Match List I with List II
List-I List-II
Event/Place Connected with Person
a) Chola Gangam Lake 1) Chandragupta Maurya
b) Appointment of Dharma Mahamatra 2) Harshavardhan
c)

Question

Match List I with List II
List-I    List-II
Event/Place    Connected with Person
a)    Chola Gangam Lake    1)    Chandragupta Maurya
b)    Appointment of Dharma Mahamatra    2)    Harshavardhan
c)    Assembly at Prayag    3)    Rajendra I
d)    Sudarshan Lake    4)    Ashoka
Select the correct answer using the codes given below :
a    b    c    d

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, 3 4 2 1. Four independent attributions are hiding inside one code, so establish each before touching the options. (a) Chola Gangam Lake → 3, Rajendra I. After his northern campaign of 1019–1022 CE, in which Chola armies marched through Kalinga, defeated Mahipala of the Palas and reached the Ganga, Rajendra I took the title Gangaikonda Chola, 'the Chola who took the Ganga', moved his capital from Thanjavur to a new city named Gangaikonda Cholapuram in what is now Ariyalur district of Tamil Nadu, and excavated beside it an enormous tank named Cholagangam — described in the Chola record as the liquid pillar of victory, because the defeated northern kings were made to carry Ganga water to fill it. (b) Appointment of Dharma Mahamatra → 4, Ashoka. Major Rock Edict V is devoted to the establishment and duties of these officers; in it Ashoka states that no such officers of Dhamma existed before him and that he appointed them thirteen years after his consecration, to work among the Yonas, Kambojas, Gandharas and other peoples, and to look after prisoners, the aged and the dependants of the dead. (c) Assembly at Prayag → 2, Harshavardhana. Xuanzang, who was at Harsha's court in the 640s, records that every five years the emperor held a great assembly called Moksha at Prayaga, the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna, at which he gave away the whole of his accumulated treasury in charity to men of every faith. (d) Sudarshan Lake → 1, Chandragupta Maurya. The Junagadh rock inscription of Rudradaman I, cut shortly after 150 CE, opens by recording that the reservoir called Sudarshana near Girnar was constructed by the Vaishya Pushyagupta, provincial governor of the Maurya emperor Chandragupta, and that conduits were later added to it by the Yavana king Tushaspha under Ashoka. So a-3, b-4, c-2, d-1, which is the code printed against option (a).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The trap the question was built around: it keeps Dharma Mahamatra with Ashoka and Prayag with Harsha, both correct, and simply exchanges the two lakes — Chola Gangam to Chandragupta Maurya and Sudarshan to Rajendra I. Every candidate who knows three names and reverses the tanks lands here. The name itself is the corrective: Chola Gangam carries both 'Chola' and 'Ganga' in it, so it can only belong to the Chola who took the Ganga.  (c) Gets the two Mauryan-era and Chola rows partly right but swaps the last pair, sending the Prayag assembly to Chandragupta Maurya and the Sudarshan lake to Harshavardhan. Neither survives a second's thought: Chandragupta Maurya is over nine centuries earlier than the quinquennial Prayaga assembly, and Harsha ruled from Kanauj in the upper Ganga plain, never over Saurashtra where the Sudarshana reservoir lay.  (d) Scores nothing, but it is the cleverest-looking wrong option because its last pair, Sudarshan Lake with Ashoka, is a genuine half-truth. Rudradaman's own inscription does place work on the reservoir in Ashoka's reign — the conduits built by the Yavana king Tushaspha. The lake itself, however, was constructed a generation earlier under Chandragupta Maurya, and the question asks who the place is connected with, not who repaired it.

Concept: Three of the four items here are public works, and reading them together gives you the whole arc of state-built hydraulic engineering in early India. The Sudarshana reservoir near Girnar is the earliest documented large dam in the subcontinent: built under Chandragupta Maurya by his governor Pushyagupta, extended under Ashoka by the Yavana Tushaspha, breached and rebuilt at Rudradaman I's own expense around 150 CE without levying a tax or forced labour on his subjects, breached again and repaired under Skandagupta in the mid-fifth century — four dynasties recorded on one rock. Cholagangam at Gangaikonda Cholapuram is the same instinct a thousand years later and in a different register: an artificial tank that was simultaneously irrigation, water supply for a new imperial capital, and a monument, since it was filled with Ganga water fetched by defeated kings. The two non-hydraulic items are administrative and ceremonial. The dhamma-mahamatta was a genuinely new cadre of officer created by Ashoka to propagate and police dhamma, and Major Rock Edict V is the constitutional document for it. Harsha's Prayaga assembly was ritualised redistribution — an emperor emptying his treasury in public every fifth year, which bought him legitimacy across sects far more effectively than patronage of any single one.

State PCS 2025 Q88 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q88 — History PYQ with Answer