“Chach Nama” was translated to Persian by

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Muhammad Ali Bin Abu Bakr Kufi. The Chachnama is the principal narrative source for the Arab conquest of Sindh — the campaign of Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 to 713 CE — and it takes its name from Chach of Alor, the Brahmin who founded the dynasty that Dahir, the ruler defeated by the Arabs, belonged to. The text is known today only in its Persian version, made around 1216 CE by Ali bin Hamid bin Abu Bakr Kufi, whom this option names in a variant form. He states in his own preface that he found an Arabic history of the conquest and rendered it into Persian, and he dedicated the work to Nasiruddin Qabacha, the ruler of Uch and Multan in the years after the collapse of the Ghurid empire. So the man, the language, the date and the patron all line up with option (c). Two refinements a careful student should carry. First, the Arabic original Kufi describes has never been found, and a strand of modern scholarship reads the Chachnama not as a translation at all but as an original thirteenth-century composition using the conquest as a frame for political argument — the received exam answer remains that Ali Kufi translated it, but the status of the 'original' is genuinely debated. Second, the name is written in several forms — Ali Kufi, Ali bin Hamid Kufi, Muhammad Ali bin Abu Bakr Kufi — and BPSC has used one of the longer variants, which is why matching the option to the man matters more than matching the exact string.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A real and well-chosen distractor, because Aufi belongs to the same moment and the same court — he wrote the Jawami-ul-Hikayat, a vast collection of anecdotes, and the Lubab-ul-Albab, the earliest surviving Persian anthology of poets, and he too worked under the patronage of Nasiruddin Qabacha before moving to Delhi. Same patron, same decade, different book.  (b) Shams-i-Siraj Afif belongs to the fourteenth century and wrote the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi, an account of the reign of Firoz Shah Tughlaq — roughly a hundred and fifty years after the Chachnama and about the Delhi Sultanate rather than about Sindh. He is a chronicler, which is why the name feels right, but of the wrong period entirely.  (d) There is one Persian Chachnama and one man credited with producing it, so no two of the three names can both be correct. Apply the standing test for this option: it is available only when you can name at least two of the listed items that are simultaneously true. Here Aufi and Shams-i-Siraj are each associated with entirely different books, so nothing supports it.

Concept: The Arab conquest of Sindh is the earliest sustained Muslim presence in the subcontinent and sits awkwardly in the syllabus, because it is neither part of the Delhi Sultanate story nor of ancient India. Muhammad bin Qasim, a young commander sent by Hajjaj bin Yusuf, the governor of Iraq under the Umayyad caliph Al-Walid, moved against Sindh in 711 CE, took the port of Debal, and defeated and killed Raja Dahir near Rawar in 712; Multan fell soon after. Arab rule was consolidated only in Sindh and southern Punjab and did not expand further, which is why the episode is often described as a conquest without consequences for the rest of India in the short term — though it opened durable trade and scholarly contact, and Sindh became the route by which Indian astronomy and mathematics, including the decimal numerals, reached Baghdad. The Chachnama is the one connected narrative of these events, and its own history is instructive: written down in Persian five centuries later, in a Sindh ruled by a post-Ghurid Turkish governor who needed a usable account of how the region had been governed before.

State PCS 2024 Q87 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q87 — History PYQ with Answer