to a varaha, the gold coin the Portuguese later called the pagoda and named after the boar of Vishnu — and then fixes its weight for a foreign reader by saying that the varaha weighed about one mithqal, equal to two dinars Kopeki. The word does the same job as saying a coin weighs so many grains. Nothing in the record attaches it to cloth, to land or to a game.

• (a)Clothes — The textile vocabulary of Indian trade is a large and separate one — muslin, malmal, khasa, bafta, calico, chintz, jamdani. Kopeki is not among those names and never appears in a cloth context.
• (c)Land measurement — Land measures in Indian records are bigha, katha, kani, kuzhi, nivartana, jarib and gaz, depending on the region and the period. A term borrowed from Timurid coinage has no place in that list.
• (d)A type of sport in South India — Included only to widen the field. The word is documented in the money tables of a Persian traveller's account of South India, which is close enough to the region to be tempting, but the context is currency and not games.

Foreign travellers are among the most useful sources for medieval Indian economic history precisely because they had to convert. To describe a market or a treasury for readers at home they matched Indian denominations against their own, and those conversion passages preserve exchange rates, weights and coin names that Indian sources record only in passing. Abd-ur-Razzaq at Vijayanagara, Ibn Battuta at Delhi, Nicolo Conti and Ludovico di Varthema on the west coast and Domingo Paes at Hampi all leave tables of this kind.

This is a vocabulary question with no way in except recognition, so the honest strategy is elimination by shape. Nothing about the word looks like an Indian land measure or an Indian game, and its ending resembles a Turkic or Slavic form rather than a Sanskritic or Dravidian one. Words that enter Indian history from Central Asia in this period are overwhelmingly to do with administration, warfare or money, and coinage is the largest of those groups; the Delhi Sultans' own tanka and jital came in the same way. That reasoning gets to coins without knowing the term. A note on the printing: the paper italicises the word and encloses it in quotation marks, which is how a glossary term is normally set, and the spelling with a final i is the plural or adjectival form of the same root that gives kopek.

• Hobson-Jobson's entry COPECK links the Russian coin to the dinar-i Kopeki named in the histories of Timur and his family, and notes kopek as Turki for dog.
• Abd-ur-Razzaq, Shah Rukh's envoy to Vijayanagara, visited in 1443 and left a money table for South India.
• In that table three jitals of copper make a silver tar, six tars a gold fanam, ten fanams a partab and two partabs a varaha.
• The varaha, later called the pagoda by the Portuguese, is named from the boar of Vishnu, and Abd-ur-Razzaq weighs it at about one mithqal, or two dinars Kopeki.
• The same glossary records Russian copper coins, called Kopes, reaching the Punjab trade through Kabul as late as 1838.

• Guessing a textile because unfamiliar words in Indian history often turn out to be cloth names.
• Assuming a term must be Indian in origin to appear in Indian history; many coin names arrived with Central Asian rulers, envoys and traders.
• Confusing the varaha or pagoda, a gold coin, with the pagoda as a building.

As a one-line what-is-this-word item, as a match between coin names and metals or dynasties, or as a statements item on the coinage of a particular period.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In medieval South Indian coinage, the gold coin known to the Portuguese as the pagoda was called

  • (a)fanam
  • (b)varaha
  • (c)jital
  • (d)tanka

  Answer(b) varaha — named from the boar of Vishnu shown on some issues; the fanam was a smaller gold coin and the jital a copper one.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Abd-ur-Razzaq, who left an account of Vijayanagara including its currency, came to India as an envoy of

  • (a)Shah Rukh of Herat
  • (b)the Sultan of Egypt
  • (c)the Ming emperor of China
  • (d)the Safavid ruler of Persia

  Answer(a) Shah Rukh of Herat — the Timurid ruler whose envoy visited the Vijayanagara court in 1443.