MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 12 of 100

Correct — option (4), Devrai II. Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi was sent to south India as the envoy of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh of Herat, reached Calicut and travelled on to the Vijayanagara capital, arriving in 1443, when Deva Raya II of the Sangama dynasty was on the throne. His narrative, the Matla-us-Sadain wa Majma-ul-Bahrain, is one of the most valuable outside descriptions of the city at its height: he wrote of a capital enclosed by successive fortified walls with cultivated land and habitation between them, of bazaars in which jewels and pearls were sold openly, of an enormous royal establishment, and of a city the like of which, he said, the eye had never seen and the ear never heard of. Deva Raya II is the right anchor for the visit on internal grounds too. He is generally regarded as the ablest of the Sangama rulers, remembered by the title Gajabetekara, the elephant hunter, and for strengthening his army by recruiting Muslim horsemen and archers into it and encouraging the use of mounted archery — a policy that shows a court in regular contact with the wider Persianate world, which is the context in which an ambassador from Herat would be received. The question is one of the standard traveller-and-ruler pairings of medieval Indian history, and it is answered by holding four such pairs apart: Nicolo de Conti with Deva Raya I in about 1420, Abdur Razzaq with Deva Raya II in 1443, and Domingo Paes and Duarte Barbosa with Krishnadeva Raya in the early sixteenth century, with Fernao Nuniz a little after him.

• (1)Harihar — Harihara belongs to the very beginning of Vijayanagara's history: Harihara I and his brother Bukka founded the kingdom in 1336 and established the Sangama dynasty on the Tungabhadra. That is more than a century before Abdur Razzaq's embassy of 1443, and the city he would have seen was still being built rather than the vast fortified capital the Persian envoy described. Choosing this option generally reflects the habit of answering any Vijayanagara question with the founder's name because it is the one most securely remembered.
• (2)Krishnadevrai — Krishnadeva Raya of the Tuluva dynasty ruled from 1509 to 1529, some two generations after Abdur Razzaq's visit, and he is the ruler most students associate with foreign accounts of Vijayanagara — which is exactly the trap. But the visitors of his reign were Portuguese: Domingo Paes, whose description of the capital and of the Mahanavami festival is the most detailed we have, and Duarte Barbosa, with Fernao Nuniz writing a little later. Abdur Razzaq was a Persian envoy of the Timurid court who came seven decades earlier, and he never saw the Vijayanagara of Krishnadeva Raya.
• (3)Devrai I — Deva Raya I ruled in the first quarter of the fifteenth century and is a genuinely well-chosen distractor, because his reign also produced a famous foreign account — that of the Italian traveller Nicolo de Conti, who visited Vijayanagara in about 1420 and left an admiring description of the city and its festivals. The two reigns are close enough to be confused and each has its own visitor, so the pairing has to be held precisely: Nicolo de Conti with Deva Raya I, Abdur Razzaq with Deva Raya II.

Almost everything known about the appearance and economy of Vijayanagara city comes from foreign visitors, because the empire's own records are inscriptions and literary works rather than descriptive chronicles. Each visitor arrived from a different world and noticed different things: Nicolo de Conti the festivals, Abdur Razzaq the fortifications, the bazaars and the court ceremonial that an envoy would be shown, Domingo Paes the scale of the city and the Mahanavami celebrations, Fernao Nuniz the history and the military organisation. Read together they establish the capital as one of the largest cities in the world of its day, sustained by an irrigation system in the Tungabhadra valley and by a long-distance trade in horses, gems and textiles. This is also why the traveller-ruler pairing is such a durable examination topic: the accounts are the primary evidence, so knowing which account belongs to which reign is knowing which decade a piece of evidence describes.

MPSC follows the standard Indian-history convention of testing foreign travellers by the ruler they visited, and it builds the option list from rulers of the same dynasty or the same kingdom so that recognising the kingdom is not enough. The productive preparation is a single table of traveller, home country, ruler, approximate year and the title of the work left behind — Abdur Razzaq's Matla-us-Sadain, Ibn Battuta's Rihla under Muhammad bin Tughlaq, Marco Polo on the Pandya country, Nicolo de Conti, Paes and Nuniz on Vijayanagara, and Bernier, Tavernier and Manucci for the Mughal period. Once that table is secure, a whole family of questions across the medieval syllabus becomes single-step recall. Vijayanagara is examined through its administration and architecture as well as its visitors, so the travellers' accounts are worth reading for their content and not only for their dates: Abdur Razzaq's description of the successive fortified enclosures is the evidence normally cited for the capital's defensive plan, as Paes's account is for the Mahanavami festival.

• Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi was the envoy of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh of Herat and visited Vijayanagara in 1443, during the reign of Deva Raya II.
• His account, the Matla-us-Sadain wa Majma-ul-Bahrain, describes the capital's successive fortified walls, its bazaars where jewels were openly sold, and the scale of the royal establishment.
• Deva Raya II of the Sangama dynasty bore the title Gajabetekara and strengthened his forces by recruiting Muslim horsemen and archers.
• Nicolo de Conti, the Italian traveller, visited Vijayanagara in about 1420 during the reign of Deva Raya I.
• The Portuguese visitors Domingo Paes and Duarte Barbosa saw Vijayanagara during the reign of Krishnadeva Raya (1509–1529), with Fernao Nuniz writing shortly afterwards.

• Pairing every foreign account of Vijayanagara with Krishnadeva Raya, whose visitors were the Portuguese chroniclers rather than the Persian envoy
• Confusing Deva Raya I, visited by Nicolo de Conti in about 1420, with Deva Raya II, visited by Abdur Razzaq in 1443
• Answering Vijayanagara questions with the founder Harihara by reflex, ignoring the two centuries of history that follow him

The traveller-and-ruler pairing is one of the most reliably recurring formats in medieval Indian history, and MPSC sets it in both directions — naming the traveller and asking for the ruler, or naming the ruler and asking who visited his court. The commission raises the difficulty by filling the option list with rulers of the same dynasty whose names differ only by a regnal numeral, as here with Deva Raya I and Deva Raya II. Questions on the titles of the travellers' works and on their nationality appear as well, so the table worth memorising has five columns rather than two.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The account of Vijayanagara titled Matla-us-Sadain wa Majma-ul-Bahrain was written by which visitor ?

  • (a)Nicolo de Conti
  • (b)Abdur Razzaq
  • (c)Domingo Paes
  • (d)Fernao Nuniz

  Answer(b) Abdur Razzaq — the Persian envoy of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh of Herat, who visited Vijayanagara in 1443 during the reign of Deva Raya II and left this account of the city's fortifications, bazaars and court. Nicolo de Conti was the Italian visitor of about 1420, while Paes and Nuniz were Portuguese writers of the sixteenth century.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes, who left a detailed description of the Vijayanagara capital and of the Mahanavami festival, visited during the reign of which ruler ?

  • (a)Harihara I
  • (b)Deva Raya II
  • (c)Krishnadeva Raya
  • (d)Rama Raya

  Answer(c) Krishnadeva Raya — Paes visited during his reign in the early sixteenth century, as did Duarte Barbosa, while Fernao Nuniz wrote a little later. Deva Raya II's visitor was the Persian envoy Abdur Razzaq in 1443, and Rama Raya belongs to the Aravidu period that ended with the battle of Talikota in 1565.