MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 4 of 100

Correct — option (1), statements (a), (b) and (c). Before doing any history, read the four choices: statement (a) appears in all four of them. That means the title Vikramjit is doing no discriminating work at all, and the question is decided entirely by (b), (c) and (d) — a thirty-second observation that turns a four-way problem into a two-way one. Now take statement (d), which is plainly false. Hemu did not defeat Akbar at the second battle of Panipat; he was defeated there. The battle was fought on 5 November 1556 between Hemu's army and the Mughal force commanded on the thirteen-year-old Akbar's behalf by Bairam Khan, and Hemu, who was carrying the fight until an arrow struck him in the eye, was captured and killed. Once (d) falls, options (2) and (4) fall with it, and only (1) and (3) remain — and they differ by exactly one statement, (b). Statement (b) is true: Hemu's career began in the market, as a shahna-i-mandi or superintendent of the market under the later Surs, and he rose from that post through the revenue and military service of the Sur administration to become wazir and commander-in-chief of Muhammad Adil Shah Suri. That rise from market officer to the effective ruler of Delhi is exactly why he is a set-piece figure in the syllabus. Statement (c) is the claim carried in the standard accounts, that Hemu fought twenty-two battles on Adil Shah's behalf without losing one, the run ending only at Panipat. And statement (a) reflects the title Vikramaditya, in its Hindavi form Vikramjit, which Hemu took on entering Delhi in October 1556 after defeating Tardi Beg Khan — some accounts describe it as conferred by Adil Shah and others as assumed at Delhi, but the title itself is firmly his and the Commission's final key treats the statement as correct. Three statements standing and one falling gives option (1).

• (2)Only (a), (c) and (d) — Fails on statement (d), and fails badly, because it reverses the outcome of one of the decisive battles of Indian history. The second battle of Panipat on 5 November 1556 ended in Hemu's defeat, capture and death at the hands of the Mughal army under Bairam Khan, and it is precisely that defeat that re-established Mughal rule in northern India after Humayun's death. A candidate is drawn here by the genuine strength of Hemu's position in 1556 — he had taken Agra and then Delhi and was crowned at Purana Qila — and by the fact that the battle was close-run until he was wounded. Close-run is not won, and no combination containing statement (d) can stand.
• (3)Only (a) and (c) — Correct as far as it goes and therefore wrong. It accepts the title and the run of unbeaten battles, and rightly refuses statement (d), but it also drops statement (b) — and Hemu's beginning as a superintendent of the market is one of the best-known facts about him, the detail every textbook uses to make the point that the Sur administration allowed a man of humble commercial origins to rise to the command of an empire's armies. It is the choice a candidate marks after eliminating the false statement but without testing the true ones, which on a combination item leaves the boundary of the list undrawn.
• (4)Only (a), (b) and (d) — Carries the same fatal statement (d) as option (2) — it makes Hemu the victor at the second battle of Panipat, which inverts the result — and it compounds the error by discarding statement (c), the twenty-two unbeaten battles, which is true. So it is wrong twice over: it admits a false claim and rejects a true one. The pattern is worth noticing for the rest of the paper. In a bundle item, the fastest route is almost never to verify every statement; it is to find the one statement you can positively disprove, strike every bundle containing it, and then decide the remainder on the single statement that separates the survivors.

Hemchandra, known as Hemu, belongs to the short interval between the two halves of Mughal rule in India — the years after Sher Shah Suri's death in 1545, when the Sur empire fragmented among his successors, and before Akbar's authority was secured. He served the last effective Sur ruler of the Delhi–Agra region, Muhammad Adil Shah, first in the market administration and then as wazir and commander of his armies, and by 1556 he was campaigning on his own account. Humayun had recovered Delhi in 1555 but died in January 1556 after a fall in his library at the Purana Qila, leaving a boy of thirteen on the throne under the regency of Bairam Khan. Hemu seized the moment, took Agra and then Delhi from the Mughal governor Tardi Beg Khan, and assumed the title Vikramaditya. The Mughal camp debated retreat to Kabul; Bairam Khan overruled it and marched on Delhi. The two armies met at Panipat, the same plain where Babur had defeated Ibrahim Lodi thirty years earlier, and the battle of 5 November 1556 ended the Sur interregnum and made Akbar's reign possible.

