Consider the following statements : 1. Parmar king Fateh Shah invited Guru Ram Rai to his kingdom. 2. He welcomed the construction of a Gurudwara at Dehradun. 3. He granted four villages – Chhayawala, Bhujanwala, Panditwari and Ghantawala – to him. Choose the correct answer :
- (a)Only 2
- (b)Only 3
- (c)1 and 2
- (d)2 and 3
Correct — C, 1 and 2.
Fateh Shah, of Garhwal's Panwar (Parmar) house, is the ruler who brought Guru Ram Rai into his kingdom. Ram Rai was the elder son of Guru Har Rai; the Sikh succession passed instead to his younger brother, and he moved north with royal backing.
He settled in the Doon valley in the mid-1670s and set up his dera there. The name Dehradun is read as that dera joined to dun, the valley, and the establishment he founded grew into the Guru Ram Rai Darbar Sahib, so statements 1 and 2 both stand.
Statement 3 is where the item turns. A grant of villages in the Doon did follow — Aurangzeb is recorded as directing Fateh Shah to make provision for Ram Rai's establishment — but the Commission's key rejects statement 3, which leaves 1 and 2.
The count is the part you can check. One published account puts the grant at three villages in Dehradun, another at seven in the Doon valley; neither count matches the four named villages printed here.
Carry away the shape of the trap: a true relationship can carry a particular the sources do not bear out.
- (a)Only 2 — This keeps the gurudwara and throws out the invitation. But the invitation is the load-bearing part of the episode: Fateh Shah's welcome is what brings Ram Rai into Garhwal, and the settlement in the Doon follows from it.
Only 2 would be right for a version in which statement 1 named a different patron or a different Guru — a Chand ruler of Kumaon, say, or Guru Ram Das in place of Guru Ram Rai.
- (b)Only 3 — This inverts the key on all three counts. It rejects the invitation and the support for the Dehradun gurudwara, and keeps the single statement the key does not accept, the four-village grant.
Only 3 would be right for an item in which the first two statements were the altered ones — statement 1 shifted to another Garhwal king, or statement 2 placing the gurudwara outside the Doon.
- (d)2 and 3 — This keeps the village grant and drops the invitation, the reverse of the key on both. Fateh Shah's welcome and his support for the Dehra belong to one episode, so accepting the second while denying the first pulls the story apart.
2 and 3 would be right for an item whose third statement matched a grant published accounts support — two published accounts give three villages and seven respectively — while its first statement moved the invitation to some other ruler.
Garhwal under its Panwar (Parmar) kings was a hill state whose rulers gave shelter and land to religious figures from the plains.
Guru Ram Rai's settlement is the clearest case, and in Dehradun the grant is what fixed where the later town grew. A displaced claimant to the Sikh gaddi received royal patronage in the Doon valley, built his dera, and the dera ended up naming the city.
This is the founding episode of Dehradun, Uttarakhand's provisional (winter) capital, so it sits at the join of state history and Sikh history rather than in either alone.
It also explains why a shrine of the Ramraiya following stands at the centre of a Garhwali town, and why the Jhanda fair is a Dehradun event.
- Garhwal's ruling house was the Panwar line, also written Parmar, with its later capital at Srinagar on the Alaknanda.
- Guru Ram Rai was the elder son of Guru Har Rai, the seventh Sikh Guru, but the succession passed to Guru Har Krishan.
- Ram Rai reached the Doon valley in the mid-1670s under Raja Fateh Shah of Garhwal and set up his dera there.
- Dehradun's name is read as dera, Ram Rai's camp, joined to dun, the valley between the Lesser Himalaya and the Shivalik (Outer Himalaya) range.
- Aurangzeb is recorded as directing Fateh Shah to grant villages in the Doon for the upkeep of Ram Rai's establishment.
- Published accounts differ on that grant: one gives three villages in Dehradun, another seven villages in the Doon valley.
- Guru Ram Rai died in 1687; work on the Darbar Sahib complex continued afterwards under his wife, Mata Panjab Kaur.
- Fateh Shah was a principal hill raja, with Bhim Chand of Kahlur, in the coalition that fought Guru Gobind Singh at Bhangani — 1688 by most accounts, 1686 by some.
- An annual Jhanda fair is held at the Guru Ram Rai Darbar Sahib in Dehradun in the days following Holi.
Two of the three statements survive; the item is decided by the third, which the Commission's key rejects — a real land grant printed with a count matching neither published figure cited above, three villages or seven.
- Statement 3 rests on a real event — a village grant in the Doon did take place — and then fixes a count and a set of names; a true general fact is not evidence for the particular version printed.
