BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 78 of 144

Correct — A, Ishwardas Nagar. The Futuhat-i-Alamgiri — 'the victories of Alamgir' — is a Persian chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign written by Ishwardas Nagar, a Nagar Brahmin of Gujarat who served in the Mughal administration and wrote as an eyewitness rather than as a court historiographer. The attribution is old and documented. Elliot and Dowson's The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, Volume VII, records at chapter LXXIV, on the authority of Bird's Gujarat, 'another work bearing this title written by Sri Das, a Nagar Brahman of Gujarát. "The author was a spectator of the occurrences he details, and was in the service of Shaikhu-l Islám, the son of ʿAbdu-l Wahháb Ahmadábádi. This work is very rare."' The personal name is rendered loosely in that Victorian notice — modern editions read it as Ishwardas, or Isardas — but the identification is unmistakable: a Nagar Brahmin of Gujarat, an eyewitness, in Mughal service. Why a private Hindu official ends up writing the history of Aurangzeb's reign at all is the part worth carrying away. The same volume records that when Mirza Muhammad Kazim's official Alamgirnama — a court chronicle of the first ten years of the reign — was presented to the Emperor in his thirty-second regnal year, 'the Emperor forbad its continuation', professing that 'the cultivation of inward piety was preferable to the ostentatious display of his achievements'. Elphinstone's verdict, quoted there, is the key sentence: from the eleventh year of the reign the course of events 'can only be traced through the means of letters on business and of notes taken clandestinely by private individuals'. Aurangzeb reigned for forty-nine years and officially chronicled ten of them. Everything after that gap survives because private men — Ishwardas Nagar, Bhimsen, Khafi Khan, and Saqi Mustaid Khan writing after the Emperor's death — wrote anyway. One caution the title itself demands: it is not unique. Elliot and Dowson's chapter LXXIV is in fact devoted to a different Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, by Muhammad Ma'sum son of Salih, a short work of fifty-five chapters covering only two or three years around the war of succession and also known as the Waqi'at-i-Alamgiri. That homonym does not disturb this question — Muhammad Ma'sum is not among the options — but it is a reminder that a Persian title identifies a book far less securely than an author does.

• (b)Bhimsen — Bhimsen wrote the Nuskha-i-Dilkusha, not the Futuhat-i-Alamgiri. He was a Kayastha in Mughal service in the Deccan, and his memoir is the best-known eyewitness account of Aurangzeb's Deccan wars written from below the level of the court. He is the sharpest distractor on the page precisely because he is the closest parallel to the right answer — a Hindu officer writing a private Persian chronicle of the same reign in the same decades. Nothing separates the two men except which title belongs to which, so learn them as a pair.
• (c)Haridas — No Persian chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign is attributed to anyone named Haridas. The best-remembered Haridas of Mughal-era India is Swami Haridas, the Vrindavan dhrupad musician and Vaishnava poet-saint whom tradition makes Tansen's teacher — a devotional and musical figure of the previous century, with no historical writing attached to his name. He is on the page because the name sits plausibly beside Ishwardas and rewards nothing but recognition.
• (d)None of them — This can only be right if all three named authors fail, and option (a) does not fail. On a paper that offers this escape hatch again and again it is worth being blunt about it: reaching for 'None of them' is almost always a sign that the candidate does not hold the title–author pair, not a sign that the pair is broken. Here the attribution to a Nagar Brahmin of Gujarat is on record in the bibliographical literature going back to the nineteenth century.

Mughal history is known largely through Persian chronicles, and those chronicles fall into two very different classes. The first is official: written at court, commissioned or sanctioned by the emperor, and shaped accordingly — Abul Fazl's Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari for Akbar, Abdul Hamid Lahori's Padshahnama for Shah Jahan, Mirza Muhammad Kazim's Alamgirnama for the first decade of Aurangzeb. Alongside these sit the imperial memoirs, Babur's Baburnama and Jahangir's Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri. The second class is private: written by officials, soldiers and clerks outside the court's patronage, often decades later, and valuable precisely because nobody was supervising them. Aurangzeb's reign is the point where the second class takes over from the first, because the Emperor stopped the official annals in his eleventh regnal year. The consequence is that for roughly four decades of the largest empire in Mughal history the record is made of private chronicles, personal letters — Aurangzeb's own Ruqaat-i-Alamgiri — and the accounts of European travellers such as Bernier, Tavernier and Manucci. Historians read that reign, unavoidably, through witnesses rather than through the state.

