Which of the following ruler ruled Assam in the time of Harsha ?

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Correct — B, Bhaskar Varman. Bhaskaravarman was the last and greatest ruler of the Varman dynasty of Kamarupa, the kingdom of ancient Assam that older texts call Pragjyotisha, and he was Harshavardhana's exact contemporary and closest ally. The alliance was a matter of strategic geometry: Harsha at Kanauj in the upper Ganga plain and Bhaskaravarman in the Brahmaputra valley had a common enemy in Shashanka of Gauda, who lay between them in Bengal, and the two squeezed him from either side. Two independent bodies of evidence tie the pair together. The first is literary — Banabhatta's Harshacharita, the court biography of Harsha, records the embassy Bhaskaravarman sent to him, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who travelled in India in the 630s and 640s, visited Bhaskaravarman's court in Kamarupa and then accompanied him to Harsha's great assemblies at Kanauj and Prayag. The second is epigraphic — Bhaskaravarman's own Nidhanpur copper plates, a grant of land recording his genealogy, were issued from his victorious camp at Karnasuvarna, Shashanka's capital in Bengal, which is direct evidence of how far his arms reached in Harsha's lifetime. The other names do not survive contact with a date. King Dahir was the Brahmin ruler of Sindh, at the opposite end of the subcontinent, and he was killed by the Arab commander Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE, some sixty-five years after Harsha's death around 647. 'Aswad Jahan' corresponds to no known ruler of Assam or of anywhere else in seventh-century India. With exactly one option correct, the inclusive fourth option has nothing to hold and fails.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) No ruler of this name is known in the history of Assam or of seventh-century India. The name is Persianate in form, which places it centuries too late for Harsha's reign in any case — a useful signal, since Kamarupa's dynasties in this period carry Sanskritic names ending in -varman.  (c) A real ruler, but of Sindh and of the wrong century. Dahir was the Brahmin king defeated and killed by Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 CE, roughly sixty-five years after Harsha died. He is placed here to test whether you check both the region and the date rather than simply recognising the name.  (d) This option is correct only if at least two of the three named men ruled Assam during Harsha's reign, and only one did. Dahir ruled a different region a century later and Aswad Jahan is not a historical figure at all, so there is no second candidate for the inclusive option to gather up.

Concept: The seventh century in northern India is organised around Harshavardhana of the Pushyabhuti dynasty, who moved his capital from Thanesar to Kanauj and held together a loose paramountcy over the Ganga plain from about 606 to about 647 CE. Learning the period means learning his three principal contemporaries and how each relates to him. Shashanka of Gauda in Bengal was the enemy, held responsible in the sources for the killing of Harsha's brother Rajyavardhana. Pulakeshin II of the Chalukyas of Badami was the rival in the south, who checked Harsha's advance on the Narmada, an episode recorded both in the Aihole inscription and by Xuanzang. Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa was the ally in the east. The Kamarupa kingdom itself is worth placing: Pragjyotisha in the epics and the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta, ruled successively by the Varman, Mlechchha and Pala lines, with its heartland in the Brahmaputra valley of present-day Assam. Bhaskaravarman is where the Varman line ends, and after him the dynasty gives way to the Mlechchha rulers.

State PCS 2024 Q54 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q54 — History PYQ with Answer