BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 94 of 150

Correct — B, 3 1 4 2. Pairing by pairing. (a) Babar — 3, Kamran. Kamran Mirza, born about 1509 at Kabul to Babur and Gulrukh Begum, ruled Kabul and Kandahar from 1531 to 1553 and spent those years fighting his brother Humayun for the Mughal inheritance; he died at Makkah in October 1557. (b) Akbar — 1, Salim. Salim, born in 1569 at Fatehpur Sikri, was Akbar's eldest surviving son and took the regnal name Jahangir when he succeeded in 1605. (c) Shah Jahan — 4, Murad. Mirza Muhammad Murad Bakhsh, youngest son of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, was born on 8 October 1624 at Rohtasgarh Fort in what is now Rohtas district of Bihar, governed Multan, Balkh and Kashmir, and was executed at Gwalior Fort on 14 December 1661. (d) Jahangir — 2, Khusrau. Khusrau Mirza, born at Lahore on 16 August 1587 to Jahangir and Shah Begum, was his father's eldest son and first heir-apparent; he rebelled in April 1606, was defeated, blinded and imprisoned until 1619, and died at Burhanpur on 26 January 1622. That gives a-3, b-1, c-4, d-2 — the code 3 1 4 2, which is option B, and it is the pairing the Commission itself confirmed when it disposed of objections to this paper. One name in List II is deliberately ambiguous and you should know why the code still comes out single-valued. Akbar also had a son called Murad — Sultan Murad Mirza, born at Fatehpur Sikri on 15 June 1570 and dead by 12 May 1599 — so 'Murad' on its own does not identify a father. What removes the ambiguity is that the other three sons each attach to exactly one man on the list: Kamran only to Babur, Salim only to Akbar, Khusrau only to Jahangir. Once Salim is fixed to Akbar, Murad has nowhere to go but Shah Jahan, and the mapping is complete. It is worth noticing how much the four fathers span: Babur reached India in 1526 and Jahangir died in 1627, so a single four-row list covers the first century of Mughal rule and four consecutive generations. That is also why no father in List I can be paired with a son from a different row's generation without an obvious impossibility appearing — Kamran was dead in 1557, thirty-five years before Shah Jahan was born, and Murad Bakhsh was not born until 1624, nineteen years after Akbar died.

• (a)4 1 3 2 — Keeps Akbar-Salim and Jahangir-Khusrau but exchanges the other two, giving Murad to Babar and Kamran to Shah Jahan. Babur's sons were Humayun, Kamran, Askari and Hindal — no Murad among them — and Kamran died at Makkah in 1557, thirty-five years before Shah Jahan was born. Note also that 3 1 4 2 is not the only code recycled in this paper: 4 1 3 2 is the key two questions earlier, at Q92, so a candidate who pattern-matches the winning code walks straight into this option.
• (c)3 1 2 4 — The sharpest trap. It gets Babar-Kamran and Akbar-Salim right and then swaps the last two, handing Khusrau to Shah Jahan and Murad to Jahangir. Khusrau was not Shah Jahan's son but his elder brother — both were sons of Jahangir — and the association is planted by real history: Khusrau died at Burhanpur in 1622 while in the Deccan with Khurram, and historians generally hold he was killed on that brother's orders. Jahangir's sons were Khusrau, Parviz, Khurram and Shahryar; none was a Murad.
• (d)4 2 3 1 — Wrong in all four places, and it defeats itself in the last one: pairing Jahangir with Salim makes a man his own father, because Salim is the birth name of the prince who reigned as Jahangir. Its Akbar-Khusrau pairing is the one with a genuine hook — Akbar doted on his grandson Khusrau, who addressed him as 'Shahi Baba', royal father, and his own father Salim as 'Shahi Bhai', royal elder brother — but a grandson is not a son, and Khusrau's father was Jahangir.

The Mughals had no law of primogeniture. Every succession was settled by arms among the reigning emperor's sons, which is why a father-to-son list is really a list of civil wars. Babur's four sons — Humayun, Kamran, Askari and Hindal — fell out immediately: Kamran held Kabul and Kandahar from 1531 to 1553 and used them against Humayun through the years of exile after Sher Shah drove the Mughals out of India. Akbar's three surviving sons were Salim, Murad and Daniyal, and Salim rebelled against his father before outliving both brothers to reign as Jahangir. Jahangir's own eldest, Khusrau, raised the standard against him in April 1606, was beaten, blinded and shut up for thirteen years, and died in the Deccan in 1622; the son who displaced him, Khurram, became Shah Jahan. Shah Jahan's four — Dara Shikoh, Shah Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh — fought the greatest of these wars in 1657-1659, with Aurangzeb the survivor and Murad Bakhsh executed at Gwalior in 1661. Two features of this dynasty make it examinable as a matching set. First, names recur across generations, so Murad belongs to two different fathers a half-century apart. Second, every prince has a regnal name distinct from his birth name — Salim becomes Jahangir, Khurram becomes Shah Jahan — so the same person can appear in one column as a son and in the other as a father.