The reasoning this item rewards is structural, not historical, and it is worth practising because MPSC prints sixty-one statement-bundle questions in this booklet. Step one: compare the four bundles before evaluating any statement, and mark the statements that appear in all of them. Here statement (a) appears in every option, so it cannot decide anything and need not be verified at all — whatever its truth, it changes nothing. Step two: find a statement you can positively disprove. Statement (d) reverses a famous outcome, so it is the natural candidate, and eliminating it removes two of the four bundles at a stroke. Step three: the survivors differ by exactly one statement, so the whole question reduces to a single yes-or-no about Hemu's beginnings in the market. Worked in that order the item takes under a minute; worked by verifying four statements against four bundles it takes three or four, on a paper that allows an average of seventy-two seconds a question. With MPSC deducting a quarter of the marks for a wrong answer, the time saved on structurally simple items is what buys the attempts that are worth taking elsewhere.

• Hemu, or Hemchandra, was wazir and commander-in-chief of Muhammad Adil Shah Suri, and began his career in the market administration as a shahna-i-mandi, or superintendent of the market, rising from there through the Sur revenue and military service.
• In October 1556 Hemu defeated the Mughal governor Tardi Beg Khan and took Delhi, and assumed the title Vikramaditya — Vikramjit in its Hindavi form — being crowned at the Purana Qila; the standard accounts credit him with twenty-two battles won without a defeat before Panipat.
• The second battle of Panipat was fought on 5 November 1556 between Hemu's army and the Mughal force commanded by Bairam Khan on behalf of the thirteen-year-old Akbar; Hemu was struck in the eye by an arrow, captured and killed, and the Mughal recovery of northern India was secured.
• The setting was created by Humayun's death in January 1556, weeks after he had recovered Delhi from the Surs, which left Akbar on the throne as a boy under Bairam Khan's regency and gave Hemu his opening.
• Panipat carries three separate battles in the syllabus — 1526, Babur against Ibrahim Lodi; 1556, Akbar's forces against Hemu; and 1761, Ahmad Shah Abdali against the Marathas — and questions frequently work by attaching the right event to the wrong one of the three.

• Evaluating every statement before comparing the bundles: statement (a) appears in all four options here, so verifying it is time spent for no marks — always check first which statements can actually discriminate between the choices
• Reversing the result of the second battle of Panipat because Hemu held the advantage for much of the day; he was wounded, captured and killed, and the Mughals won
• Confusing the second battle of Panipat with the first (Babur against Ibrahim Lodi, 1526) or the third (Abdali against the Marathas, 1761), which is the standard way this area is misremembered
• Assuming that a bundle which rejects the one false statement must be correct — option (3) does exactly that and still fails, because it also drops a true statement

MPSC's medieval-history questions cluster around rulers, titles, offices and battles, and they are usually cast as a statement bundle with overlapping combinations rather than as a single fact. That format punishes half-knowledge in both directions — you lose the mark for admitting a false statement and equally for dropping a true one — so the useful preparation is a short, complete list per figure rather than one memorable detail. UPSC treats the same period through institutions and processes: the working of the mansabdari system, the character of the Sur revenue settlement, the sources for a reign. The overlap is the factual core, and the divergence is what you are expected to do with it, so a candidate preparing for both should carry the complete list for MPSC and one line on significance for UPSC.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The second battle of Panipat, fought in 1556, was fought between Hemu and a Mughal army commanded on Akbar's behalf by which of the following ?

  • (a)Tardi Beg Khan
  • (b)Bairam Khan
  • (c)Munim Khan
  • (d)Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan

  Answer(b) Bairam Khan — as regent for the thirteen-year-old Akbar he overruled the counsel to withdraw to Kabul and commanded the Mughal army that defeated and killed Hemu at Panipat on 5 November 1556. Tardi Beg Khan was the Mughal governor whom Hemu had already driven out of Delhi, and Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan was Bairam Khan's son, a figure of Akbar's later court.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Hemu, the wazir of Muhammad Adil Shah Suri, is said in the standard accounts to have begun his career in which of the following capacities ?

  • (a)Superintendent of the market
  • (b)Keeper of the royal stables
  • (c)Commander of a thousand horse
  • (d)Governor of Bengal

  Answer(a) Superintendent of the market — Hemu began as a shahna-i-mandi in the Sur administration and rose through the revenue and military service to become wazir and commander-in-chief, which is why his career is taught as the classic instance of mobility within the Sur system. He was never governor of Bengal, though it was from the eastern provinces that he campaigned in 1556.