Practice: Prominent Personalities

(d) Chetavani ra Chungatya, in Dingal. Composed in Raag Sorath. He was Chief Counsellor to the Maharana of Mewar and patriarch of the Souda Barhath family.

Why not the others: A Charan used the traditional bardic idiom — whose ancient function is to praise and admonish rulers — to address a Maharana about attending a colonial durbar. The institution was turned on the paramount power using its own oldest function.

(a) Was Kesari Singh's son and died in jail in 1918. 24 May 1893 to 24 May 1918 — born and died on the same day of the year, twenty-five years apart. He was imprisoned over the 1912 bomb thrown at Lord Hardinge's procession.

Why not the others: (b) and (d) both describe Zorawar Singh Barhath, Kesari Singh's brother, who lived under the pseudonym Amardas Vairagi.

(b) Gokul Bhai Bhatt. A member of the Constituent Assembly of India representing Bombay State, and briefly Chief Minister of princely Sirohi.

Why not the others: His Constituent Assembly seat is worth a second look: he sat for Bombay State while leading in Sirohi — the state the integration chapter shows was partitioned between Bombay and Rajasthan.

(c) 30 March 1949, by Sawai Man Singh II. Hiralal Shastri, under the title then used of Prime Minister.

Why not the others: 30 March 1949 is also the day the United State of Rajasthan was inaugurated, and Man Singh II — Ruler of Jaipur and first Rajpramukh — administered the oath. Three facts from three chapters, one morning.

(d) Zorawar Singh Barhath. Kesari Singh's brother, who spent his later life in the dress of a saint and raised funds for the independence movement.

Why not the others: (c) Vijay Singh Pathik is the other assumed name in this unit — born Bhoop Singh Gurjar, renamed after the 1915 Lahore conspiracy case. Two revolutionaries, two aliases.

(a) The same men were revolutionaries and founders of constitutional bodies. Arjun Lal Sethi and Kesari Singh Barhath co-founded the Rajasthan Seva Sangh in 1919 with Vijay Singh Pathik.

Why not the others: Rajasthan did not pass from a revolutionary phase to a constitutional one; it had people who did both, which makes the standard phase model unusable here.

(b) Govind Guru. Alongside the Bhagat panth, among the Bhils.

Why not the others: (a) Tejawat led the Eki movement in the 1920s. The two tribal leaders are routinely swapped, forty years and one generation apart.

(c) The architect of Kumbhalgarh and author of the Rajvallabh. He and Jaita served as shilpacharyas at Chittor.

Why not the others: (a) is Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, (b) Lal Chand Ustad, (d) Karan Chand. Four builders, four projects, three centuries — and this is the set most often merged.

(d) The younger brother of Rai Singh of Bikaner. 1549-1600, son of Kalyanmal. Dursa Adha called the work the fifth Veda and the nineteenth Purana.

Why not the others: (a) is Suryamall Misran, author of the Vansh Bhaskar. Rai Singh built Junagarh, 1589-94 — the fort and the poem come from the same household.

(a) Vijay Singh Pathik, with Arjun Lal Sethi and Kesari Singh Barhath. At Wardha, with headquarters moved to Ajmer in 1920.

Why not the others: (c) founded the Marudhar Hitkarini Sabha in 1918 — a different body, a year earlier, in a different state.

(b) Bhogilal Pandya (1904-1981). Vagad is the Dungarpur and Banswara country in the state's south.

Why not the others: (a) Gokul Bhai Bhatt is the Gandhi of Rajasthan, and that is the intended confusion — two men, two Gandhis, one state. Hold them apart by scale: Bhatt is the state, Pandya is the region.

(c) the Padma Bhushan, in 1976, for social work. He had been elected President of the Seva Sangh in 1938 and founded the Dungarpur Rajya Praja Mandal.

Why not the others: (d) borrows 1938, which is the Seva Sangh presidency, not an award. Keep the two 1930s-40s dates attached to what they belong to — an office and an award are different kinds of fact.

(d) 19 June 1947, at Rastapal in Dungarpur, on the orders of District Magistrate Jaweri Lal Chabeesa and D.S.P. Baboolal Shrivastav.

