NDA (II) 2022 General Ability Test · Question 124 of 150

Correct — C, Ibn Battuta. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta reached India in 1333 and spent about six years as a qadi, or judge, in the service of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, and his travelogue the Rihla contains exactly this description. He writes that in India the postal service is of two kinds — mounted couriers who ride the sultan's horses with relays every four miles, and couriers on foot stationed at every third of a mile, each of whom runs with the letter in one hand and a brass-belled rod in the other and hands it on to the next runner. He adds the detail that most students find counter-intuitive, that the foot relay was the quicker of the two. The horse-post is the service the question names Uluq and the running relay the one it names Dawa.

• (a)Al-Biruni — Al-Biruni (c. 973–c. 1050) came from Khwarezm and travelled to India in the entourage of Mahmud of Ghazni, writing his Arabic study of Indian sciences and beliefs around 1030. He is roughly three centuries too early to have seen the Delhi Sultanate's relay post at all.
• (b)Duarte Barbosa — Duarte Barbosa was a Portuguese official who served in Portuguese India between 1500 and 1516 and wrote his book around 1516. His subject is the ports, trade and peoples of the Indian Ocean coasts, not the internal administration of the Delhi sultans.
• (d)Seydi Ali Reis — Seydi Ali Reis (1498–1563) was an Ottoman admiral who was driven onto the Gujarat coast in 1554, met Humayun, and wrote the Mirat-ul-Memalik about his overland journey home. He belongs to the Mughal century, long after the Tughlaq post described here.

The Delhi Sultanate ran a fast state communication and intelligence network, and it is foreign travellers rather than court chronicles that give us the most vivid working description of it. Ibn Battuta's Rihla is the single richest outsider's account of fourteenth-century India, because he was not a passing visitor but an office-holder inside Muhammad bin Tughlaq's administration. Alongside the post he describes the coconut and the paan leaf, the bazaars of Delhi, the sultan's court, and his own embassy towards China.

Four travellers, four different centuries — that is really what the question is testing. Only one of the four was inside the Sultanate's own administration long enough to describe its post from the inside, and that is Ibn Battuta. A useful sanity check while reading is the transliterated vocabulary in the stem; Persian and Arabic administrative terms of this kind point to a fourteenth-century Muslim observer, which rules out the Portuguese and Ottoman writers straight away, and Al-Biruni is on the wrong side of the Delhi Sultanate's foundation. The exact spellings Uluq and Dawa come from the standard Indian school-textbook rendering of the passage; older English translations describe the same two services without transliterating the terms.

• Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan traveller born in 1304; his travelogue is known as the Rihla.
• He arrived in India in 1333 and served about six years as a qadi under Muhammad bin Tughlaq.
• He records that a report could travel from Sind to Delhi in five days by post, although the same journey took fifty days on the march.
• In his account the horse-post used royal horses with relays every four miles, while the foot-post had a station every third of a mile — and the foot-post was faster.

• Pairing Al-Biruni with the Delhi Sultanate; he belongs to the Ghaznavid period, three centuries earlier.
• Assuming the horse-post must have been faster — Ibn Battuta says the relay of runners beat it.
• Mixing up Ibn Battuta's Rihla with Seydi Ali Reis's Mirat-ul-Memalik, both of which are travel accounts by Muslim visitors.

As a traveller-to-account match, as a traveller-to-nationality match, or as an item on which ruler's reign a named visitor described.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The travel account of Ibn Battuta is known as

  • (a)Kitab-ul-Hind
  • (b)Rihla
  • (c)Mirat-ul-Memalik
  • (d)Tuzuk-i-Baburi

  Answer(b) Rihla — Kitab-ul-Hind is Al-Biruni's, Mirat-ul-Memalik is Seydi Ali Reis's and the Tuzuk-i-Baburi is Babur's memoir.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Ibn Battuta served as a qadi at Delhi during the reign of

  • (a)Iltutmish
  • (b)Alauddin Khalji
  • (c)Muhammad bin Tughlaq
  • (d)Firoz Shah Tughlaq

  Answer(c) Muhammad bin Tughlaq — Ibn Battuta reached India in 1333 and held the office for about six years.