Consider the types of land according to The Amarkosha :
a. Urvara-fertile
b. Maru-desert
c. Shadvala-grassy
d. Devmatrika-watered by rain
Which of the following is correct ?

Question

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Correct — D, More than one of the above. This is the rare occasion on this paper where the fourth option is not a trap but the honest answer, and the reasoning has to be done in two stages rather than one. Stage one is the Sanskrit. All four pairings in the stem are correct against the Amarakosha's twelve-fold classification of land in its Bhumi-varga: urvara is fertile land; maru is desert; shadvala is land covered with young green grass; and devamatrika is land whose water comes from rain — literally land that has the rain-god for its foster-mother — as distinct from nadimatrika, land watered by a river. Stage two is the arithmetic of the options, which is where the question is actually won. If a, b, c and d are all true, then option (a) 'a and b both' is a true statement; option (b) 'c and d both' is a true statement; and option (c) 'b, c and d' is also a true statement. Three of the listed options are simultaneously correct, and no option says 'all four pairings are correct'. The only choice that accommodates the situation is 'More than one of the above'. That is precisely the test to apply whenever this option appears: it is right when, and only when, you can name at least two of the other options that are true at the same time. Here you can name three, and the reasoning is airtight rather than a fallback for uncertainty.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Not wrong in what it asserts — urvara really is fertile land and maru really is desert — but incomplete as an answer, because c and d are equally correct. An option that states a true but partial fact is not the answer when another option accounts for the whole situation.  (b) Again true as far as it goes: shadvala is grassy land and devamatrika is rain-watered land. It fails for the same reason as option (a) — it leaves out two pairings that are just as accurate, so it cannot be the best answer available.  (c) The most tempting of the three, because it covers three of the four and a candidate reads it as 'nearly everything'. But it silently excludes urvara-fertile, which is the least disputable pairing in the entire list — urvara is the standard Sanskrit word for fertile soil.

Concept: The Amarakosha, properly the Namalingaanushasana, is the best-known Sanskrit thesaurus, composed by Amarasimha, and it is organised as three kandas — one on the heavens and divine matters, one on the earth and its contents, and one of general and miscellaneous words. Within the second sits the Bhumi-varga, the section on land, which distinguishes twelve kinds of ground: urvara (fertile), ushara (barren or saline), maru (desert), aprahata (fallow), shadvala (grassy), pankila (muddy), jalaprayah (watery), kachchha (marshy, near water), sharkara and sharkaravati (stony and pebbly), nadimatrika (watered by a river) and devamatrika (watered by rain). The last pair is the one historians make most use of, because the distinction between river-irrigated and rain-fed land is the basic fact of Indian agriculture and of the revenue systems built on it. A lexicon of this kind is a historical source in its own right: the vocabulary a society finds worth listing tells you what it needed to distinguish, and twelve named categories of soil imply a settled agrarian order that assessed land carefully.

State PCS 2024 Q146 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q146 — History PYQ with Answer