Why not the others: (a) is the date Kali Bai died — she was shot on the 19th and died on the night of the 20th, so both dates are correct for different questions. (b) circulates in some question banks and no source consulted supports it.

(a) the night of 20 June 1947. She cut with a sickle the rope by which her teacher was being dragged behind a truck, and was shot for it.

Why not the others: (b) is the date of the incident itself. This pair is set precisely so that you must read whether the question asks about the incident or about her death — the two are one day apart and both are examinable.

(b) — that is the official department's role attribution. Widely circulated accounts instead call Nanabhai Khant the teacher, and this page follows the official source while recording that the two differ.

Why not the others: (d) is wrong on the facts: Nwal Bai, Mogi Bai, Lali Bai, Homli Bai and Sohn Lal were also injured. Where an official record and popular accounts disagree on a detail, note the disagreement rather than picking silently — an option may be written from either.

(c). A search across every spelling variant returns nothing on Rastapal, Kali Bai, Nanabhai Khant, any firing or any martyr — while the same volume details Maharawal Lakshman Singh's honours.

Why not the others: (b) is the trap worth understanding: silence is not denial. An official record can be accurate in all it says and still omit what a reader most needs. That is a reason to read gazetteers for what they are, not to distrust them — and it is why this chapter's account rests on the Art and Culture Department instead.

(d) Panna Dhai in Mewar — and the parallel is exact. Both women substituted their own son for the heir: Panna Dhai in Mewar for Udai Singh, Gaura Dhai in Marwar for Ajit Singh.

Why not the others: The two are a matched pair, one for each of the great houses, and an examiner who sets one is very likely testing whether you can place the other. Gaura Dhai (4 June 1646 to 1704) was of a Mali family of Jodhpur, daughter of Ratnoji Tak and Roopa.

(a). She handed the prince to Mukund Das Khinchi — and it was he who was disguised as a snake charmer, which is what makes (c) work as an option.

Why not the others: The crisis is the one from the Durgadas story: Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur died at Jamrud in 1678, his queen gave birth to Ajit Singh on the journey home, and Aurangzeb summoned the family to Delhi. She is remembered in Dhusan, the state song of Jodhpur; a six-pillared chhatri was built for her at Jodhpur in 1711; and a baori there is named Roopa Dhai Gaura Dhai. A Mali woman has a chhatri, a stepwell and a state song to her name — the memorial architecture of Rajasthan was not raised only for rulers and merchants.

(b) The Meera of Wagad. Maharawal Shiv Singh of Dungarpur had the Balmukund Mandir built for her in 1829 — a ruler building a temple for a living woman poet is the fact to carry.

Why not the others: (a) The Gandhi of Wagad is Bhogilal Pandya, earlier in this chapter and in the same region. The Vagad country produced its own Meera and its own Gandhi, and named both by comparison with someone else — which is itself worth a remark in an interview.

(c). Titled Veer Shiromani, born 13 August 1638 at Salwa, son of Askaran, minister of Jaswant Singh. He fought Aurangzeb until the emperor's death in 1707, formed the Rathore-Sisodia alliance, later fell out with Maharaja Ajit Singh, left for Mewar, and died at Ujjain on 22 November 1718.

Why not the others: (c) is the row people assume must be wrong, and it is the one that is right. The man who spent thirty years fighting Aurangzeb personally arranged the Islamic education of a Mughal prince's children while they were in his care. Loyalty to a ward and enmity to an empire were not, for him, the same axis — a far better illustration of swami-dharma in practice than any adjective. The adage: Oh mother, give birth to a son like Durgadas.

(d) Kaviraj Shyamal Das, born 1836 at Dhokaliya, Bhilwara, court poet to Maharana Shambhu Singh and Maharana Sajjan Singh, who wrote it on Shambhu Singh's instruction.

Why not the others: (a) Dayaldas (born 1798, Kudiya, Bikaner) wrote the Bikaner Ri Rathodari Khyat, to Sardar Singh's enthronement in 1851. (b) Dursa Adha, a contemporary of Akbar, wrote Viruddh Chhahattari. (c) Bavji Chatursingh (born 1879, Karjali) wrote for the common folk from a hut at Sukher. And note the pair of titles Shyamal Das holds — Kesar-e-Hind from the British and Kaviraja from the Maharana, for the same book. A court history acceptable to both the paramount power and the state is a document with two audiences, and reading the Veer Vinod as a commissioned court history of the 1870s is the point of knowing who wrote it.

