Who among the following travellers reported the use of seed drill on the Karnataka coast which is considered to be the earliest reference of the presence of the device in India?

Correct — A, Duarte Barbosa. Barbosa served the Portuguese crown at Cannanore from about 1500, and the book he finished around 1516 works down the Malabar and Kanara shore port by port. Writing of tillage there he describes a plough whose share carries a hollow through which the seed drops into the furrow the share has just opened, and he separates that from a northern form in which the seed tube is fixed on to the share instead of being cut into it. Historians of Indian agricultural technology take this passage as the earliest datable notice of drill-sowing anywhere in India. The other three men on the list wrote about courts, cities and horses, and none of them stopped to describe a farm implement.

• (b)Abdur Razzaq — Abdur Razzaq arrived in 1442 as the envoy of Shah Rukh of Herat, landing at Calicut and going on to Vijayanagara. His Matla-us-Sadain is prized for the seven walls of the capital, its bazaars and the Mahanavami festival — court and city, not the plough.
• (c)Afanasy Nikitin — The Tver horse-dealer Nikitin was in India from 1469 to 1474 and his Voyage Beyond the Three Seas is the great Russian source for the Bahmani Deccan. He landed at Chaul and went inland to Junnar, Bidar and Gulbarga; horses, the sultan's army and Hindu pilgrimage fill his pages, and the Kanara coast is not his ground.
• (d)Niccolo Conti — Conti, a Venetian merchant, reached Vijayanagara about 1420 and left the first European description of that city, its ramparts and its festivals. Being the earliest of the four to arrive is exactly what makes him a tempting wrong answer, since the question asks who recorded the device, not who came first.

For everyday working life in India before the eighteenth century, foreign travellers are often the only witnesses we have, because Indian texts of the time rarely thought a field tool worth writing down. The seed drill is one such device: a frame or plough that carries seed down a tube and releases it into the furrow, so that the crop comes up in rows at an even depth. Sowing that way uses far less seed than scattering by hand and makes later weeding and hoeing possible, which is why so small a machine holds so large a place in agricultural history.

Read the stem twice. 'Earliest reference' is not 'earliest traveller', and three of the four names — Conti about 1420, Abdur Razzaq in 1442, Nikitin from 1469 — are older than Barbosa. The words that actually decide the answer are 'Karnataka coast'. Barbosa's book is built as a coastal itinerary of precisely that shore; Razzaq and Conti wrote about the inland capital at Vijayanagara, and Nikitin about the Bahmani towns of the plateau. Match the writer to the geography and the item collapses.

• Duarte Barbosa was a Portuguese official at Cannanore from about 1500; his book, finished around 1516, describes the Indian Ocean coasts port by port.
• His notice of seed carried in a hollow of the plough share and dropped into the furrow is treated as the earliest known Indian reference to drill-sowing.
• Abdur Razzaq came in 1442-43 as Shah Rukh's envoy to Calicut and Vijayanagara and wrote the Matla-us-Sadain.
• Afanasy Nikitin of Tver was in the Bahmani Deccan from 1469 to 1474; his account is the Voyage Beyond the Three Seas.
• Niccolo Conti, a Venetian, saw Vijayanagara about 1420, roughly a century before Barbosa wrote.

• Choosing the oldest traveller when the question asks for the oldest reference to a thing.
• Confusing Barbosa with Barbosa's contemporaries Tome Pires and Ludovico di Varthema, who also wrote on the west coast.
• Placing Nikitin on the west coast throughout; he landed there but wrote about the interior.

A traveller-to-detail matching item — the examiner supplies one distinctive observation and expects you to know whose account it sits in.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Matla-us-Sadain, which describes the city of Vijayanagara and its Mahanavami festival, was written by which traveller?

  • (a)Ibn Battuta
  • (b)Abdur Razzaq
  • (c)Marco Polo
  • (d)Duarte Barbosa

  Answer(b) Abdur Razzaq — sent by Shah Rukh of Herat, he reached Calicut in 1442 and went on to Vijayanagara.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Voyage Beyond the Three Seas, an account of the Bahmani Deccan in the 1470s, was written by a traveller from which country?

  • (a)Italy
  • (b)Portugal
  • (c)Russia
  • (d)Morocco

  Answer(c) Russia — Afanasy Nikitin was a horse-dealer from Tver who spent about five years in India.