CDS (I) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 77 of 120

Correct — C, Ghulam Husain. The Siyar-ul-Mutakherin — the Review of Modern Times — is a Persian history of eighteenth-century India written by Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, a well-connected Muslim nobleman of Bihar and Bengal who knew the actors he wrote about. It carries the narrative from the later Mughals through the wars of the Bengal succession, the intrigue at Murshidabad, the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the establishment of Company power, and it was completed in the 1780s. An English translation appeared from Calcutta in 1790, and the book became one of the most-used indigenous sources for the period precisely because it is written from inside the Indo-Persian political world rather than from a Company factory. Of the other three names, two belong to the political history of the age rather than to its literature, and the fourth belongs to a different century altogether.

• (a)Salabat Jung — A Nizam of Hyderabad in the 1750s, installed with French help and later displaced by his brother Nizam Ali Khan. He is a subject of eighteenth-century history, not a historian of it.
• (b)Qasim Khan — A name that echoes Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Bengal whom the Company installed after Plassey and who was defeated at Buxar in 1764. Again a participant in the events, not their chronicler.
• (d)Ram Mohan Roy — The Bengal reformer, born in 1772 and active in the early nineteenth century. He wrote in Persian, Bengali and English and campaigned against sati, but he was not born when Plassey was fought.

Persian remained the language of administration and of serious historical writing in India well into the nineteenth century, and the fall of the Mughal order produced a rich crop of Persian chronicles. The Siyar-ul-Mutakherin is the best known of them for the Bengal transition. Written by a man related to the Nawabi families and familiar with Company officials, it is neither a court panegyric nor a colonial account, which gives it unusual value.

The item is a straight author-to-work recall, and the sensible strategy is elimination by role. Salabat Jung and Qasim Khan are rulers; Ram Mohan Roy is a nineteenth-century reformer. That leaves the one name that is not a political figure. It also helps to read the title: siyar means lives or biographies and mutakherin means the moderns or the later ones, so the book announces itself as an account of recent men and affairs. A caution worth carrying into the exam hall — the same author is sometimes listed as Ghulam Husain Khan or Ghulam Hussain Tabatabai, and he should not be confused with Ghulam Husain Salim, who wrote the Riyaz-us-Salatin on Bengal.

• The Siyar-ul-Mutakherin was written in Persian by Sayyid Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai and completed in the 1780s.
• An English translation, Seir Mutaqherin or Review of Modern Times, was published from Calcutta in 1790.
• It covers the later Mughal period and the Bengal transition, including the Battle of Plassey of 1757.
• Its value lies in being an insider's Indo-Persian account rather than a Company record.
• Ram Mohan Roy was born in 1772, fifteen years after Plassey, which rules him out at once.

• Confusing Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai with Ghulam Husain Salim, author of the Riyaz-us-Salatin.
• Picking a ruler's name because it is familiar from the same events.
• Dating Ram Mohan Roy to the eighteenth-century political crisis; he was born in 1772.

As an author-to-work item, or through matching lists of medieval and early-modern chronicles with their authors.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Siyar-ul-Mutakherin was written in which language?

  • (a)Bengali
  • (b)Persian
  • (c)Arabic
  • (d)Urdu

  Answer(b) Persian — the language of administration and of serious historical writing in India through the eighteenth century.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Battle of Plassey was fought in which year?

  • (a)1757
  • (b)1761
  • (c)1764
  • (d)1765

  Answer(a) 1757 — Buxar followed in 1764 and the grant of the Diwani of Bengal in 1765.