NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 125 of 150

Correct — C, Nawab of Awadh. In 1799 Saadat Ali Khan II, the Nawab of Awadh, sent the illustrated manuscript of the Padshahnama to King George III of Great Britain. It has remained in Britain ever since and is preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, where it is one of the most celebrated surviving examples of Mughal court painting. Note the two separate roles the question is testing: the man who wrote the chronicle and the ruler who gave a copy of it away more than a century later are different people, and the option list deliberately puts both kinds of candidate side by side.

• (a)Abul Fazl — Abu'l Fazl was Akbar's courtier and biographer, the author of the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari, and he was murdered in 1602 — a generation before Shah Jahan's reign even began, and nearly two centuries before 1799.
• (b)Abdul Hamid Lahori — Lahori is the right name for the wrong question. He was the official historian of Shah Jahan's reign and the author of the Badshah Nama itself, completing his two volumes in 1648 and dying in 1654. He wrote the book; he did not give it to a British king a century and a half after his death.
• (d)William Jones — Sir William Jones was the Calcutta judge and Sanskrit scholar who founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 and whose comparative philology transformed European study of Indian languages. He is a plausible-sounding conduit for an Indian manuscript reaching London, but he died in 1794, five years before the gift.

Mughal emperors commissioned official chronicles of their reigns, written by court historians with access to state papers and illustrated by the imperial painting workshop. Abu'l Fazl wrote the Akbarnama for Akbar; Abdul Hamid Lahori wrote the Badshah Nama, or Padshahnama, for Shah Jahan, building on an earlier account by Muhammad Amin Qazvini and completing his two volumes in 1648. After Lahori's death his pupil Muhammad Waris carried the record forward. These manuscripts are historical sources and works of art at the same time, which is why the illustrated copies were treated as treasures worth giving to a foreign sovereign.

Two habits make this item safe. The first is to separate authorship from provenance — who wrote a text, who copied it, who owned it and who gave it away are four different questions, and Indian history papers regularly test the last of them. The second is to use dates as a filter: three of the four options can be eliminated on chronology alone, since Abu'l Fazl died in 1602, Lahori in 1654 and Jones in 1794, and all three deaths fall before 1799. Some accounts of the gift name the earlier Nawab, Asaf-ud-Daula, but he died in 1797 and it was his successor Saadat Ali Khan II who was on the masnad of Awadh in 1799. The date itself is worth noticing for what else it says about the period: by 1799 the Nawab of Awadh was a subsidiary ally of the East India Company, and a gift of this magnitude to the British king belongs to that political relationship as much as to the history of art.

• In 1799 Saadat Ali Khan II, the Nawab of Awadh, sent the Padshahnama to King George III of Great Britain.
• The imperial illustrated manuscript is preserved in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle.
• Abdul Hamid Lahori, the official historian of Shah Jahan's reign, wrote the chronicle in two volumes, completed in 1648.
• Abu'l Fazl, author of the Akbarnama, was murdered in 1602; Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784, died in 1794.

• Naming the author when the question asks for the donor.
• Assuming an orientalist scholar must be the person who carried an Indian manuscript to Britain.
• Overlooking that three of the four options had already died before 1799.

NDA sets Mughal chronicle items in most papers, alternating between who wrote a text, whose reign it covers, and how a particular copy travelled.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Badshah Nama, the official chronicle of Shah Jahan's reign, was written by

  • (a)Abu'l Fazl
  • (b)Abdul Hamid Lahori
  • (c)Badauni
  • (d)Khafi Khan

  Answer(b) Abdul Hamid Lahori — his two volumes were completed in 1648.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Sir William Jones is best remembered for founding, in 1784, the

  • (a)Archaeological Survey of India
  • (b)Asiatic Society of Bengal
  • (c)Fort William College
  • (d)Calcutta Madrasa

  Answer(b) Asiatic Society of Bengal — Fort William College was founded in 1800 and the Calcutta Madrasa in 1780 or 1781.