Which of the following statement applies to Aadilshah's Wajir Hemu ?
(a) Adilshah gave Hemu the title of 'Vikramjit'.
(b) Hemu started his career as a Market Superintendent.
(c) Hemu had not lost a si

Question

Which of the following statement applies to Aadilshah's Wajir Hemu ?
(a) Adilshah gave Hemu the title of 'Vikramjit'.
(b) Hemu started his career as a Market Superintendent.
(c) Hemu had not lost a single battle out of 22 battles.
(d) Hemu defeated Akbar in the second battle of Panipat.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) 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.  (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.  (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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2026 Q4 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q4 — History PYQ with Answer