MPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 8 of 100

Correct — option (3), statements a, b and c. Krishnadevaraya, who ruled the Vijayanagara Empire from 1509 to 1529 at the height of its power, was himself a Telugu poet as well as a patron of poets: he composed the Amuktamalyada, which tells of the marriage of the god Ranganayaka (a form of Vishnu) to Andal, one of the Vaishnava Alvar saints, and which also doubles as a manual of statecraft, so statement a stands. He carried the titles 'Andhra Bhoja' and 'Abhinava Bhoja' — 'the Bhoja of the Andhra country' and 'a new Bhoja' — deliberately invoking the legendary ninth-tenth century Paramara king Bhoja of Dhara, remembered as the archetypal scholar-king, so statement b stands. His court held the Ashtadiggajas, the eight celebrated Telugu poets, and its foremost figure was Allasani Peddana, honoured with the title Andhra Kavita Pitamaha ('grandfather of Telugu poetry') for his Manucharitramu, so statement c stands. Only statement d fails: Krishnadevaraya belonged to the Tuluva dynasty, the third dynasty to rule Vijayanagara, not the Sangama dynasty, which was the empire's first ruling house, founded by Harihara I and Bukka I roughly a century and a half earlier. Three statements true, one false, gives option (3).

• (1)Only a and b — Accepts the two statements about Krishnadevaraya's own authorship of the Amuktamalyada and his titles, but wrongly drops statement c — that Peddana was a prominent poet in his court. Peddana's presence at Krishnadevaraya's court, and his standing as foremost among the Ashtadiggajas, is among the best-attested facts of the whole Vijayanagara literary period, so excluding it understates a true and well-documented statement rather than correctly identifying a false one.
• (2)Only b and c — Correctly keeps the title and the Peddana statements, but wrongly drops statement a, that Krishnadevaraya himself wrote the Amuktamalyada. This is one of the most secure facts about him — a ruling emperor who was also a practising Telugu poet is precisely why he is remembered as a patron-scholar in the mould of the historical Bhoja he took his titles from — and dropping it removes a true statement rather than the false one.
• (4)Only b, c and d — Keeps the two true statements about his titles and Peddana, but swaps in the false statement d — that he belonged to the Sangama dynasty — while dropping the true statement a about his authorship of the Amuktamalyada. Krishnadevaraya was the most celebrated ruler of the Tuluva dynasty, Vijayanagara's third ruling house; the Sangama dynasty was the empire's founding line under Harihara I and Bukka I, roughly a century and a half before Krishnadevaraya's reign, and confusing the two collapses the empire's whole dynastic sequence into one name.

Krishnadevaraya's reign (1509–1529) is the conventional high point of the Vijayanagara Empire, and the syllabus treats him as much a cultural figure as a political and military one: a ruler who fought and administered while also composing Telugu verse, patronising a court of celebrated poets, and consciously modelling himself on Raja Bhoja of Dhara, the archetypal scholar-king of an earlier north Indian dynasty. The Vijayanagara Empire itself passed through four ruling dynasties — Sangama, Saluva, Tuluva and Aravidu — and Krishnadevaraya's own dynasty, Tuluva, is the third of these, distinct from the Sangama dynasty that founded the empire in the mid-fourteenth century.

This is a statement-bundle question of the kind MPSC uses across its history section, and the efficient approach is the same each time: check whether any statement can be positively confirmed or denied before working through all four in sequence. Here, the dynastic claim in statement d is the one most likely to be misremembered, precisely because 'Vijayanagara king' and 'Sangama dynasty' are loosely associated in a general reading of the empire's history even though only its first hundred-odd years belong to that dynasty.

• Krishnadevaraya ruled the Vijayanagara Empire from 1509 to 1529, the era generally regarded as its political and cultural peak.
• He wrote the Amuktamalyada in Telugu, narrating the marriage of Ranganayaka (Vishnu) and the Alvar saint Andal, and doubling as a treatise on statecraft.
• He held the titles 'Andhra Bhoja' and 'Abhinava Bhoja', invoking the legendary Paramara king Bhoja of Dhara as a model of the scholar-king.
• Allasani Peddana, foremost of the Ashtadiggajas (eight great Telugu poets) at his court, held the title Andhra Kavita Pitamaha and wrote the Manucharitramu.
• Krishnadevaraya belonged to the Tuluva dynasty, Vijayanagara's third ruling house; the Sangama dynasty, founded by Harihara I and Bukka I in the mid-fourteenth century, was the empire's first.

• Assuming any Vijayanagara emperor belongs to the Sangama dynasty, since it is the dynasty most associated with the empire's founding and thus the 'default' answer
• Treating a ruler's title (Andhra Bhoja) as an actual dynastic name rather than an honorific
• Underestimating how well-documented a statement is (such as Peddana's presence at court) and discarding it instead of the genuinely false statement

MPSC regularly builds a four-statement bundle on a single well-known ruler, mixing several very well-attested facts with one precisely wrong dynastic or genealogical claim, so that a candidate who is broadly familiar with the ruler but hazy on dynastic sequence is drawn to the wrong combination. The safeguard is a short dynasty-and-founder table for empires like Vijayanagara that ruled across several centuries and several houses.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Krishnadevaraya belonged to which of the four ruling dynasties of the Vijayanagara Empire?

  • (a)Sangama
  • (b)Saluva
  • (c)Tuluva
  • (d)Aravidu

  Answer(c) Tuluva — the empire's third ruling dynasty. The Sangama dynasty (Harihara I and Bukka I) founded the empire in the mid-fourteenth century, the Saluva dynasty briefly interrupted the succession, and the Aravidu dynasty ruled after Vijayanagara's decline following the Battle of Talikota (1565).

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Amuktamalyada, composed by Krishnadevaraya, narrates the marriage of which Alvar saint to the deity Ranganayaka?

  • (a)Andal
  • (b)Meera
  • (c)Akka Mahadevi
  • (d)Lal Ded

  Answer(a) Andal — the only woman among the twelve Alvar saints of the Tamil Vaishnava tradition; Meera, Akka Mahadevi and Lal Ded belong to entirely separate regional bhakti traditions and are not the subject of Krishnadevaraya's poem.