Treat this as a bijection, not as four separate recollections, and start from the unambiguous entries. Kamran attaches to Babur alone — he is a first-generation Mughal prince, dead in 1557, and no later emperor on the list was even alive then. Salim attaches to Akbar alone. Khusrau attaches to Jahangir alone. Three of the four are therefore forced, and Murad, the one name that could honestly belong to two fathers here, falls to the only father left. That is the whole solution, and it needs no date arithmetic. The single fact that discriminates hardest is that Salim and Jahangir are the same man. Hold that and two things follow at once: Akbar must take 1, and any code that pairs Jahangir with Salim is self-refuting — which alone eliminates option D. Then use the generation gap as a second filter: Kamran is three generations above Shah Jahan, so any code giving Kamran to Shah Jahan is dead, and that removes options A and D together. What survives is a choice between B and C, and it turns purely on whether Khusrau was Shah Jahan's son or his brother. He was his brother. One last warning about this particular paper: the code 4 1 3 2 is the key at Q92 and a distractor here, so nothing can be inferred from having seen a string of digits win two questions ago. The reason all of this is worth drilling is that List II gives bare first names — no Mirza, no title, no dates — so nothing can be read off the page. A student who stores the Mughals only by regnal name has to translate twice before he can even begin: Salim into Jahangir, and Khurram into Shah Jahan.

• Kamran Mirza — born about 1509 at Kabul to Babur and Gulrukh Begum, Mughal ruler of Kabul and Kandahar from 1531 to 1553, and Humayun's chief rival through the years of exile after Sher Shah Suri drove the Mughals out of India; he died at Makkah in October 1557, in Ottoman territory, having been sent there after his defeat.
• Salim, born in 1569 at Fatehpur Sikri, was Akbar's eldest surviving son and reigned from 1605 as Jahangir; his own third son Khurram succeeded in turn as Shah Jahan. Because the birth name and the regnal name belong to one man, no code that makes Jahangir the father of Salim can be right — it would make an emperor his own father.
• Akbar's second surviving son was also named Murad — Sultan Murad Mirza, born at Fatehpur Sikri on 15 June 1570, dead on 12 May 1599 and buried at Humayun's Tomb — which is why the bare name 'Murad' in List II identifies no father until the other three pairings are fixed.
• Murad Bakhsh, formally Mirza Muhammad Murad Bakhsh, was the youngest son of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, born on 8 October 1624 at Rohtasgarh Fort in present-day Rohtas district of Bihar; he was Subadar of Multan, Balkh and Kashmir in turn and was executed at Gwalior Fort on 14 December 1661.
• Khusrau Mirza — born at Lahore on 16 August 1587 to Jahangir and Shah Begum, daughter of Raja Bhagwant Das of Amber; heir-apparent, he rebelled in April 1606, was blinded and held prisoner until 1619, died at Burhanpur on 26 January 1622, and is buried in the Khusro Bagh at Prayagraj.

• Treating 'Murad' as uniquely identifying — Akbar's son Sultan Murad Mirza (1570-1599) and Shah Jahan's son Murad Bakhsh (1624-1661) are two different princes, and only the one-to-one rule separates them
• Pairing Khusrau with Shah Jahan because his death at Burhanpur in 1622 is bound up with Khurram — Khusrau was Shah Jahan's elder brother, and both were sons of Jahangir
• Forgetting that Salim and Jahangir are one man, which makes the Jahangir-Salim pairing in option D a logical impossibility rather than merely a factual error

BPSC asks Mughal genealogy as a bare four-by-four grid with a numeric code, no negative wording and no statements to weigh, and builds the difficulty entirely into one repeated name and two near-miss codes — a candidate who knows three pairings and guesses the fourth scores the same as one who knows none, since there is no partial credit and a wrong answer costs a third of a mark. UPSC has not set a naked father-to-son list in decades; it embeds the same genealogy inside a battle, an assertion-reason pair or a campaign, asking who fought at Dharmat or which prince Shah Jahan sent to Balkh and Qandahar, so the relationship must be known together with what the prince actually did.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following was NOT a son of Shah Jahan ?

  • (a)Dara Shikoh
  • (b)Shah Shuja
  • (c)Daniyal
  • (d)Murad Bakhsh

  Answer(c) Daniyal — Daniyal was a son of Akbar, alongside Salim and Murad Mirza; Shah Jahan's four sons were Dara Shikoh, Shah Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Khusrau Mirza, who rebelled in 1606 and is buried at Khusro Bagh in Prayagraj, was the eldest son of

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

  Answer(b) Jahangir — Khusrau was born at Lahore in 1587 to Jahangir and Shah Begum, rebelled against his father in April 1606, was blinded and imprisoned, and died at Burhanpur in 1622; Akbar was his grandfather and Shah Jahan his younger brother.