Futuhat-i-Alamgiri was written by

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Correct — A, Ishwardas Nagar. The Futuhat-i-Alamgiri — 'the victories of Alamgir' — is a Persian chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign written by Ishwardas Nagar, a Nagar Brahmin of Gujarat who served in the Mughal administration and wrote as an eyewitness rather than as a court historiographer.

The attribution is old and documented. Elliot and Dowson's The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, Volume VII, records at chapter LXXIV, on the authority of Bird's Gujarat, 'another work bearing this title written by Sri Das, a Nagar Brahman of Gujarát. "The author was a spectator of the occurrences he details, and was in the service of Shaikhu-l Islám, the son of ʿAbdu-l Wahháb Ahmadábádi. This work is very rare."' The personal name is rendered loosely in that Victorian notice — modern editions read it as Ishwardas, or Isardas — but the identification is unmistakable: a Nagar Brahmin of Gujarat, an eyewitness, in Mughal service.

Why a private Hindu official ends up writing the history of Aurangzeb's reign at all is the part worth carrying away. The same volume records that when Mirza Muhammad Kazim's official Alamgirnama — a court chronicle of the first ten years of the reign — was presented to the Emperor in his thirty-second regnal year, 'the Emperor forbad its continuation', professing that 'the cultivation of inward piety was preferable to the ostentatious display of his achievements'. Elphinstone's verdict, quoted there, is the key sentence: from the eleventh year of the reign the course of events 'can only be traced through the means of letters on business and of notes taken clandestinely by private individuals'. Aurangzeb reigned for forty-nine years and officially chronicled ten of them. Everything after that gap survives because private men — Ishwardas Nagar, Bhimsen, Khafi Khan, and Saqi Mustaid Khan writing after the Emperor's death — wrote anyway.

One caution the title itself demands: it is not unique. Elliot and Dowson's chapter LXXIV is in fact devoted to a different Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, by Muhammad Ma'sum son of Salih, a short work of fifty-five chapters covering only two or three years around the war of succession and also known as the Waqi'at-i-Alamgiri. That homonym does not disturb this question — Muhammad Ma'sum is not among the options — but it is a reminder that a Persian title identifies a book far less securely than an author does.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Bhimsen wrote the Nuskha-i-Dilkusha, not the Futuhat-i-Alamgiri. He was a Kayastha in Mughal service in the Deccan, and his memoir is the best-known eyewitness account of Aurangzeb's Deccan wars written from below the level of the court. He is the sharpest distractor on the page precisely because he is the closest parallel to the right answer — a Hindu officer writing a private Persian chronicle of the same reign in the same decades. Nothing separates the two men except which title belongs to which, so learn them as a pair.  (c) No Persian chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign is attributed to anyone named Haridas. The best-remembered Haridas of Mughal-era India is Swami Haridas, the Vrindavan dhrupad musician and Vaishnava poet-saint whom tradition makes Tansen's teacher — a devotional and musical figure of the previous century, with no historical writing attached to his name. He is on the page because the name sits plausibly beside Ishwardas and rewards nothing but recognition.  (d) This can only be right if all three named authors fail, and option (a) does not fail. On a paper that offers this escape hatch again and again it is worth being blunt about it: reaching for 'None of them' is almost always a sign that the candidate does not hold the title–author pair, not a sign that the pair is broken. Here the attribution to a Nagar Brahmin of Gujarat is on record in the bibliographical literature going back to the nineteenth century.

Concept: Mughal history is known largely through Persian chronicles, and those chronicles fall into two very different classes. The first is official: written at court, commissioned or sanctioned by the emperor, and shaped accordingly — Abul Fazl's Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari for Akbar, Abdul Hamid Lahori's Padshahnama for Shah Jahan, Mirza Muhammad Kazim's Alamgirnama for the first decade of Aurangzeb. Alongside these sit the imperial memoirs, Babur's Baburnama and Jahangir's Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri. The second class is private: written by officials, soldiers and clerks outside the court's patronage, often decades later, and valuable precisely because nobody was supervising them. Aurangzeb's reign is the point where the second class takes over from the first, because the Emperor stopped the official annals in his eleventh regnal year. The consequence is that for roughly four decades of the largest empire in Mughal history the record is made of private chronicles, personal letters — Aurangzeb's own Ruqaat-i-Alamgiri — and the accounts of European travellers such as Bernier, Tavernier and Manucci. Historians read that reign, unavoidably, through witnesses rather than through the state.

State PCS 2023 Q78 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q78 — History PYQ with Answer