MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 8 of 100

Correct — option (1), 'Only (c)'. Note first what the stem is asking: the word 'wrong' is printed in bold, so the item wants the pairs that are INCORRECT, and every statement you can vouch for has to be left out of the answer rather than put into it. Taking the four printed pairs in turn: (a) Abdul Samad – Famous painter is a correct pair, because Khwaja Abdus Samad was a Persian master painter who came to India in Humayun's time and headed the imperial atelier under Akbar, where the vast illustrated Hamzanama was produced; he was honoured with the title Shirin Qalam, 'sweet pen', and later held administrative office as well. (b) Takhte Taus – Peacock throne is a correct pair, since taus is simply the Persian word for peacock: the Takht-i-Taus was the jewelled throne commissioned by Shah Jahan, and it was carried off by Nadir Shah after the sack of Delhi in 1739. (d) Bibi ka Makbara – Memorial of Dilras Bano is a correct pair: the mausoleum at Aurangabad, now Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, was raised in memory of Dilras Banu Begum, Aurangzeb's wife, who bore the title Rabia-ud-Daurani, and its resemblance to the Taj Mahal has earned it the name 'Taj of the Deccan'. That leaves (c) Prince Azam Shah – Bahamani ruler, and it is plainly wrong: Muhammad Azam Shah was a Mughal prince, the son of Aurangzeb, who briefly claimed the throne on his father's death in 1707 and was defeated by his brother at Jajau. He has nothing to do with the Bahmani sultanate, a fifteenth-century Deccan power founded by Alauddin Hasan Bahman Shah in 1347 with its capitals at Gulbarga and later Bidar. Only pair (c) is wrong, so option (1) is the answer. The question also contains its own cross-check: it was Azam Shah who built the Bibi ka Maqbara for his mother, so a candidate who is confident about (d) already knows that the man in (c) was a Mughal.

• (2)(a) and (d) — This option condemns two pairs that are both correct. Abdul Samad genuinely was a painter — one of the two Persian masters, with Mir Sayyid Ali, who founded the Mughal atelier under Humayun and Akbar — and the Bibi ka Maqbara genuinely is the memorial of Dilras Banu Begum. Choosing it usually means the candidate has read the stem as asking for the CORRECT pairs and then reversed the answer imperfectly, or has failed to notice the bold 'wrong' altogether; it also misses that the only false statement in the set, (c), is not even included here.
• (3)(b) and (d) — Takht-i-Taus is the Persian name of Shah Jahan's Peacock Throne — taus means peacock — and the Bibi ka Maqbara is Dilras Banu Begum's memorial, so both pairs in this option are correct and neither belongs in an answer to a 'wrong pairs' question. This option is aimed at a candidate who is unsure of the Persian word and suspects that a term that sounds unfamiliar must be the trap. It is worth remembering that MPSC often prints a transliterated Persian or Arabic term precisely to see whether the candidate knows its meaning rather than only its fame.
• (4)(c) and (d) — This is the most attractive wrong answer, because it correctly identifies (c) as a false pair and then adds one pair too many. Statement (d) is true: the Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad was built in memory of Dilras Banu Begum, titled Rabia-ud-Daurani. Anyone who picks this option has spotted the real error but has doubted the attribution of the tomb — perhaps because they associate the monument with Aurangzeb rather than with his wife, or with his son Azam Shah who commissioned it. In negative questions of this format, adding a true statement to the answer is as fatal as omitting the false one.

Three separate strands of medieval Indian history are being tested in one set of four lines, and the trap in each case is a category error rather than an unknown fact. Abdul Samad tests whether the candidate can place a name in the right profession — the Mughal atelier's founders were Persian painters recruited by Humayun during his exile. Takht-i-Taus tests whether a Persian term is understood rather than merely recognised. Prince Azam Shah tests whether Mughal princes and Deccan sultans are kept in separate compartments: the Bahmani sultanate of 1347–1527, with its capitals at Gulbarga and Bidar, precedes the Mughal presence in the Deccan by more than a century and belongs to a different dynastic world altogether, one whose fragments — Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golconda, Bidar, Berar — were what the Mughals eventually absorbed. Bibi ka Maqbara tests the ability to attach a monument to the person buried in it rather than to the emperor of the day.

