Class 7 Social Science Chapter 4: New Beginnings: Cities and States NCERT Solutions

Concept used. The quotation is from the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft written by Kautilya, chief minister to the first Maurya emperor, Chandragupta Maurya. It lists the qualities Kautilya believed a kingdom's land must have. Reading it closely means picking out each separate recommendation and asking what purpose it served then, and whether a country still needs the same thing today.

1. "Protected by fortifying the capital and the towns at the frontiers." Kautilya wants strong defence: walls and forts around the capital and the border towns, so enemies cannot walk in easily. Fig. 4.1 shows exactly this kind of fortified capital at Rajagriha. Today, this idea survives as border security, armed forces, and guarded frontier posts.
2. "The land should sustain the population but also outsiders in times of calamities." The kingdom must grow enough food not only for its own people but also for refugees during a famine, flood or war. Today this matches disaster relief planning, foodgrain reserves and emergency shelters for displaced people.
3. "Cultivable land, mines, timber forests, elephant forests, and good pastures rich in cattle." Kautilya wants a variety of natural resources: farmland, minerals, wood, war elephants and grazing land for cattle. Today, a country still wants a mixed resource base, mines and forests are still strategic assets, though elephants have been replaced by tanks and machinery.
4. "It should not depend only on rain for water. It should have good roads and waterways." This calls for irrigation beyond just rainfall, and transport infrastructure. Today this matches dams, canals, highways, railways and ports, which every modern government still invests in.
5. "A productive economy with a wide variety of commodities." The kingdom should produce and trade many different goods, not depend on just one product. This is the ancient version of what economists today call a diversified economy, so that a shock to one sector does not collapse the whole system.

Kautilya's Arthashastra recommends a fortified capital and frontier towns, land that can support both citizens and refugees in a crisis, a variety of natural resources, irrigation and transport beyond rainfall, and a diversified, trade-friendly economy. Most of these ideas, defence, disaster preparedness, resource management, infrastructure and economic diversification, are still central to how countries are run today, only the specific technologies (tanks instead of elephants, canals and dams instead of simple waterways) have changed.

Concept used. A janapada was a clan-territory headed by a raja or ruler. Each janapada also had an assembly or council, called sabha or samiti, where clan matters were discussed; these two words first appear in the Vedas, India's most ancient texts. The chapter describes two different patterns for how a ruler came to power, depending on the type of mahajanapada.

1. The general, hereditary pattern. In most mahajanapadas (Magadha, Kosala, Avanti and others), the position of raja was hereditary: a raja's son would usually succeed him. The raja was not supposed to rule alone or arbitrarily; he was expected to take advice from the sabha or samiti of elders, as well as from ministers and administrators. According to some texts, an incompetent ruler could even be removed by the assembly, though this was not a fixed, established law.
2. The gana-sangha exception. At least two mahajanapadas, Vajji (or Vrijji) and neighbouring Malla, worked differently. Here, the sabha or samiti held more power and took major decisions through discussion, and, if necessary, through a vote. Surprisingly, this included the selection of the raja himself. Because the assembly chose the ruler, these states were not monarchies; scholars call this system an early republic.
3. Why the evidence must be read carefully. The chapter reminds us that the surviving textual evidence for this remote period is incomplete, so we should treat "an assembly could remove a ruler" as a significant possibility recorded in some texts, not as proof of a universal, codified law.

In most mahajanapadas, the raja's position was hereditary, passed from father to son, though he was expected to rule with the advice of the sabha or samiti. In Vajji and Malla, however, the sabha/samiti itself chose the raja through discussion and vote, making these two mahajanapadas early, assembly-based republics rather than monarchies.

Concept used. Historians reconstruct a period with no living witnesses by combining different types of historical sources. The chapter names two main kinds used for the mahajanapadas: archaeological evidence (physical remains dug up from the ground, including coins) and literary evidence (ancient texts that describe the period). Using more than one type lets a historian cross-check one source against another.

1. Archaeological excavations of cities. Digging at sites such as Rajagriha and Kaushambi has confirmed that fortified, moated cities really existed where the texts say the mahajanapadas' capitals stood. This tells a historian about city planning, fortification techniques and the physical scale of these early urban centres.
2. Numismatic (coin) evidence. Punch-marked coins, made first of silver and later of copper and gold, survive from many ancient cities of north India.

   

   Studying the symbols punched onto these coins tells a historian which mahajanapada issued them, and the fact that coins from neighbouring regions circulated together shows that trade crossed political boundaries.
3. Literary evidence. Late Vedic, Buddhist and Jain literature is full of references to the new urban centres, and gives the more frequently repeated list of sixteen mahajanapadas. Such texts contribute names, political events and social details that stone and coins alone cannot supply.
4. Regional excavation evidence beyond the Ganga plains. Southern sites such as Kodumanal, near Erode in Tamil Nadu, have yielded shell and gemstone industries that show craft production and long-distance trade in the far south, a period and region the northern mahajanapada texts barely mention.

   

5. Cross-checking one source against another. A historian would compare what the ancient Tamil literature says about southern kingdoms with what excavations at sites like Kodumanal physically confirm, the same method used to confirm that the mahajanapadas the late Vedic, Buddhist and Jain texts describe genuinely existed as excavated cities.

A historian studying the mahajanapadas would combine archaeological excavations of cities (fortifications, layout), numismatic evidence (punch-marked coins showing trade and individual issuing states), literary evidence (Vedic, Buddhist and Jain texts naming rulers and states) and regional excavations such as Kodumanal (craft and trade in the south), cross-checking each source type against the others to build a reliable, well-rounded picture.

Concept used. Iron metallurgy is the technology of extracting iron from ore and shaping it into tools and weapons. Urbanism (city life) needs a food surplus large enough to support people who are not farmers, such as traders, craftspeople, soldiers and administrators. Connecting these two ideas explains why a change in metal technology could trigger a change in how people lived together.

1. Better farming tools meant more food. Iron ploughshares, sickles and axes are harder and hold a sharper edge than bronze ones. By the late 2nd millennium BCE, iron tools had become widespread, letting farmers clear forest for new fields and till heavier soils, which raised the amount of food each farmer could grow.
2. More food meant a surplus, and a surplus meant specialists. Once farmers grew more grain than their own families needed, that extra food could feed people who did not farm at all: metalworkers (Fig. 4.5 shows exactly such workers at a smithy), traders, potters, weavers, priests, soldiers and rulers. A city is, at its core, a place full of such non-farming specialists.
3. Iron weapons changed the scale of political power. Iron swords, spears, arrows and shields were lighter and sharper than bronze equivalents. Stronger armies could conquer and hold larger territories, which is part of how smaller janapadas combined into much bigger mahajanapadas by the 8th-7th centuries BCE.
4. Iron tools built the cities themselves. Quarrying stone and shaping timber for city walls, gateways and moats, such as the fortifications seen at Rajagriha, needed durable iron tools; without them, building and maintaining large fortified capitals at scale would have been far slower.
5. Extending the idea with reasoning of my own. Iron tools likely also allowed farmers to dig wells and irrigation channels through harder ground, so that fields no longer had to sit right next to a river to get water reliably. This would have let settlements grow at more places across the Ganga plains, not only along the riverbanks, spreading the new urban and agricultural pattern faster.

Iron metallurgy mattered because sharper, stronger iron tools raised farm output, and that food surplus could feed the traders, craftspeople, soldiers and rulers who do not grow their own food but who make up a city. Iron weapons also strengthened armies, helping janapadas combine into larger mahajanapadas, while iron tools made possible the quarrying, building and irrigation work that large fortified capitals required.