UPPSC 2024 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 45 of 150

Correct — A, both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A). Test the Assertion first. The Turkish invasion did succeed, and the measure of success is that it did not stop at plunder. Mahmud of Ghazni's raids in the first quarter of the eleventh century took wealth and left, annexing only the Punjab; but Muizz-ud-din Muhammad bin Sam, whom Indian textbooks call Muhammad Ghori, came to stay. He took Multan in the mid-1170s, took Lahore from the last Ghaznavid in 1186, lost the first battle of Tarain to Prithviraj III Chauhan in 1191, returned and won the second battle of Tarain in 1192, and defeated Jayachandra of Kannauj at Chandawar in 1194. When he died in 1206 his slave-general Qutb-ud-din Aibak set up an independent sultanate at Delhi, and Turkish rule in north India lasted, in one dynasty or another, for the next three centuries. That is a successful invasion by any definition. Now the Reason, which is also true. Twelfth-century north India was not a state but a field of rival kingdoms: the Chahamanas at Ajmer and Delhi, the Gahadavalas at Kannauj, the Chandelas in Bundelkhand, the Chaulukyas in Gujarat, the Paramaras in Malwa, the Senas in Bengal, each with its own tributary chiefs, and each more often at war with its neighbours than with any outsider. And the Reason genuinely explains the Assertion, which is why the code is (a) and not (c). The disunity was not a background condition; it operated at every decisive moment. Prithviraj Chauhan faced Ghori at Tarain with a large but improvised coalition and no help at all from Jayachandra of Kannauj, his standing enemy. When Prithviraj was beaten in 1192 there was no second front and no alliance to absorb the blow — the Turks simply moved on to Kannauj in 1194 and destroyed the next kingdom in isolation, and a few years later Bakhtiyar Khalji rode into Bihar and Bengal and unseated the Senas with a strikingly small force. Each Indian kingdom fought its own war, lost it alone, and was absorbed. Historians of the period add other causes and you should know them — the Turks' fast, well-drilled cavalry of mounted archers against Indian armies built around elephants and slow feudal levies, a single unified command against contingents owing loyalty to different chiefs, and a narrow, caste-bound military recruitment against a system that drew fighters from wherever it could. But those are strengths that could be neutralised by a united defence, and Tarain in 1191 proved it: a single Indian coalition beat Ghori in the field. It was the failure to build that coalition again, or to keep it, that turned a defeat in one battle into the loss of north India. The absence of political unity is therefore the explanation the Assertion needs, not merely a true statement standing beside it.

• (b)(A) is false, but (R) is true. — The Assertion is not false. Some candidates reason that the Turks were repulsed more than once — Ghori was beaten by the Chaulukyas of Gujarat in the late 1170s and by Prithviraj at the first battle of Tarain in 1191 — and conclude that the invasion failed. Those were setbacks inside a campaign that succeeded. The second battle of Tarain in 1192, Chandawar in 1194 and Bakhtiyar Khalji's conquest of Bihar and Bengal within the following decade left a Turkish sultanate ruling from Delhi in 1206. An invasion that founds a three-hundred-year state has succeeded.
• (c)Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A). — This is the option that costs marks, because it applies the right instinct to the wrong item. Both statements are indeed true, but here the Reason is the standard historical explanation of the Assertion, not an unrelated fact set beside it. Political fragmentation is exactly what let the Turks fight the Chahamanas, the Gahadavalas and the Senas one at a time, and it is why the single defeat at Tarain in 1192 was not absorbed by an alliance. Choosing (c) would be defensible only if disunity had no bearing on the outcome — and the campaign record shows it had a decisive bearing.
• (d)(A) is true, but (R) is false. — The Reason is not false. There was no paramount power in north India after the Pratiharas declined in the tenth century; what remained was a mosaic of regional kingdoms — Chahamana, Gahadavala, Chandela, Chaulukya, Paramara, Sena and others — held together internally by samanta chiefs who owed conditional service and were frequently at war with one another. The Chahamana–Gahadavala hostility is the best-documented case, and it is why Prithviraj stood at Tarain without Kannauj beside him.

Between the decline of the Pratiharas in the tenth century and the Turkish conquest, north India was organised as a set of regional kingdoms under a samanta or feudatory system: land was assigned to subordinate chiefs in return for military service, so a king's army was an assembly of contingents rather than a standing force under one command. Contemporary Indian politics treated rival kings, not distant invaders, as the enemy that mattered, and a defeat could therefore end a kingdom without alarming its neighbours. The Ghurid campaigns of 1175–1206 exploited exactly this structure, and the sultanate that Qutb-ud-din Aibak founded at Delhi in 1206 was, in its early decades, essentially a military administration in which conquered territory was parcelled out as iqtas to Turkish commanders.

