‘Ashta Pradhan’ was a Council of Ministers

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Correct — C, in the Maratha administration. ‘Ashta Pradhan’ means literally ‘the eight ministers’, and it is the council Shivaji formalised at his coronation at Raigad fort on 6 June 1674 — the same occasion on which he issued coinage in his own name, the copper shivrai and the gold hon, and proclaimed a new Rajyabhisheka era. That is why historians treat the council as the birth of a Maratha bureaucracy rather than a durbar of favourites: each of the eight held a named department. The eight offices, with the Persian-derived alternative titles they replaced, were the Peshwa or Pantpradhan, chief minister for general administration, first held by Moropant Trimbak Pingle; the Amatya or Mujumdar, in charge of finance and the accounts of the state, the title conferred at the coronation on Ramchandra Pant; the Sachiv or Shurunavis, secretary, who drew up and scrutinised royal letters, held by Annaji Datto; the Mantri or Waqia-navis, keeper of the king's daily record and of intelligence; the Senapati or Sar-i-Naubat, commander-in-chief, of whom Hambirrao Mohite is the most celebrated; the Sumant or Dabir, foreign affairs and relations with other sovereigns; the Nyayadhish, chief justice for civil and criminal matters, held by Niraji Ravji; and the Panditrao, head of religious endowments and learning, held by Raghunath Pandit. Two features mark the council out. The designations were deliberately Sanskrit, displacing the Persian and Arabic administrative vocabulary the Deccan sultanates had used — the same impulse that produced the Rajyavyavaharakosha, the lexicon of about 1,344 state terms in ten thematic vargas compiled by that same Raghunath Pandit to supply Sanskrit equivalents for the Persian words of government. And the posts were working ones: with the sole exception of the Nyayadhish and the Panditrao, every pradhan also held a full-time military command, his deputy discharging the civil business in his absence. That combination — a fixed number, named departments, Sanskrit titles and serving commanders — is what makes the Ashta Pradhan a cabinet rather than a court, and it is the reason examiners keep returning to it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Tempting because a Sanskrit-titled council of ministers sounds ancient rather than seventeenth-century. But the Gupta establishment is described in inscriptions by a quite different vocabulary — kumaramatyas as high functionaries, the sandhivigrahika or minister for war and peace (Harisena held the office under Samudragupta), the mahadandanayaka and mahabaladhikrita, with provinces called bhuktis under uparikas and districts called vishayas under vishayapatis. No Gupta source records a fixed council of eight, and the term Ashta Pradhan never appears.  (b) The Chola state is famous for the opposite of a cabinet — its local self-government. The Uttaramerur inscriptions of Parantaka I, dated 919 and 921 CE, record how the brahmadeya sabha chose its variyams, or committees, by the kudavolai lot drawn from palm-leaf tickets in a pot; alongside the sabha stood the ur of ordinary villages and the nagaram of merchant towns. Central officers existed and were graded as perundanam and sirutanam, but there was no eight-member ministerial council and no Ashta Pradhan.  (d) The closest miss, and the reason the option is on the paper. Vijayanagara genuinely did have a council of ministers advising the raya, along with the nayankara system under which military chiefs held amaram land in return for troops and the ayagar system of twelve hereditary village servants. But that council was neither fixed at eight nor known as the Ashta Pradhan, and the Vijayanagara empire ended in the sixteenth century, a hundred years before Shivaji's coronation.

Concept: The Ashta Pradhan is the administrative heart of what Shivaji built between 1645 and 1680, and its point is institutional rather than ceremonial. Shivaji's swaraj was carved out of territory held by Bijapur and then contested by the Mughals, so it needed a state apparatus that could outlive any one commander. The coronation of 6 June 1674 at Raigad, performed by Gaga Bhatt of Banaras after a long dispute among court Brahmins over whether a king could be crowned outside the Kshatriya order, was the moment that apparatus was declared: a sovereign era, sovereign coinage, and a council of eight departmental ministers. Below the council the kingdom was divided into prants under subhedars, with the land revenue assessed on measured land rather than farmed out to hereditary intermediaries, and forts placed under a deliberate triad of a havaldar, a sabnis and a sarnobat so that no single officer could hand one over. Outside the swaraj proper, Maratha claims on neighbouring territory were expressed as chauth, a levy of one-fourth of the revenue, and sardeshmukhi, an additional tenth claimed as the hereditary right of a paramount deshmukh. The council did not survive as a working cabinet: Sambhaji, who ruled from 1680 to 1689, cut its powers, and from 1714 the Peshwa appointed by Shivaji's grandson Shahu steadily engrossed authority until the office became hereditary in one Chitpavan family at Pune, leaving the other seven pradhans as court dignitaries with titles and no departments.

State PCS 2023 Q66 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q66 — History PYQ with Answer