MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 10 of 100

Correct — option (3), which reads (a)-(iii), (b)-(iv), (c)-(ii), (d)-(i). Statement (a), Gulbadan Begam, goes with item (iii), the Humayunnamah. She was a daughter of Babur and an aunt of Akbar, and when Akbar wanted the reign of his father set down he asked the surviving members of the household to write what they remembered; her account, the Ahwal-i Humayun Badshah, is the work universally known as the Humayun-nama and the only surviving history of the dynasty written by a Mughal woman. Statement (b), Salima Sultana, goes with item (iv), wrote poems in Persian. Salima Sultan Begum was a daughter of Gulrukh Begum and so a granddaughter of Babur; she was married first to Bairam Khan in December 1557 and, after his assassination, to Akbar in May 1561, and she is described as a gifted writer and a renowned poet of her time who wrote Persian verse under the pen name Makhfi. Statement (c), Jahanara Begam, goes with item (ii), highly educated and well read in Persian. The eldest daughter of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, she was taught by Sati al-Nisa Khanam, who was known for her command of the Quran and of Persian literature, and she wrote Persian prose of her own — the Munis al-Arwah, a life of the Chishti saint Muinuddin Chishti composed after her pilgrimage to Ajmer, and the Risalah-i Sahibiyah on her own Sufi initiation. She became Padshah Begum at seventeen on her mother's death in 1631. That leaves statement (d), Zeb-un-Nisa, with item (i), expert in calligraphy — and this is the pairing on which the question actually turns. The eldest child of Aurangzeb and Dilras Banu Begum, she memorised the Quran and became a hafiza at seven, studied under the Persian poet Ashraf Mazandarani, and had a good reputation in calligraphy as well as in verse. The trap is that she too wrote Persian poetry, under the same pen name Makhfi that Salima Sultan had used, so the poetry item fits either woman and cannot separate them; calligraphy is documented for Zeb-un-Nisa and it is the discriminator the item is built on. Note also that two of the four choices give the Humayunnamah to Gulbadan, so recognising that famous pairing alone leaves two choices standing and the calligraphy row has to decide.

• (1)(a) - (iii), (b) - (ii), (c) - (i), (d) - (iv) — This is the near-miss, and the choice most candidates will be left with. It gets Gulbadan and the Humayunnamah right, then shifts the remaining three items one place: Salima Sultana becomes the highly educated reader of Persian, Jahanara becomes the expert in calligraphy and Zeb-un-Nisa becomes the writer of Persian verse. Every row of that trio is individually plausible, which is the point. It fails on the calligraphy attribution, which belongs to Zeb-un-Nisa and is the only item in the column that separates the two poets of the set. Jahanara's documented accomplishment is her Persian learning and her Persian prose, and it is on that, rather than on the pen, that her name is attached in this question.
• (2)(a) - (ii), (b) - (i), (c) - (iv), (d) - (iii) — This choice moves the Humayunnamah away from Gulbadan Begam and gives it to Zeb-un-Nisa, which is impossible on chronology alone: Gulbadan was Babur's daughter writing about Humayun's reign at Akbar's request in the sixteenth century, and Zeb-un-Nisa was Aurangzeb's daughter, born in 1638 and dying in 1702, more than a century later. The Humayunnamah pairing is the single most secure fact in this question and the fastest filter over the option set, so any choice that displaces it can be struck without examining its other three rows. This choice also gives calligraphy to Salima Sultana and Persian verse to Jahanara, both of which are unsupported.
• (4)(a) - (iv), (b) - (iii), (c) - (i), (d) - (ii) — Here Gulbadan is credited with Persian poems, Salima Sultana with the Humayunnamah, Jahanara with calligraphy and Zeb-un-Nisa with being highly educated and well read in Persian. It fails at the same first hurdle as the previous choice by moving the Humayunnamah off Gulbadan, and it then compounds the error by giving it to Salima Sultan Begum, who is close enough in date to Gulbadan to make the misattribution feel possible — she was Babur's granddaughter and Akbar's wife. That closeness is exactly why the paper offers it. The last row is not false as a description of Zeb-un-Nisa, who was formidably educated, but it is the item the key assigns elsewhere, and a matching question is decided by the whole permutation and not by whether one row could be defended in isolation.

The women of the Mughal household were not merely subjects of court painting; several were writers, builders, traders and political actors, and the examinable content lies in knowing which of those things each of them was. Gulbadan Begam is the historian of the family, the only Mughal woman whose narrative history survives. Salima Sultan Begum belongs to the generation of Akbar's court, a woman of Timurid descent whose standing came from her lineage as well as her marriages, and who wrote verse. Jahanara Begum, in Shah Jahan's reign, combined enormous wealth with religious scholarship: she held the title Padshah Begum, financed the Jami Masjid at Agra out of her own funds in 1648, built the caravanserai at Chandni Chowk, endowed a madrasa, was initiated into the Qadiri Sufi order and wrote two Persian works about it. Zeb-un-Nisa, in Aurangzeb's, was a hafiza at seven, a poet whose collected verse as the Diwan-i-Makhfi runs to some five thousand lines and was compiled in 1724 after her death, and a prisoner in Salimgarh fort at Delhi for the last twenty years of her life.

