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History Optional PYQ Master Pack · Model answer

What were ‘Brahmdeya’ grants? How do you account for the large number of such grants in the early medieval period?

  • UPSC 2022
  • Early Medieval India, 750-1200

A brahmadeya was a specific and narrow category of land grant — land, whether individual plots or an entire village, given away tax-free to a Brahmana or a group of Brahmanas, converting them from mere ritual specialists into landowners and land-controllers in their own right. Their sheer proliferation across the early medieval centuries was never…

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What the full answer covers

  • Defining the Institution
  • Accounting for the Proliferation: Political Legitimation
  • Accounting for the Proliferation: Opening Forest and Tribal Tracts
  • Accounting for the Proliferation: Competitive Prestige Among Dynasties
  • Accounting for the Proliferation: The Puranic and Dharmashastric Ideology of Dana
  • Resistance the Legitimating Ideology Could Not Fully Suppress
  • …and 1 more sections, with a conclusion

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