Given below are two statements one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : The territories of the Sultanate could be broadly divided into two parts - the Khalsa and t

Question

Given below are two statements one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : The territories of the Sultanate could be broadly divided into two parts - the Khalsa and the Jagirs.
Reason (R) : The Jagirs comprised of the land under the control of the State.
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, (A) is true, but (R) is false. The Assertion states the standard textbook division of Sultanate territory into two categories, and that is accepted: one part was retained under direct state administration — the khalisa (khalsa) — and the other was assigned away to nobles and officers, the assignment being called iqta in the Sultanate period and, in the language the commission uses here, jagir. The Reason then inverts the definition. It is the khalisa, not the jagir, that was 'the land under the control of the State': its revenue was realised by the Sultan's own revenue officers and flowed into the central treasury, where it paid the standing army and the establishment of the court. A jagir or iqta was precisely the land the state did not administer directly — it was handed over to an assignee who collected the revenue himself in lieu of a cash salary and maintained a stipulated body of troops out of it, remitting only the surplus (fawazil) to the exchequer. So the Reason describes the wrong half of the pair, the Assertion survives, and the code that fits is 'A true, R false'.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option concedes that the Reason is true, and it is not. The Reason assigns to the jagir the defining feature of the khalisa. Once you see that the two categories are opposites — one administered by the state, one assigned out of the state's direct administration — no code that begins 'Both (A) and (R) are true' can be right.  (c) This gets both halves the wrong way round. The two-fold division of the realm into directly administered land and assigned land is exactly how the Sultanate's revenue geography is described, so the Assertion is not false; and the Reason's definition of jagir is the one that fails.  (d) The trap option, and the one a hurried candidate marks. It reads naturally — a division of territory, followed by a sentence that sounds like it is explaining one of the two parts — and the phrase 'under the control of the State' feels harmless because every part of the Sultanate was, in some sense, under the state. But the technical sense is narrower: 'under the control of the state' is the definition of khalisa. Note also that UPPSC has shuffled the usual assertion-reason code here, putting 'both true and R explains A' at (d) instead of the customary (a) — so a candidate who marks the code by position rather than by reading it is caught twice.

Concept: The Delhi Sultanate financed itself out of land revenue, and the whole of its territory was booked into one of two columns. The khalisa (khalsa) was the reserved or crown share — land whose revenue was assessed and collected by the central government's own officers, the amil or amalguzar working under the diwan-i-wizarat, and paid into the Sultan's treasury to meet the salaries of the standing army and the expenses of the court. Everything else was assigned: a territory, called an iqta, was made over to a commander or officer, the muqti or wali, who collected its revenue, kept what was due to him as pay, maintained the troop contingent fixed for him, and sent the balance to the exchequer. The label changed over time — iqta belongs to the Sultanate and jagir became the standard word under the Mughals, where jagir and khalisa are the matching pair — but the underlying architecture is the same: directly administered land on one side, assigned land on the other.

State PCS 2025 Q36 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q36 — History PYQ with Answer