BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 65 of 144

Correct — B, Surat. Surat earned the title because it was the port from which Indian Muslims sailed for the Hajj, and the epithet appears in the records as a working description of the city rather than as a poetic flourish. The Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, writing on Aurangzeb's reign, sets out both why the trade concentrated there and why the name mattered: 'The silting of the head of the Gulf of Cambay, the disturbed state of the north of Gujarat, and the destruction of Diu by the Muscat Arabs in 1670, combined to centre Gujarat trade in Surat. At the same time its consequence as the Gate of Mecca was increased by the strong religious feeling among Indian Musalmans fostered by the emperor.' The name was not merely rhetorical. Surat's city wall had a gate literally called the Mecca Gate and the tidal inlet beside it was the Mecca Creek; the merchants' quarters lay outside that gate; and when the Dutch bargained in 1694-95 for a monopoly of the European trade with Surat and exemption from customs, what they offered in return was to guarantee the security of 'the pilgrim traffic between Surat and Mecca'. Mughal control began when Akbar took the city in March 1573, after which imperial officers ran it until 1733; the same gazetteer records that in Akbar's time, around 1590, Surat is 'called an emporium, or first class port', important enough for Akbar to post two separate officers there — a kiladar who commanded the castle and the river, and a mutasaddi who administered the district and city and collected the customs revenue, and who was pointedly not subordinate to the provincial diwan at Ahmedabad. Pilgrim shipping, imperial customs and the Hajj embarkation together made Surat the Mughal empire's window on the Arabian Sea, and Bab-ul-Makka is the name that records it.

• (a)Calicut — Calicut was the Zamorin's port on the Malabar coast and the landing place of Vasco da Gama in 1498 — a great pepper emporium and the hinge of the early Portuguese trade, but never Mughal territory. Mughal authority never extended over Malabar, so no imperial pilgrim-port title from the Mughal period could attach to it. A candidate who reads the option list as 'name the most famous medieval Indian port' rather than reading the words 'during the Mughal period' will be drawn straight to it.
• (c)Cambay — The strongest distractor, because Cambay genuinely was Gujarat's leading port before Surat and is the more famous name in the earlier medieval sources, giving its name to the whole gulf. But it lost that place physically rather than politically: the gazetteer names 'the silting of the head of the Gulf of Cambay' as one of the very reasons Gujarat's trade shifted to Surat, along with disorder in northern Gujarat and the destruction of Diu by the Muscat Arabs in 1670. Cambay's decline is the precondition for Surat's rise, not a rival claim to the epithet.
• (d)Broach — Broach, the Bharuch of today, is described in the same gazetteer as 'one of the oldest ports in Western India' and appears in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea as Barygaza, with five trade routes converging on it — two by sea to Southern Arabia, Egypt and the Persian Gulf, and three by land to Sind, to Ujjain in Malwa and south to Paithan and Daulatabad. Its greatness is therefore classical rather than Mughal; by the seventeenth century it was a secondary port in Surat's shadow, and it was never the Hajj embarkation point.

Surat sits on the left bank of the Tapi a little above its mouth, and its rise is a story of imperial politics as much as geography. Akbar's conquest of Gujarat brought the city under Mughal rule in 1573, and the gazetteer divides the 160 years that followed into three phases: about eighty-five years to 1658, under Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, when 'Surat enjoyed peace and rose to be one of the first cities in India'; the forty-nine years of Aurangzeb's reign, when its prosperity was checked first by Maratha raids and then by the rise of English Bombay; and a final twenty-seven years of disorder in which the governors of Surat were subject to Delhi in little more than name. It was the customs house of the empire's western trade, the port where the English East India Company opened its first factory in 1613 with Jahangir's permission, where the Portuguese had a factory from 1611 and the Dutch a house of their own, and above all the port of embarkation for the Hajj — which is why the emperors invested in it and why attacks on its pilgrim ships caused diplomatic crises. Shivaji sacked it in 1664, taking booty the gazetteer values at not less than a million sterling in three days while the governor sheltered in the castle, and returned to levy contributions in 1670; his general Moro Pandit did the same in 1671, and Maratha raids recurred in 1674 and 1675. The outer wall begun in 1664 was the city's answer.

