संगम युग

The question asks which pairs are wrongly matched, so the correct answer names the mismatches.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched, since Senguttuvan, celebrated in the Silappadikaram and associated with the Pattini cult, was a Chera.
• Pair 2 is wrongly matched, since Udiyanjeral, also known as Perunjottu Udiyan Cheralatan and remembered for feeding both armies at the Kurukshetra war in bardic tradition, was a Chera and not a Chola, and the very element Cheral in the name carries the dynastic label.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched, since Nedunjeliyan of Madurai, victor of Talaiyalanganam, was a Pandya. Only pair 2 is a mismatch, so (b) is correct. (a) and (c) wrongly treat the Chera identification of Senguttuvan as an error, and (d) wrongly rejects the Pandya identification of Nedunjeliyan.

Vattakirutal, also written vadakkiruttal meaning sitting facing north, was the Sangam era practice by which a king who had been defeated, dishonoured or bereaved of a close companion fasted to death seated facing north, a ritual self immolation by starvation that preserved honour. It is recorded of Chera and Pandya rulers in the Purananuru.

• Option (a) refers to a separate courtly practice noted in later sources but not to this term.
• Option (b) describes the scholarly assembly, associated with the Sangam academies themselves.
• Option (c) describes the tinai motif of girls guarding millet fields, a recurrent image in Sangam love poetry but a different practice altogether.

Hence (d).

• Option (b) is correct. The Sangam poets were aware of the varna scheme, which appears in references to brahmanas and their functions and to the ordering of society, even though the working social categories of the Tamil country were organised on a different basis, around the five tinais or ecological regions and the occupational groups associated with each. The point historians draw from this is that varna was known but not yet the dominant organising principle in the far south.
• Option (a) is wrong, since the poems are a principal source for material culture, describing crops, crafts, ports, trade with the Yavanas, ornaments, dwellings and food in considerable detail.
• Option (c) is wrong, and conspicuously so: the puram poetry is largely heroic verse celebrating war, cattle raids, valour and death in battle, with the hero stone commemorating the fallen warrior.
• Option (d) is wrong because magical and supernatural forces appear in the poems as accepted features of the world, and no rationalist critique of them is offered.

Hence (b).