(a) R is the evidence for A. The same men appear in both lists.

(a) R explains A exactly, and it joins the language chapter to this one.

(a) R is the date in question. Man Singh II became first Rajpramukh and swore in Hiralal Shastri the same day.

(d) R is true and A false. Amardas Vairagi was his brother Zorawar Singh.

(a) A is the father, B the son, C the brother — three generations of one Charan family, and D a fellow revolutionary who also co-founded a constitutional body with A.

(a) Four titles from four different chapters, which is why a personalities page works as an index.

(a) Three centuries and four chapters in one question — which is what this topic is actually testing.

(a) 7 April 1949 to 5 January 1951. 7 April 1949 is also the day Articles VI(1) and VI(2) of the Covenant of the United State of Rajasthan required the administrations to be made over to the new Rajpramukh. A ministry cannot administer a state whose administration has not yet been transferred to it.

Why not the others: (b) borrows 30 March 1949, which is the inauguration of Greater Rajasthan and the day Sawai Man Singh II entered office as Rajpramukh under Article III(5) and III(8) — the ceremony, not the transfer. (c) Both the Assembly's record and the India Post commemorative brochure close the term on 5 January 1951, well before the first elections. (d) 18 April 1948 is the inauguration of the United State of Rajasthan and Manikya Lal Verma's ministry.

(b). Under Article III(5) and III(8) of the Covenant, the Ruler of Jaipur became the first President of the Council of Rulers, and the President of that Council is the Rajpramukh. He entered office on 30 March 1949.

Why not the others: (a) is 7 April 1949, under Article VI(1) and VI(2). (c) the Matsya merger is 15 May 1949. (d) the ministry closed on 5 January 1951. A state can be proclaimed a week before it can be governed, and the eight days between the ceremony and the transfer are the whole of the difficulty here.

(c). The Rajpramukh of the former Rajasthan State, and each of Bikaner, Jaipur, Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, made over the administration on 7 April 1949.

Why not the others: (a) Jaipur supplied the Rajpramukh, which is a different fact from the transfer clause. (b) Bhupal Singh of Udaipur was Maharajpramukh and the Maharao of Kota Up-Rajpramukh — offices, again, not transfers. (d) the Matsya Union came in on 15 May 1949.

(d) Maharajpramukh — the senior title, and not the working office.

Why not the others: (a) the Rajpramukh was Sawai Man Singh II of Jaipur, under Article III(5) and III(8). (b) the Maharao of Kota was Up-Rajpramukh. (c) is a trap of a special kind: the President of the Council of Rulers is the Rajpramukh, the same office under its other name, and therefore Man Singh II again. The assumption that the senior house of Mewar must have held the senior working office is the error this set is built on.

(a). His seat at that table is the Matsya merger of 15 May 1949 showing up as a place in the cabinet. The Assembly's list names, alongside Shastri: Bhure Lal Baya, Raghuvar Dayal, Phool Chand Bafana, Narsingha Kachhavaha, Siddha Raj Dhaddha, Vedpal Tyagi, Prem Narayan Mathur, Rao Raja Hanuvant Singh and Shobha Ram.

Why not the others: (b) is Gokul Bhai Bhatt. (d) describes C. S. Venkatachar, B. N. Jha and Hari Sharma, who were brought into the cabinet between 6 January and 25 April 1951, after Shastri's resignation.

(b) Banasthali Vidyapith, founded by Hiralal Shastri, who also reorganised the Jaipur Rajya Praja Mandal in 1937 and headed the government of Jaipur State in 1948.

Why not the others: (a) the Vidyarthi Bhawan was established at Jhunjhunu by Sardar Harlal Singh. (c) the Vardhaman Pathshala was Arjun Lal Sethi's school, where Durgaprasad Chaudhary took his first education. (d) the Charkha Sangh was founded at Jaipur in 1927 by Jamnalal Bajaj. Four institutions, four founders, and every one of them is in this chapter.