The question is a single title-to-author pairing, so the reasoning is really about which pairs you carry. Two Hindu officers wrote private Persian chronicles of Aurangzeb's reign, and each is the trap for the other: Ishwardas Nagar wrote the Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, Bhimsen wrote the Nuskha-i-Dilkusha. Memorise them together and the question resolves instantly; memorise only the fact that 'a Hindu officer wrote a chronicle of Aurangzeb', and you will be split fifty-fifty on exactly this stem. A second reading aid is the title genre. 'Futuhat' means victories or conquests, and it is a recurring formula in Indo-Persian titles — Firoz Shah Tughlaq's own Futuhat-i-Firozshahi, Isami's Futuh-us-Salatin. A title in that family tells you the book is a narrative of campaigns; it does not, on its own, tell you who wrote it, which is exactly the trouble illustrated by the existence of a second Futuhat-i-Alamgiri by Muhammad Ma'sum. The wider point, and the one worth taking into the mains answer as much as into prelims, is that this question is a fragment of a real historiographical problem. Aurangzeb's ban on official history-writing did not stop history; it changed who wrote it, from salaried court historiographers to men writing on their own account, at their own risk, from a provincial or a campaign vantage point. That is why the private chronicles of his reign read very differently from the Akbarnama, and why modern scholarship leans on them so heavily.

• Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, 'the victories of Alamgir', is a Persian chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign by Ishwardas Nagar, a Nagar Brahmin of Gujarat in Mughal service who wrote as an eyewitness and not as a court historiographer
• Elliot and Dowson, The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, Vol. VII, ch. LXXIV, citing Bird's Gujarat: 'another work bearing this title written by Sri Das, a Nagar Brahman of Gujarát. The author was a spectator of the occurrences he details, and was in the service of Shaikhu-l Islám, the son of ʿAbdu-l Wahháb Ahmadábádi. This work is very rare.'
• The same volume's chapter LXXIV is about a homonymous Futuhat-i-Alamgiri by Muhammad Ma'sum, son of Salih — fifty-five chapters covering only two or three years around the war of succession, also known as Waqi'at-i-Alamgiri
• Mirza Muhammad Kazim's official Alamgirnama covered the first ten years of Aurangzeb's reign and was presented in the thirty-second regnal year, whereupon 'the Emperor forbad its continuation', professing that 'the cultivation of inward piety was preferable to the ostentatious display of his achievements'
• Elphinstone, quoted in the same notice: from the eleventh year of the reign the course of events 'can only be traced through the means of letters on business and of notes taken clandestinely by private individuals'
• The private chronicles that fill the gap: Ishwardas Nagar's Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, Bhimsen's Nuskha-i-Dilkusha on the Deccan campaigns, Khafi Khan's Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, and Saqi Mustaid Khan's Maasir-i-Alamgiri, compiled after Aurangzeb's death in 1707

• Swapping Ishwardas Nagar and Bhimsen — Futuhat-i-Alamgiri is Ishwardas's, Nuskha-i-Dilkusha is Bhimsen's
• Assuming a Persian chronicle of a Mughal reign must have been written by a Muslim court historian; several of the best sources for Aurangzeb are by Hindu officials writing privately
• Treating a Persian title as unique to one book — there is a second Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, by Muhammad Ma'sum

BPSC asks this flat: a title, four names, and a 'None of them' escape hatch, with nothing in the stem to reason from — so the pairs must be held cold, and that fourth option is offered so routinely on this paper that treating it as a live candidate costs marks. UPSC almost never asks 'who wrote X'. It asks who a named person was — 'In Indian history, who was Abdul Hamid Lahori?' in 2006 — or quotes a chronicler's verdict and asks whom he was writing about, as with Badauni's line on Muhammad bin Tughlaq in 1999. Learn the author-title pairs for BPSC, and learn each chronicler's reign, patron and vantage point for UPSC.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Nuskha-i-Dilkusha, an eyewitness account of Aurangzeb's Deccan campaigns, was written by

  • (a)Ishwardas Nagar
  • (b)Bhimsen
  • (c)Khafi Khan
  • (d)Saqi Mustaid Khan

  Answer(b) Bhimsen — a Kayastha in Mughal service in the Deccan; Ishwardas Nagar wrote the Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, Khafi Khan the Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, and Saqi Mustaid Khan the Maasir-i-Alamgiri.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which official chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign did the Emperor himself order to be discontinued?

  • (a)Padshahnama
  • (b)Alamgirnama
  • (c)Maasir-i-Alamgiri
  • (d)Muntakhab-ul-Lubab

  Answer(b) Alamgirnama — Muhammad Kazim's court history covering the first ten years of the reign; Aurangzeb forbade its continuation, which is why no official annals exist for the reign after its eleventh year.