- 'Parmar' also names the Malwa dynasty of Munj and Bhoja; the house meant here is Garhwal's Panwar/Parmar line, a separate one.
- Guru Ram Rai is not Guru Ram Das, and he did not hold the gaddi of the main Sikh line; sliding between the names rewrites the episode.
- Fateh Shah both patronised Ram Rai and fought Guru Gobind Singh at Bhangani, so reading his reign as simply pro-Sikh or anti-Sikh misstates it.
- In a combination item, settle each numbered statement on its own before looking at the options; a statement set that opens with two you accept invites you to nod through the third.
The topic offers several handles for a question: the origin of Dehradun's name, a ruler-and-patron pairing to match, or a statement set of the kind printed here.
In this item the device is patronage stated correctly and then one particular altered. The particulars open to alteration are the number of villages, their names, the dynasty's name, or whose son Ram Rai was.
Testing each statement against a fact you can name, rather than against how plausible the story sounds, is what separates them.
MPPSC_2017_PRE_PaperI_Q162017Same dynastic name, different dynasty. That item tests the Parmars of Malwa — Upendra, Munj, Udayaditya — where Gangeyadeva is the outsider. Here 'Parmar' means Garhwal's Panwar house of Fateh Shah, a Himalayan line with no bearing on Malwa's succession list. Useful precisely because the label is shared and the content is not.
UPSC_2004_GS1_Q1202004Same format and same subject area: numbered statements about the Sikh Gurus, decided by whether each particular is attached to the right person. That item works inside the succession of the Gurus themselves; this one works at the edge of it, on a son who did not succeed and on the Garhwal king who sheltered him.
UPSC_1996_GS1_Q921996Shares the name-discrimination hazard. That item pairs Gurus with institutions and puts Guru Ram Das among the choices; here the figure is Guru Ram Rai, a different person entirely. The difference is in the task — matching pairs there, judging statements about a regional patronage here.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Guru Ram Rai, whose dera in the Doon valley gave Dehradun its name, was the son of which Sikh Guru?
- (a)Guru Har Rai
- (b)Guru Har Krishan
- (c)Guru Tegh Bahadur
- (d)Guru Ram Das
Answera — Ram Rai was the elder son of Guru Har Rai, the seventh Guru, and was passed over when the gaddi went to his younger brother.Guru Har Krishan is that younger brother, so he cannot be the father. Guru Tegh Bahadur became Guru after Har Krishan and belonged to an earlier generation of the family. Guru Ram Das was the fourth Guru, a different figure whose name only resembles Ram Rai's.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The Panwar (Parmar) house of Raja Fateh Shah ruled which kingdom, with its later capital at Srinagar on the Alaknanda?
- (a)Kumaon
- (b)Garhwal
- (c)Sirmaur
- (d)Malwa
Answerb — Fateh Shah's Panwar (Parmar) line ruled Garhwal, and Srinagar on the Alaknanda was its seat in his period.Kumaon was held by the Chand rajas, with Almora as their capital. Sirmaur was a separate Himalayan state in what is now Himachal Pradesh. Malwa had its own Parmar dynasty, centred on Dhar in the plains — the shared dynastic name is exactly the confusion this question sets up.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Consider the following statements about Raja Fateh Shah of Garhwal : 1. He extended patronage to Guru Ram Rai in the Doon valley. 2. He was among the hill chiefs who fought Guru Gobind Singh at the battle of Bhangani. Choose the correct answer :
- (a)Only 1
- (b)Only 2
- (c)Both 1 and 2
- (d)Neither 1 nor 2
Answerc — both hold, and holding them together is the point. Fateh Shah received Ram Rai in the Doon and backed the establishment there.The same ruler was a principal raja, alongside Bhim Chand of Kahlur, in the hill coalition that fought Guru Gobind Singh at Bhangani, dated 1688 by most accounts and 1686 by some.
Options a and b each keep one half of a reign that contained both, and d denies a patronage that the founding of Dehradun rests on.
- practice — not a real PYQ
In the name 'Dehradun', the element 'dun' refers to :
- (a)A valley lying between the Lesser Himalaya and the Shivalik (Outer Himalaya) range
- (b)A fortified camp of a wandering teacher
- (c)The confluence of two rivers
- (d)A market town on a trade route
Answera — a dun is the longitudinal valley between the Lesser Himalaya and the Shivaliks, the landform the Doon valley is named for.The camp element of the name is 'dehra', not 'dun', so b attaches the meaning to the wrong half. A river confluence in this region carries the word prayag, and a market settlement would be a mandi or ganj; neither is what 'dun' denotes.