In which one of the following works has Amir Khusrau praised the climate of India, its languages, notably Sanskrit, its arts and music and even its animals?

Correct — D, Nuh Sipihr. The Nuh Sipihr, the Nine Skies, is the masnavi Amir Khusrau completed in 1318 for Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah Khalji, and it is built in nine chapters each called a sipihr, a sky. The third sky is the famous one, and it is exactly what the stem describes: an argument that India is the finest country on earth. Khusrau praises its climate, which he says is temperate the year round where other lands are extreme; its learning, and Sanskrit above all, which he ranks as a language of science and philosophy rather than a mere vernacular; its music, which he claims no other people can match; and he runs down through its flowers, its fruits, its birds and its animals. He also does something no earlier writer had done — he names the regional languages of India one after another, Sindhi, Lahori, Kashmiri, Bengali, Awadhi, Gujar, Telingi, Ma'bari and the Dehlavi of his own city. That inventory is why historians go to this poem rather than to any of the other three. Khusrau wrote for seven sultans across half a century, so the other options are all real works of his; none of them is the one that argues India's case.

• (a)Ijaz-i Khusrawi — The Miracles of Khusrau — five volumes of ornate prose, a working model of letter-writing and rhetorical composition for secretaries. It is a stylebook, not a description of the country.
• (b)Dewal Rani Khizr Khani — A romantic masnavi of about 1315 on the love of Khizr Khan, a son of Alauddin Khalji, and Deval Rani, the Vaghela princess of Gujarat. A story of two people, not a portrait of India.
• (c)Khazainul Futuh — The Treasures of Victories, a prose account of Alauddin Khalji's reign — his buildings, his market controls and his campaigns in the Deccan. It records what a sultan did, not what India is like.

Amir Khusrau, who lived from about 1253 to 1325, was the outstanding Persian poet of the Delhi Sultanate and a disciple of the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya. He served a run of sultans from the Balban period through the Khaljis to the early Tughluqs, and wrote in almost every available form — five masnavis modelled on Nizami, historical narratives of campaigns, prose collections and a large body of lyric verse. He is also the writer through whom historians reach the ordinary texture of Sultanate India, because he wrote about Indian languages, Indian music and Indian seasons at a time when Persian writing in India mostly recorded courts and wars.

Four titles by one author is a hard question format, and guessing from the sound of the names does not work here: Nuh Sipihr means Nine Skies and gives no clue about India. What works is sorting the four by genre. One is prose rhetoric, one is a love story, one is a reign chronicle, and only one is a general poem about the country — so a candidate who knows what kind of book each is can arrive at the answer without ever having read a line of it. The Khusrau tradition of praising India should also be read with its context in mind. It is written for a Delhi court by a poet who is arguing, in Persian and for a Persianate audience, that his own country need not defer to Iran or to Arabia. That is a claim being made, not a neutral survey, and the enthusiasm for Sanskrit sits alongside a great deal of conventional court panegyric.

• The Nuh Sipihr was completed in 1318 under Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah Khalji and is arranged in nine chapters, each called a sipihr or sky.
• Its third sipihr carries the praise of India — climate, learning, Sanskrit, music, flora and fauna.
• It contains one of the earliest listings of India's regional languages by name, including Sindhi, Lahori, Kashmiri, Bengali, Awadhi, Gujar, Telingi and Ma'bari.
• Khaza'in-ul-Futuh, also called Tarikh-i-Alai, is Khusrau's prose record of Alauddin Khalji's reign.
• Dewal Rani Khizr Khan, of about 1315, is a masnavi on the marriage of Khizr Khan and the Vaghela princess Deval Rani of Gujarat.
• Khusrau was a disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya and is buried in the same dargah complex in Delhi.

• Choosing Khazainul Futuh because it sounds grand — it is a reign chronicle, not a description of the country.
• Treating Khusrau's praise of India as a neutral survey; it is an argument made at a Persianate court.
• Confusing Dewal Rani Khizr Khani, a love-masnavi, with the historical narratives.

As a work-to-content item like this one, as a match-the-pairs between Khusrau's titles and their subjects, or as a source question — which text tells us about Alauddin's price controls.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Amir Khusrau's Khaza'in-ul-Futuh is a source mainly for the reign of which ruler?

  • (a)Iltutmish
  • (b)Balban
  • (c)Alauddin Khalji
  • (d)Firoz Shah Tughluq

  Answer(c) Alauddin Khalji — the work records his buildings, his campaigns and his market regulations.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Amir Khusrau was a disciple of which Sufi saint?

  • (a)Moinuddin Chishti
  • (b)Nizamuddin Auliya
  • (c)Bahauddin Zakariya
  • (d)Salim Chishti

  Answer(b) Nizamuddin Auliya — Khusrau is buried in the same dargah complex in Delhi.