CDS (II) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 72 of 120

Correct — B, Muhammad bin Tughluq. Ibn Battuta reached Delhi around 1334, and the Sultan appointed the Moroccan traveller qazi of the capital, a post he held for several years. In 1341 an embassy arrived from the Yuan court of China asking permission to rebuild a Buddhist temple in the Himalayan foothills, and Muhammad bin Tughluq chose Ibn Battuta to lead the return mission. The embassy was a disaster. Bandits attacked the party on the way to the coast and Ibn Battuta was robbed, seized and nearly killed; at Calicut one of his ships went down in a storm and the other sailed without him and was later taken by a king in Sumatra. Rather than face the Sultan after losing the mission and its gifts, he never went back to Delhi. He wrote it all up in the Rihla, which is the fullest outside account of Muhammad bin Tughluq's reign.

• (a)Alauddin Khilji — Alauddin Khilji died in 1316, roughly two decades before Ibn Battuta arrived in India. His reign belongs to market control and the Mongol campaigns, not to embassies to China.
• (c)Iltutmish — Iltutmish ruled from 1211 to 1236, a century too early. He is the sultan of the Iqta system, the silver tanka and the recognition from the Caliph.
• (d)Firoz Shah Tughluq — Firoz Shah Tughluq succeeded Muhammad bin Tughluq in 1351. Ibn Battuta had already left India by then, so the embassy cannot be his.

Ibn Battuta, born at Tangier in Morocco in 1304, spent nearly thirty years travelling across Africa, West Asia, India, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, South-East Asia and China. His account, the Rihla, was dictated after his return and is one of the great travel texts of the medieval world. For Indian history it is indispensable, since it describes Delhi and Daulatabad, the postal system with its horse post and foot post, the courts and the markets, and the character of Muhammad bin Tughluq himself, whom he served and feared in equal measure.

Traveller items are answered by pinning each visitor to a ruler and a reign. Al-Biruni goes with Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century, Ibn Battuta with Muhammad bin Tughluq in the fourteenth, Abdur Razzaq with Vijayanagara under Deva Raya II in the fifteenth, and Bernier, Tavernier and Manucci with the later Mughals in the seventeenth. Muhammad bin Tughluq is the ruler most associated with foreign contacts of this kind, and his reign is also when the Chinese embassy and the return mission fall. The Chinese connection is a memorable hook, since the Yuan dynasty request concerned a Buddhist temple destroyed in the Himalayan borderland.

• Ibn Battuta was born at Tangier in 1304 and reached Delhi around 1334, where Muhammad bin Tughluq made him qazi.
• In 1341 the Sultan sent him as envoy to the Yuan court of China, in reply to a Chinese embassy about rebuilding a Himalayan Buddhist temple.
• The mission collapsed after a bandit attack, a shipwreck at Calicut and the loss of the second vessel; he never returned to Delhi to report.
• His account of the journeys is the Rihla, the fullest foreign description of Muhammad bin Tughluq's reign.
• He describes the medieval Indian postal system as of two kinds, the horse post called uluq and the foot post called dawa.

• Placing Ibn Battuta with Alauddin Khilji because both are strongly associated with the Sultanate's high point.
• Assuming the China embassy succeeded. It never reached the Yuan court, and Ibn Battuta avoided returning to Delhi.
• Confusing the token currency, which was in copper and bronze, with the gold dinar Ibn Battuta describes.

As a traveller-to-ruler match, or as an assertion-reason item on Muhammad bin Tughluq's coinage and his foreign contacts.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The travel account of Ibn Battuta is known by which name?

  • (a)Kitab-ul-Hind
  • (b)Rihla
  • (c)Storia do Mogor
  • (d)Travels in the Mogul Empire

  Answer(b) Rihla — Kitab-ul-Hind is al-Biruni's, Storia do Mogor is Manucci's and Travels in the Mogul Empire is Bernier's.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Ibn Battuta describes the medieval Indian postal system as being of two kinds. The foot post was called

  • (a)uluq
  • (b)dawa
  • (c)iqta
  • (d)diwan

  Answer(b) dawa — the horse post was the uluq; iqta and diwan are administrative terms, not postal ones.