Questions on Mughal royal women appear in state services papers because they sit at the junction of political history, cultural history and the social-history section that examiners like to reach for when they want something beyond the standard list of battles and emperors. The commission's method here is characteristic: choose four women who overlap in accomplishment, then use the one attribute that is documented for exactly one of them as the discriminator. Two of these four wrote Persian poetry, three were noted for their command of Persian, and all four were educated — so the item is not decided by any of those. It is decided by calligraphy. The lesson generalises across every matching question in this paper: identify which of the printed items is unique to one name and which are shared, and spend your recall on the unique one. Remember also that the two columns are printed side by side purely as page layout, and that a name and an item sharing a line propose nothing.

• Gulbadan Begam, a daughter of Babur, wrote the Ahwal-i Humayun Badshah, known as the Humayun-nama, at Akbar's request; it is the only surviving history of the dynasty written by a Mughal woman.
• Salima Sultan Begum was a daughter of Gulrukh Begum and a granddaughter of Babur; she married Bairam Khan in December 1557 and Akbar in May 1561, and wrote Persian verse under the pen name Makhfi.
• Jahanara Begum, eldest daughter of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, became Padshah Begum in 1631, was taught by Sati al-Nisa Khanam, and wrote the Munis al-Arwah and the Risalah-i Sahibiyah in Persian.
• Zeb-un-Nisa, 1638 to 1702, eldest child of Aurangzeb and Dilras Banu Begum, became a hafiza at seven, had a good reputation in calligraphy, wrote verse as Makhfi, and spent her last twenty years imprisoned at Salimgarh.
• Both Salima Sultan Begum and Zeb-un-Nisa used the pen name Makhfi, meaning the hidden one, so a Persian-poetry item cannot by itself separate them; the calligraphy attribution is what does.

• Using Persian poetry to identify a Mughal princess when two of the four women in this set wrote Persian verse and both used the same pen name, Makhfi
• Confusing Gulbadan Begam, who wrote the Humayun-nama, with Salima Sultan Begum, since both are of Babur's line and both belong to the sixteenth century
• Assuming that a description which fits a person must be the item assigned to them; a permutation question is decided as a whole, and a row that is defensible in isolation can still be in the wrong choice
• Confusing Zeb-un-Nisa, Aurangzeb's daughter and a poet imprisoned at Salimgarh, with Jahanara, Shah Jahan's daughter and the Padshah Begum who wrote Persian prose

MPSC and other commissions ask about Mughal royal women in three shapes: a match of woman to written work, a single-fact question about the author of a named chronicle, and a statement-verification item about titles and offices such as Padshah Begum. The Humayun-nama and Gulbadan Begam is the pairing that appears most often and should be automatic. Beyond it, prepare each woman with one uniquely identifying detail rather than a general description, because the examiner will deliberately choose descriptions that overlap: for Jahanara the Agra mosque of 1648 and the Munis al-Arwah, for Zeb-un-Nisa the Diwan-i-Makhfi and the imprisonment at Salimgarh, for Salima Sultan the two marriages that place her between Bairam Khan and Akbar.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Humayun-nama, the only surviving narrative history of the Mughal dynasty written by a woman of the imperial household, was composed at Akbar's request by which of the following ?

  • (a)Salima Sultan Begum
  • (b)Gulbadan Begam
  • (c)Jahanara Begum
  • (d)Maham Anaga

  Answer(b) Gulbadan Begam — a daughter of Babur and an aunt of Akbar, who set down what she remembered of Humayun's reign when Akbar asked the surviving members of the household for their recollections. The work is formally titled Ahwal-i Humayun Badshah, and no other Mughal woman left a comparable narrative history.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Persian works Munis al-Arwah and Risalah-i Sahibiyah, on the Chishti saint of Ajmer and on the author's own Sufi initiation, were written by which Mughal princess ?

  • (a)Zeb-un-Nisa
  • (b)Roshanara Begum
  • (c)Jahanara Begum
  • (d)Gauharara Begum

  Answer(c) Jahanara Begum — the eldest daughter of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, who wrote the Munis al-Arwah after her pilgrimage to Ajmer and the Risalah-i Sahibiyah about her initiation into the Qadiri order under Mullah Shah Badakhshi. Zeb-un-Nisa, the usual distractor here, belongs to the next reign and is remembered for verse and calligraphy rather than Sufi prose.