Which of the following Sufi Silsilah was founded in Bihar ?

Question

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Correct — C, Firdousia. The Firdausi order is the one silsilah of Indian Sufism that belongs to Bihar. It began as a branch of the Suhrawardi order, was carried from Delhi eastward in the fourteenth century, and struck root in Bihar so completely that it became effectively an independent order there and spread almost nowhere else. Its towering figure is Shaikh Sharfuddin Ahmad Yahya Maneri, called Makhdum-ul-Mulk, the most influential Sufi Bihar has produced: born at Maner near Patna, he spent years in ascetic retreat in the Rajgir hills before settling at Bihar Sharif in what is now Nalanda district, where the Sultan built him a khanqah and where his tomb remains one of eastern India's principal dargahs. His hundreds of letters of spiritual instruction, the Maktubat-i-Sadi, circulated far beyond Bihar and are among the most widely read Sufi writings produced in India. One honest qualification belongs on the card, because it is what makes this a medium-confidence answer rather than a certainty: 'founded in Bihar' is a loose description. The Firdausi lineage traces back through Najibuddin Firdausi in Delhi and beyond him to Central Asian roots, so the order was not created from nothing in Bihar; it was transplanted there, became independent there and remained confined to it. On a paper that offers four silsilahs and asks which belongs to Bihar, that is the intended and the only defensible answer, because each of the other three has a documented origin somewhere else entirely.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The Qalandars were not a silsilah in the ordinary sense at all. They were wandering, ecstatic, deliberately unconventional dervishes who rejected the settled khanqah discipline that defined the organised orders — no fixed lineage of masters, no institutional centre. India's best-known Qalandar shrine is that of Bu Ali Shah Qalandar at Panipat in Haryana, far from Bihar.  (b) The Kubrawiya was founded by Najmuddin Kubra in Khwarezm, in Central Asia, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It entered India through the north-west and had its principal Indian influence in Kashmir, where Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani and his followers carried it in the fourteenth century. Its Indian story is a Kashmiri one, not a Bihari one.  (d) The Qadiriya takes its name from Shaikh Abdul Qadir Jilani of Baghdad, who died in the twelfth century, and was introduced into India in the fifteenth century with its early Indian centre at Uch in what is now Pakistani Punjab. It spread widely afterwards — Dara Shukoh was among its adherents — but it neither began in Bihar nor was ever centred there.

Concept: Indian Sufism organised itself into silsilahs — chains of spiritual descent running from a master to his disciples, each with a distinctive discipline and a network of khanqahs. Four orders dominated medieval India. The CHISHTI, brought by Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti to Ajmer, kept its distance from the state, refused royal grants, admitted people of every community and used devotional music, sama, as a path to God; Nizamuddin Auliya and Nasiruddin Chirag-i-Dehlavi belong to it. The SUHRAWARDI, established by Bahauddin Zakariya at Multan, took the opposite view, accepting state patronage and office. The QADIRI came later, from Baghdad through Uch. The NAQSHBANDI, associated with Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi in the seventeenth century, was the most orthodox and rejected sama. The Firdausi is the Suhrawardi branch that migrated east and became Bihar's own, which is why a Bihar paper can reasonably expect a candidate to know it while a national paper would not.

State PCS 2025 Q29 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q29 — History PYQ with Answer