EPFO APFC 2023 General Studies · Question 62 of 120

Correct — C, (c) Tamraparni river in the Pandyan Kingdom. The passage the question is drawn from sits in Book II of the Arthashastra, in the chapter on the superintendent of the treasury, where Kautilya sets out how gems entering the royal treasury are to be examined and graded. Pearls in that list are named after the places they come from, and the first named variety is Tamraparnika — the pearl of the Tamraparni. The others in the same list are named on the same principle: Pandyakavataka from the Pandya country, Pasikya from the Pasika, Kauleya from Kula in Simhala, that is Sri Lanka, and Chaurneya from the Churni, the river usually identified with the Periyar in Kerala. Two things make the answer more than a memorised line. The first is that the Tamraparni — the Thamirabarani of Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu — runs down from the Podigai hills into the Gulf of Mannar, and its estuary held the pearl banks that made the Pandya country famous in the ancient world. The Pandya port of Korkai stood near its mouth and was the centre of the pearl fishery; Greek and Roman writers, including the author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Pliny, record the pearls of that coast, and the Tamil Sangam poems know the same fishery. The second is that pearls are produced by oysters, so a genuine pearl source has to be a coast, a gulf or a river mouth. That single physical fact disposes of two of the four options before any textual recall is needed, because two of them name hills. Kautilya's list is a list of waters and of the countries the waters run through, and among the options only one names a river in the kingdom that classical antiquity associated with pearls.

• (a)Madura region hills — This option gets the kingdom right and the geography wrong, which is what makes it the most tempting wrong answer. Madurai was indeed the political capital of the Pandyas, standing on the Vaigai and famous as the seat of the Tamil academy, the Sangam. But a capital is not a pearl bed. The Pandya pearl fishery lay well to the south on the coast of the Gulf of Mannar, around Korkai near the mouth of the Tamraparni, and it is the river, not the capital and not any hills near it, that gives Kautilya's pearl variety its name. Watch the move the option makes: it substitutes the best-known place-name of a kingdom for the specific place the text names. In questions built on a classical text, the answer is usually the obscure toponym the text actually uses, not the famous one the candidate already knows.
• (b)Shravanabelagola hills — Shravanabelagola is in Hassan district in Karnataka and is one of the great centres of Jainism, with two hills, Chandragiri and Vindhyagiri, the second carrying the monolithic image of Gommateshvara or Bahubali raised around 981 by Chavundaraya, the minister of a Western Ganga king, and anointed in the Mahamastakabhisheka held every twelve years. It has no connection with pearls at all. The reason it is in the option set is the Mauryan association: tradition holds that Chandragupta Maurya, the king Kautilya served, abdicated and ended his life there as a Jaina ascetic in the company of Bhadrabahu, and a candidate who hears Kautilya and reaches for the nearest Mauryan place-name will land on it. The association is real; it is simply the wrong kind of association, since the question is about a passage on gems and not about the king's biography.
• (d)Kaveri river in the Palakkad region — This option fails on plain geography before it fails on the text. The Kaveri rises at Talakaveri in the Brahmagiri hills of Kodagu in Karnataka and flows east across Tamil Nadu to the Bay of Bengal; Palakkad lies on the other side of the Western Ghats in Kerala, and is known for the Palakkad Gap, the break in the ranges through which the south-west monsoon and the road and rail routes to Tamil Nadu pass. The Kaveri does not flow through it. The option is well made, though, because Kerala is not absent from Kautilya's pearl list — the variety he calls Chaurneya is named from the Churni, the river generally identified with the Periyar. So a region that does appear in the text has been paired with a river that does not, and the pairing has to be checked in both halves. When an option joins a river to a region, verify that the river actually runs there before considering whether the text names it.

The Arthashastra is a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, administration and economic policy attributed to Kautilya, also called Chanakya and Vishnugupta, the minister traditionally associated with Chandragupta Maurya. It describes itself as consisting of fifteen books, a hundred and fifty chapters and a hundred and eighty sections, and it was lost to scholarship for centuries until a manuscript reached R. Shamasastry at the Oriental Library in Mysore, who published the Sanskrit text in 1909 and an English translation in 1915. Historians differ on its date — many treat it as a Mauryan core reworked over later centuries — but nobody disputes its value as evidence for how an ancient Indian state was imagined to work. Its second book, on the superintendents, is the most detailed administrative document surviving from ancient India, running through officers for the treasury, mines, metals, forest produce, weaving, agriculture, liquor, cattle, shipping, ports, weights and measures and much else. The chapter behind this question belongs to the treasury officer and grades the gems, pearls, corals and diamonds that may be admitted, naming each variety after the water or country it comes from. That naming convention is the point of the question: in Kautilya's economic geography, a commodity carries the name of its source, so the list doubles as a map of where the wealth of the subcontinent was found.