(c) On 24 November 1899 at Jobner, in Jaipur district. He died on 28 December 1974, and India Post issued a stamp for him on 24 November 1976, his birth anniversary.

Why not the others: (a) Banasthali is where he founded Jeevan Kutir in 1929, not where he was born. (b) is Jamnalal Bajaj, born at Kashi ka Bas near Sikar on 4 November 1889. (d) borrows the 28 December of his death.

(d). He was released under the August 1939 agreement that recognised the Mandal, and India Post issued a stamp for him on 4 November 1970.

Why not the others: (a) he died at Wardha on 11 February 1942, five years before independence, and Hiralal Shastri, president from 1940, carried the Mandal afterwards. A question that asks who headed the Jaipur Praja Mandal is asking which year you are standing in. (b) the 1937 reorganisation is Shastri's. (c) Wardha is where Bajaj died, and where the Rajasthan Seva Sangh was founded in 1919: the place is real, the pairing is not.

(a). The Rajasthan Legislative Assembly's list of ministries places him in Manikya Lal Verma's cabinet in the United State of Rajasthan, inaugurated 18 April 1948, and again in Tika Ram Paliwal's cabinet of 1952. The man who taught Bhil children to read was a minister of the state twice before Rajasthan had held an election, which is a stronger sentence in an answer than the Padma Bhushan of 1976.

Why not the others: (d) is the version that follows from remembering him only as the Gandhi of Vagad, and it is the reason this fact is worth carrying. (b) the Shastri cabinet is a separate list of nine names, beginning with Bhure Lal Baya.

(b) Burnt alive on 3 April 1946 and died on 4 April 1946. Born at Jaisalmer on 3 November 1900, he took part in the Non-Cooperation Movement from 1921, wrote Jaisalmer Rajya ka Gunda Shasan against the state's administration, and compiled Azadi ke Deewane.

Why not the others: (a) and (c) are the same-day version, and it is what circulates. This is a two-date death of exactly the kind Kali Bai's is: the violence and the death fall on different days, and an option offering 3 April or 4 April 1946 can be correct depending on which of the two it asks about. (d) Amarchand Banthia of Bikaner is the man hanged by the British, in the 1857 struggle.

(c) 25 May 1941, after which he was tortured in jail.

Why not the others: (a) 24 May 1941 is the date the board's account gives for the treason charge, and the two circulate interchangeably; keep the arrest and the charge apart. (b) 1921 is when he entered the Non-Cooperation Movement. (d) 3 April 1946 is the burning.

(d). Nehru's sentence, "Shri Sagarmal Gopa was burnt alive on 3rd April", is reproduced in the brochure issued in the India's Struggle for Freedom series.

Why not the others: (c) is what usually circulates, and a month is not a date. A postage stamp is an odd place to find the best-attested date on a page, and India Post's commemorative brochures are researched documents, not decoration, which is why (a) understates them. (b) Azadi ke Deewane is a compilation Gopa himself made.

(a). He also procured weapons for Mewar. His method was not only the treasury; it was the dismantling of the enemy's.

Why not the others: (b) is the standard reduction of him to a single donation, and the official account will not support it. (d) confuses the man with the building. Two of this chapter's own writers decided how he would be remembered: Colonel James Tod called him Mewar's saviour, and Kaviraj Shyamal Das wrote of him with the same regard — the second on a Maharana's instruction.

(b). The larger sum is the one brought back from the Malwa campaign in that tradition.

Why not the others: The two figures differ by a factor of ten and neither is derived from the other, so (a) and (c) each throw away a source with as good a claim as the one kept. (d) is worse than either: an average is a number no source gives. What is not in dispute is what happened to his name — a generous donor in Rajasthan is still called a "Bhamashah", and that is the better answer to almost any question about him.

(c) 1708. The struggle is therefore thirty years, 1678 to 1708.

Why not the others: (a) is the endpoint everyone reaches for, and it is a different fact. Aurangzeb died in 1707; Ajit Singh got his throne in 1708. Fix the two endpoints separately, because they are two events — a question about the length of the struggle is asking about the second. (b) 22 November 1718 is Durgadas's own death, after he had left Jodhpur for Mewar. (d) 13 August 1638 is his birth.

