Which among the following ports was called Babul Makka (Gate of Makka) during the Mughal period?

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Correct — B, Surat. Surat earned the title because it was the port from which Indian Muslims sailed for the Hajj, and the epithet appears in the records as a working description of the city rather than as a poetic flourish. The Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, writing on Aurangzeb's reign, sets out both why the trade concentrated there and why the name mattered: 'The silting of the head of the Gulf of Cambay, the disturbed state of the north of Gujarat, and the destruction of Diu by the Muscat Arabs in 1670, combined to centre Gujarat trade in Surat. At the same time its consequence as the Gate of Mecca was increased by the strong religious feeling among Indian Musalmans fostered by the emperor.' The name was not merely rhetorical. Surat's city wall had a gate literally called the Mecca Gate and the tidal inlet beside it was the Mecca Creek; the merchants' quarters lay outside that gate; and when the Dutch bargained in 1694-95 for a monopoly of the European trade with Surat and exemption from customs, what they offered in return was to guarantee the security of 'the pilgrim traffic between Surat and Mecca'. Mughal control began when Akbar took the city in March 1573, after which imperial officers ran it until 1733; the same gazetteer records that in Akbar's time, around 1590, Surat is 'called an emporium, or first class port', important enough for Akbar to post two separate officers there — a kiladar who commanded the castle and the river, and a mutasaddi who administered the district and city and collected the customs revenue, and who was pointedly not subordinate to the provincial diwan at Ahmedabad. Pilgrim shipping, imperial customs and the Hajj embarkation together made Surat the Mughal empire's window on the Arabian Sea, and Bab-ul-Makka is the name that records it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Calicut was the Zamorin's port on the Malabar coast and the landing place of Vasco da Gama in 1498 — a great pepper emporium and the hinge of the early Portuguese trade, but never Mughal territory. Mughal authority never extended over Malabar, so no imperial pilgrim-port title from the Mughal period could attach to it. A candidate who reads the option list as 'name the most famous medieval Indian port' rather than reading the words 'during the Mughal period' will be drawn straight to it.  (c) The strongest distractor, because Cambay genuinely was Gujarat's leading port before Surat and is the more famous name in the earlier medieval sources, giving its name to the whole gulf. But it lost that place physically rather than politically: the gazetteer names 'the silting of the head of the Gulf of Cambay' as one of the very reasons Gujarat's trade shifted to Surat, along with disorder in northern Gujarat and the destruction of Diu by the Muscat Arabs in 1670. Cambay's decline is the precondition for Surat's rise, not a rival claim to the epithet.  (d) Broach, the Bharuch of today, is described in the same gazetteer as 'one of the oldest ports in Western India' and appears in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea as Barygaza, with five trade routes converging on it — two by sea to Southern Arabia, Egypt and the Persian Gulf, and three by land to Sind, to Ujjain in Malwa and south to Paithan and Daulatabad. Its greatness is therefore classical rather than Mughal; by the seventeenth century it was a secondary port in Surat's shadow, and it was never the Hajj embarkation point.

Concept: Surat sits on the left bank of the Tapi a little above its mouth, and its rise is a story of imperial politics as much as geography. Akbar's conquest of Gujarat brought the city under Mughal rule in 1573, and the gazetteer divides the 160 years that followed into three phases: about eighty-five years to 1658, under Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, when 'Surat enjoyed peace and rose to be one of the first cities in India'; the forty-nine years of Aurangzeb's reign, when its prosperity was checked first by Maratha raids and then by the rise of English Bombay; and a final twenty-seven years of disorder in which the governors of Surat were subject to Delhi in little more than name. It was the customs house of the empire's western trade, the port where the English East India Company opened its first factory in 1613 with Jahangir's permission, where the Portuguese had a factory from 1611 and the Dutch a house of their own, and above all the port of embarkation for the Hajj — which is why the emperors invested in it and why attacks on its pilgrim ships caused diplomatic crises. Shivaji sacked it in 1664, taking booty the gazetteer values at not less than a million sterling in three days while the governor sheltered in the castle, and returned to levy contributions in 1670; his general Moro Pandit did the same in 1671, and Maratha raids recurred in 1674 and 1675. The outer wall begun in 1664 was the city's answer.

State PCS 2023 Q65 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q65 — History PYQ with Answer