The ancient and medieval history block of this paper favours items that can be answered from a specific line of a specific text rather than from a general narrative, and this is a clear example: it asks not what Kautilya thought about pearls but which water he names. Two skills are being tested at once. The first is textual recall, which most candidates will not have. The second, which is available to everybody, is the elimination of options that cannot be right for physical or geographical reasons — pearls come from oyster beds in salt water and estuaries, so two options naming hills can be set aside, and of the two rivers left, one is placed in a region it does not flow through. That leaves one option standing, and it happens to be the one that also matches the classical evidence, since the pearl fishery of the Pandya coast is among the best-attested facts of ancient Indian trade, recorded from the Periplus and Pliny through to the Sangam poems. The wider habit worth building is to treat every option in a history question as a compound claim. An option that names a river and a region, or a dynasty and a king, or a text and an author, offers two separate opportunities to be wrong, and checking the cheaper half first is usually faster than trying to recall the text.

• The Arthashastra's second book deals with the superintendents of the state; the chapter on the treasury officer examines gems and pearls entering the treasury and names each pearl variety after its source, beginning with Tamraparnika from the Tamraparni river in the Pandya country.
• Other varieties named in the same passage include Pandyakavataka from the Pandya country, Pasikya from the Pasika, Kauleya from Kula in Simhala or Sri Lanka, and Chaurneya from the Churni, the river commonly identified with the Periyar in Kerala.
• The Tamraparni, today the Thamirabarani of Tirunelveli district in Tamil Nadu, flows from the Podigai hills into the Gulf of Mannar; the Pandya port of Korkai near its mouth was the centre of the pearl fishery of the ancient south.
• The pearls of this coast are recorded in classical sources including the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and Pliny's Natural History, and in the Tamil Sangam corpus, making the Pandya pearl trade one of the best-attested facts of ancient Indian commerce.
• The Arthashastra is attributed to Kautilya, also called Chanakya and Vishnugupta; the text describes itself as fifteen books, a hundred and fifty chapters and a hundred and eighty sections, and was recovered and published by R. Shamasastry, who brought out the Sanskrit text in 1909 and an English translation in 1915.

• Choosing the capital of a kingdom when the text names a river in it; Madurai is the Pandya capital, but Kautilya's pearl variety is named from the Tamraparni
• Reaching for Shravanabelagola because it is the Mauryan place-name a candidate remembers; the Chandragupta and Bhadrabahu tradition is genuine but belongs to the king's biography, not to a chapter on gems
• Failing to check the two halves of a compound option separately; the Kaveri is a real river and Palakkad a real region, but the Kaveri does not flow through Palakkad
• Forgetting the physical test available in this question — pearls form in oysters, so a pearl source in an ancient text will be a coast, a gulf or a river mouth, never a range of hills
• Assuming Kerala has no place in Kautilya's pearl list; the Churni, usually identified with the Periyar, is named, which is why the Kaveri and Palakkad option looks half-plausible

Ancient history in this paper is asked as precise attribution — which text names what, which dynasty held which capital, which king belongs to which line — rather than as narrative or interpretation. The Arthashastra recurs because it supplies dozens of such attributions: an officer's title, a commodity's source, a rate of tax, a rule for a guild. When it appears, the options are usually place-names of comparable obscurity, one of which is the text's own and the rest of which are famous sites borrowed from other contexts, often other periods and other religions. The method that works is to read the options for category errors first, since a site famous for sculpture, for a stupa or for a monastery has probably been imported from a different question altogether, and only then to try to recall the line. Expect the same shape whenever the paper asks about Megasthenes, the Periplus, Fa-Hien or Xuanzang.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The ancient Pandya port associated with the pearl fishery of the Gulf of Mannar, situated near the mouth of the Tamraparni river, is

  • (a)Korkai
  • (b)Arikamedu
  • (c)Tamralipti
  • (d)Bharuch

  Answer(a) Korkai — the Pandya port near the mouth of the Tamraparni on the Gulf of Mannar, the centre of the pearl fishery known to classical writers and to the Sangam poems. Arikamedu on the Coromandel coast near Puducherry is the Indo-Roman trading settlement excavated by Wheeler; Tamralipti is the great port of the Bengal coast at the mouth of the Ganga system; and Bharuch, the Barygaza of the Greek accounts, lies on the Narmada on the western seaboard.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Sanskrit text of the Arthashastra was recovered and published in 1909 by which one of the following scholars?

  • (a)R. Shamasastry
  • (b)James Prinsep
  • (c)Alexander Cunningham
  • (d)John Marshall

  Answer(a) R. Shamasastry — librarian at the Oriental Library in Mysore, he edited and published the Sanskrit text of the Arthashastra in 1909 and brought out an English translation in 1915, restoring to scholarship a treatise that had been known only by reputation. James Prinsep is remembered for deciphering Brahmi and Kharoshthi, Alexander Cunningham as the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, and John Marshall as the Director General under whom Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were excavated.