In an assertion–reason item the discipline is to ask three questions, and the third — does the Reason cause the Assertion? — is where most candidates go wrong in both directions. Having been trained to distrust plausible-sounding reasons, many mark (c) here out of caution. Resist that. The test is whether the Reason names a cause historians actually assign, and 'the absence of political unity in north India' is the first cause in every standard account of the Turkish conquest. A useful way to check the causal claim is the counterfactual: Tarain in 1191 shows what happened when the Indian side did put a coalition into the field — Ghori was defeated and wounded. When the coalition was not rebuilt in 1192, and when Kannauj stood aside, the whole of the Ganga plain fell kingdom by kingdom within twelve years. Remember also that disunity is the principal cause, not the only one; a good answer in the mains would add the Turks' cavalry-based military system, their unity of command, and the narrow social base of Indian recruitment.

• Mahmud of Ghazni raided north-western India repeatedly in the first quarter of the eleventh century and annexed the Punjab, but he did not attempt to rule the interior; permanent Turkish conquest began with Muhammad Ghori (Muizz-ud-din Muhammad bin Sam) from 1175.
• First battle of Tarain, 1191 — Prithviraj III Chauhan defeated Ghori; second battle of Tarain, 1192 — Ghori defeated and killed Prithviraj. Battle of Chandawar, 1194 — Ghori defeated Jayachandra of the Gahadavala kingdom of Kannauj, who had given Prithviraj no support.
• Bakhtiyar Khalji overran Bihar and then Bengal in the opening years of the thirteenth century, unseating the Sena ruler Lakshmana Sena at Nadia with a small force; the speed of that conquest is the clearest illustration of kingdoms falling one at a time.
• Muhammad Ghori was killed in 1206, and his slave-general Qutb-ud-din Aibak established an independent Turkish sultanate at Delhi in the same year, beginning the line of Delhi Sultans that ruled until 1526.
• Alongside disunity, historians cite the Turks' fast cavalry of mounted archers against Indian reliance on elephants and slow feudal levies, a single command against contingents under different chiefs, and caste-restricted military recruitment on the Indian side — contributing causes that a united defence could have offset, as Tarain in 1191 briefly showed.

• Marking (c) reflexively because 'both true but R does not explain A' is the commonest correct code in assertion–reason questions. Here the Reason is the standard causal explanation and (a) is right.
• Treating the invasion as a single event. Ghori lost in Gujarat in the 1170s and at Tarain in 1191 before winning in 1192 — early reverses do not make the Assertion false.
• Confusing Mahmud of Ghazni with Muhammad Ghori. Mahmud raided for plunder in the eleventh century and annexed only the Punjab; Ghori conquered in the late twelfth century and his successor founded the Delhi Sultanate in 1206.

UPPSC likes this period as assertion–reason or chronological ordering, and returns often to the causes of the Turkish success and to the character of early Sultanate administration; UPSC prefers a specific hook — how a particular sultan died, what a revenue office was called, which chronicler wrote what — so learn the causes for UPPSC and the details for UPSC.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In which battle did Muhammad Ghori defeat Jayachandra, the Gahadavala ruler of Kannauj?

  • (a)First battle of Tarain, 1191
  • (b)Second battle of Tarain, 1192
  • (c)Battle of Chandawar, 1194
  • (d)Battle of Kayadara, 1178

  Answer(c) Battle of Chandawar, 1194 — after defeating Prithviraj Chauhan at the second battle of Tarain in 1192, Ghori turned on Kannauj and defeated Jayachandra at Chandawar, near the Yamuna. Kayadara in the 1170s was Ghori's defeat at the hands of the Chaulukyas of Gujarat.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is most accurate about the political condition of north India on the eve of the Turkish conquest?

  • (a)A single paramount empire ruled from Kannauj over the whole Ganga plain
  • (b)Several regional kingdoms with samanta feudatories, frequently at war with one another
  • (c)A confederacy of Rajput states bound by a formal defensive treaty
  • (d)Republican assemblies had replaced monarchy across the northern plains

  Answer(b) Several regional kingdoms with samanta feudatories, frequently at war with one another — the Chahamanas, Gahadavalas, Chandelas, Chaulukyas, Paramaras and Senas among others, with no paramount power after the decline of the Pratiharas and no standing alliance against an external threat.