'Identify the wrong pairs' is one of MPSC's standard formats and it fails candidates for procedural reasons more often than for factual ones, because the negation is carried by a single bolded word that is easy to skim past. The discipline that works is to judge each pair on its own as true or false first, writing a tick or a cross, and only then to read the options and pick the one that lists exactly the crosses. In this paper the format matters even more than usual: eleven questions carry a negative or exclusionary stem, and the negating word is printed in bold each time. A second habit worth building is to look for a pair in the set that quietly corroborates another — here (d) names the monument that the prince in (c) actually built. A further reason to work pair by pair here is that the four printed lines are drawn from four different chapters of the syllabus, so a candidate who is strong on Mughal painting but weak on Deccan dynastic history can still reach the answer by settling the pairs he is sure of and testing only what is left.

• Khwaja Abdus Samad was a Persian painter who came to India under Humayun and headed the imperial atelier under Akbar, where the illustrated Hamzanama was produced; he bore the title Shirin Qalam.
• Takht-i-Taus, the Peacock Throne, was commissioned by Shah Jahan; taus is Persian for peacock, and the throne was taken away by Nadir Shah after his sack of Delhi in 1739.
• Muhammad Azam Shah was a son of Aurangzeb and a Mughal prince, not a Bahmani ruler; he briefly claimed the throne after Aurangzeb's death in 1707 and was defeated at Jajau by his brother.
• The Bahmani sultanate was founded in 1347 by Alauddin Hasan Bahman Shah, with its capital first at Gulbarga and later at Bidar, and it broke up into the five Deccan sultanates in the early sixteenth century.
• The Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad, now Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, was built in memory of Dilras Banu Begum, styled Rabia-ud-Daurani, and is known as the Taj of the Deccan.

• Missing the bolded 'wrong' in the stem and answering with the pairs that are correct — the commonest way this format is failed
• Adding a true pair to an otherwise right answer, as option (4) does by including the Bibi ka Maqbara pair
• Placing a Mughal prince among the Deccan sultans; the Bahmani sultanate ended in the early sixteenth century, long before Azam Shah's time
• Attributing the Bibi ka Maqbara to Aurangzeb's own memory rather than to his wife Dilras Banu Begum

MPSC's 'identify the wrong pairs' items generally plant exactly one false pair among three true ones and then offer at least one option that identifies the false pair correctly but drags a true pair along with it — that near-miss option is where most marks are lost. The subject matter is usually mixed deliberately, so a single question can span Mughal painting, Persian vocabulary, Deccan dynastic history and monument attribution, none of which can be answered from the others. Working pair by pair before looking at the options, and treating the bolded negation as the first thing to read, is what makes this family of questions safe.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad, now Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, was built in memory of which person ?

  • (a)Mumtaz Mahal, the wife of Shah Jahan
  • (b)Dilras Banu Begum, the wife of Aurangzeb
  • (c)Jahanara Begum, the daughter of Shah Jahan
  • (d)Rabia Durrani, the mother of Shah Jahan

  Answer(b) Dilras Banu Begum, the wife of Aurangzeb — she bore the title Rabia-ud-Daurani, and the mausoleum built for her by her son Azam Shah is often called the Taj of the Deccan for its resemblance to the Taj Mahal, which was built for Mumtaz Mahal at Agra.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Bahmani sultanate, founded in 1347, had its capital first at which city before it was moved to Bidar ?

  • (a)Gulbarga
  • (b)Daulatabad
  • (c)Golconda
  • (d)Ahmadnagar

  Answer(a) Gulbarga — Alauddin Hasan Bahman Shah founded the Bahmani sultanate in 1347 with its capital at Gulbarga, and the capital was later shifted to Bidar. Golconda and Ahmadnagar became capitals of two of the successor sultanates into which the Bahmani kingdom broke up in the early sixteenth century.