Three of the four options are Gujarat ports and one is not, so the first cut is geographical: Calicut lay outside the Mughal empire altogether, which rules it out of any question framed 'during the Mughal period'. That leaves Cambay, Broach and Surat, and the discriminator is chronology rather than fame. Broach peaked in the classical period as Barygaza of the Periplus; Cambay peaked in the sultanate period and was then strangled by the silting of the head of its own gulf; Surat peaked precisely under the Mughals and declined once Bombay took its trade. A useful habit for this whole family of questions is to ask what the epithet is actually claiming — 'Gate of Mecca' is a claim about pilgrim shipping, not about tonnage, customs revenue or wealth, and the Hajj traffic of the Mughal century sailed from Surat. Note also that the name is a description in use rather than an official designation, so it is properly a sobriquet the sources attach to the city, not a title conferred by any emperor, and your prose should not imply otherwise. Finally, the same set of four ports has now been put to candidates twice, by UPSC in 2001 and by BPSC in 2023, with only the order of the options changed — which is a useful reminder that the port map of medieval and Mughal India is a small, finite and highly repeatable syllabus item.

• Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency on Aurangzeb's reign: Surat's 'consequence as the Gate of Mecca was increased by the strong religious feeling among Indian Musalmans fostered by the emperor'
• Akbar took Surat in March 1573; Mughal officers administered it until 1733, and around 1590 it is described as 'an emporium, or first class port'
• Akbar posted two officers at Surat — a kiladar commanding the castle and the river, and a mutasaddi over the district, the city and the collection of customs, who was not subordinate to the diwan at Ahmedabad
• Surat's own city wall had a Mecca Gate and a Mecca Creek, and in 1694-95 the Dutch offered to guarantee the security of the pilgrim traffic between Surat and Mecca in return for a trade monopoly and freedom from customs
• Cambay lost primacy because of the silting of the head of the Gulf of Cambay, together with disorder in northern Gujarat and the destruction of Diu by the Muscat Arabs in 1670
• Broach, the Barygaza of the Periplus, had five trade routes converging on it in the classical period — by sea to Southern Arabia, Egypt and the Persian Gulf, by land to Sind, Ujjain and Paithan — but its peak was long past by Mughal times
• Shivaji sacked Surat in 1664, staying three days and taking booty valued at not less than a million sterling; he returned in 1670, his general Moro Pandit levied contributions in 1671, and the Marathas plundered the city again in 1674 and 1675
• European presence at Surat: a Portuguese factory from 1611, the English factory of 1613 under Jahangir, and a Dutch house — in 1630 two Portuguese officers went to Surat to discuss with the Mughals how to drive the other Europeans out of Surat, Broach and Cambay
• The gazetteer splits Mughal Surat into three phases: 1573-1658 under Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, when it 'rose to be one of the first cities in India'; 1658-1707 under Aurangzeb, checked by Maratha raids and the rise of Bombay; and 1707-1733, when its governors obeyed Delhi in name only

• Picking Cambay because it is the older and more famous Gujarat port. Its silting is exactly what transferred the trade to Surat
• Forgetting that Calicut was never under Mughal rule, which disqualifies it from a question framed 'during the Mughal period'
• Treating 'Gate of Mecca' as a formal imperial title. It is a descriptive name in the sources, tied to Hajj embarkation rather than to any grant

This is one of the clearest lifts on the paper — UPSC asked it word for word in 2001 with the same four ports in a different order, and BPSC reproduced it in 2023, which tells you that the pre-2010 UPSC prelims papers are live BPSC material and should be solved as such. UPSC has since moved on to asking about Surat structurally, as in its 2009 question on whose permission the English obtained for their first factory there, and to asking about maritime trade in analytical rather than name-recall form. BPSC still favours the single-fact epithet. Learning Surat as one package — Akbar 1573, English factory 1613 under Jahangir, Bab-ul-Makka and the Hajj traffic, Shivaji's sack of 1664, decline to Bombay — answers both styles from the same page of notes.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which Mughal emperor's conquest of Gujarat in 1573 brought the port of Surat under imperial administration?

  • (a)Humayun
  • (b)Akbar
  • (c)Jahangir
  • (d)Shah Jahan

  Answer(b) Akbar — Surat was taken in March 1573 and administered by officers appointed from Delhi until 1733; Akbar posted a kiladar over the castle and river and a mutasaddi over the city and its customs.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The decline of Cambay as Gujarat's principal port and the corresponding rise of Surat is attributed chiefly to

  • (a)The silting of the head of the Gulf of Cambay
  • (b)A prohibition on Hajj shipping imposed by Akbar
  • (c)The transfer of the Gujarat capital to Ahmedabad
  • (d)The closure of the Red Sea trade by the Ottomans

  Answer(a) The silting of the head of the Gulf of Cambay — named in the Bombay Presidency gazetteer, along with disorder in northern Gujarat and the destruction of Diu in 1670, as what centred Gujarat's trade on Surat.