NDA (II) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 128 of 146

Correct — D, Nicolo Conti. Niccolò de' Conti, whose name the booklet prints in its older short form, was born at Chioggia in the Republic of Venice, left Venice around 1419 and did not return until 1444. Somewhere near the start of that quarter-century of wandering, about 1420, he reached Vijayanagara and left one of the earliest European descriptions of the capital. He is the only one of the four who satisfies both halves of the stem at once — Italian by origin, and in India in the fifteenth century. Every other name fails on nationality, on century, or on both.

• (a)Nikitin — Afanasy Nikitin passes the century test but not the nationality one. He was a Russian merchant from Tver whose journey ran from 1468 to 1475, with 1471 to 1474 spent in India, and his account, A Journey Beyond the Three Seas, centres on the Bahmani Sultanate and its capital at Bidar.
• (b)Fa-Hien — Fa-Hien was a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim of the early fifth century, roughly a thousand years too early and from the wrong direction. He travelled in India during the reign of the Gupta ruler Chandragupta II; Vijayanagara was not founded until the fourteenth century.
• (c)Bernier — François Bernier was a French physician who spent about a dozen years in India in the middle of the seventeenth century, attached to the Mughal court in Aurangzeb's time. Wrong country and two centuries too late, with the Vijayanagara Empire already broken by then.

Almost everything known about daily life in Vijayanagara comes from outsiders, because the empire left little narrative history of its own. The line of foreign visitors runs from Conti in the 1420s through the Persian envoy Abdur Razzaq in the 1440s to the Portuguese writers Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz in the sixteenth century, and their accounts of the fortifications, the irrigation works and the Mahanavami festival are what historians still lean on. Their value is exactly that they were strangers: they recorded what an insider would have thought too obvious to write down.

The stem sets two independent filters, nationality and century, and every distractor is defeated by at least one of them, so the item can be cleared by elimination even without recalling Conti. Fa-Hien is Chinese and ancient, Bernier is French and Mughal-era, Nikitin is Russian. That leaves only the Venetian. A useful hold for the wider topic is to sort travellers by the court they described rather than by name — Ibn Battuta with Muhammad bin Tughlaq, Nikitin with the Bahmanis, Conti and Abdur Razzaq with Vijayanagara, Bernier and Tavernier with the Mughals.

• Niccolò de' Conti was born at Chioggia in the Republic of Venice and travelled between about 1419 and 1444.
• He reached Vijayanagara around 1420, leaving one of the earliest European accounts of the city.
• Afanasy Nikitin was a Russian merchant of Tver who was in India from 1471 to 1474 and wrote A Journey Beyond the Three Seas.
• François Bernier, a French physician, was in India in the mid-seventeenth century and wrote on the Mughal empire under Aurangzeb.
• Fa-Hien, a Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, travelled in India in the early fifth century, during the reign of Chandragupta II.

• Assuming any European traveller who wrote on India must be Portuguese, given how many were.
• Placing Nikitin at Vijayanagara — he did pass through the south, but his account is built around the Bahmani capital at Bidar.
• Reading Fa-Hien and Hiuen Tsang as interchangeable; Fa-Hien belongs to Chandragupta II's reign, Hiuen Tsang to Harsha's.

Asked as a two-filter identification — nationality plus century — with each wrong name failing on at least one filter.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The travel account A Journey Beyond the Three Seas, describing the Bahmani kingdom, was written by

  • (a)Niccolò de' Conti
  • (b)Afanasy Nikitin
  • (c)Duarte Barbosa
  • (d)Abdur Razzaq

  Answer(b) Afanasy Nikitin — the merchant of Tver who was in India from 1471 to 1474 and centred his account on Bidar.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Persian envoy who visited Calicut and the Vijayanagara court in the 1440s was

  • (a)Al-Biruni
  • (b)Ibn Battuta
  • (c)Abdur Razzaq
  • (d)Seydi Ali Reis

  Answer(c) Abdur Razzaq — sent from Herat by Shah Rukh, and one of the fullest early descriptions of Vijayanagara.