(d) Ujjain, on the bank of the Sipra — the river the Rajasthani accounts call the Kshipra.

Why not the others: (a) is the assumption that a Marwar hero must lie in Marwar; he left Jodhpur for Mewar after his differences with Maharaja Ajit Singh, and he died outside both. (b) Jamrud is where Maharaja Jaswant Singh died in 1678. (c) Salwa Kallan is the birthplace given in the brochure for the India Post stamp of 26 August 1988, his 350th birth anniversary.

(a). A Charan poet at a Rajput court, writing against the paramount power in the ruler's own hearing, is what Kesari Singh Barhath was doing three generations later. The bardic institution did not turn against the British in 1903; Chetavani ra Chungatya is the late, famous instance of a habit, not the invention of one.

Why not the others: (b) is Suryamall Misran (1815-1868), of the Vansh Bhaskar. (c) is Kaviraj Shyamal Das, court poet to Shambhu Singh and Sajjan Singh. (d) is Dursa Adha.

(b) The Nagari Pracharini Sabha, in 1938.

Why not the others: (a), with the Rajasthan Puratan Granthmala, is the route by which Munhata Nainsi's Khyat and his Marwar ra Pargana ri Vigat reached print in the twentieth century. (c) published Nathuram Khadgawat's Rajasthan's Role in the Struggle of 1857. (d) published Vishveshwar Nath Reu's Glories of Marwar and the Glorious Rathors in 1943. Knowing that a khyat reached print in the 1930s from a research institute is worth as much as knowing who wrote it, because that is the edition an examiner's own source is working from.

(c) Vishveshwar Nath Reu. The second title was published by the Archaeological Department, Jodhpur.

Why not the others: (a) Jagdish Singh Gehlot wrote Rajputane ka Itihas and The History of Rajputana. (b) Dasharath Sharma wrote Early Chauhan Dynasties. (d) Nathuram Khadgawat wrote Rajasthan's Role in the Struggle of 1857. RPSC sets this group as author-and-book pairs, which is the form to learn it in.

(d). The Budget 2026-27, presented on 11 February 2026, announced saint panoramas and a Rs 30 crore heritage walkway programme, under the head that has previously funded panoramas to figures from Rajasthan's freedom movement and religious tradition. Commemoration is exactly where a personalities chapter goes wrong if it is not careful.

Why not the others: (a) state sponsorship is not evidential weight; a memorial is built to honour, not to establish a date. (c) gives up too easily. Where two accounts differ, both can be recorded and the basis of each named — which is what is done with Bhamashah's two figures, and with the founding year of the Dungarpur Rajya Praja Mandal, 1944 in circulated accounts and 1945 in the state gazetteer.

(a). The four titles have not been named in any published report, so what was removed cannot be stated.

Why not the others: (b) a book cannot be withdrawn from the session in which it is introduced; 2020-21 is when these entered. This bears on a personalities chapter for one reason: school texts are where most of these biographies are first met.

(a) R is exactly why A holds. 30 March is the inauguration and the Rajpramukh's entry into office; 7 April is the transfer of administration and the start of the ministry. A state can be proclaimed a week before it can be governed, and that eight-day gap is the difference between a covenant signed and a covenant executed.

(a) A sixteenth-century finance minister became a common noun — while the two figures for his gift, Rs 2.5 lakh in gold coins and Rs 25 lakh with 20,000 ashrafis, still stand side by side.

(a) Both are two-date deaths, and in both the state's violence and the death fall on different days. The discipline that separates 19 June from 20 June 1947 is the one that separates 3 April from 4 April 1946.

(a) Reu also wrote Glories of Marwar and the Glorious Rathors, published by the Archaeological Department, Jodhpur, in 1943; Khadgawat's book was published by the Rajasthan State Archives. Author, title and publishing body are three separate facts, and RPSC uses all three.

(d) Four dates in fourteen months, and only one of them is the one everybody quotes. The close on 5 January 1951 is the least disputed of the four: both the Assembly's record and the India Post brochure give it. Shobha Ram, Chief Minister of the Matsya Union from March 1948, is the merger of 15 May 1949 appearing as a seat in the Shastri cabinet.