'Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi' was written by

Question

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Correct — D, Shams Siraj Afif. There is a complication in this question that the option list quietly removes. Two separate Persian chronicles of the Delhi Sultanate carry the title Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi: one by Ziauddin Barani, who served at the courts of Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah and whose work covers the Sultanate from Balban down to the early years of Firuz Shah's reign; and one by Shams-i-Siraj Afif, who wrote the fuller and more detailed narrative of Firuz Shah Tughlaq's reign itself, composed after Timur's invasion. Barani is not on this list, so the question resolves cleanly to Afif. His chronicle is the standard primary source for the Tughlaq period and is cited as such throughout modern scholarship — it was translated in Elliot and Dowson's History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, printed by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1891, and it is Afif whom historians quote for details of Firuz Shah's administration, his canals, his new towns and even for the affairs of neighbouring kingdoms, as when he gives Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah of Bengal the style Shah-i-Bangalah. Each of the other three names is attached, equally firmly, to a different book — and one of those titles is close enough to this one to be the trap the setter intended.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Minhaj-i-Siraj Juzjani wrote the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, an elaborate history of the Islamic world in Persian, named for and dedicated to Sultan Nasir-ud-Din Mahmud, the eighth Sultan of Delhi, at whose court he served. It is the principal source for the Slave dynasty — a century and more before Firuz Shah Tughlaq — and it is where the account of Razia Sultan and of Balban's early career comes from.  (b) Abdul Malik Isami, born in 1311, wrote the Futuh-us-Salatin around 1350 — a poetic history, in verse rather than prose, of Muslim rule in India, composed in the Deccan and dedicated to the founder of the Bahmani kingdom. He wrote against the Tughlaqs rather than for them, which is the opposite of Afif's relationship to his subject.  (c) The deliberate near-miss. Yahya bin Ahmad Sirhindi, a fifteenth-century historian, wrote the Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi, a Persian chronicle of the Sayyid dynasty — a title with the same Tarikh-i-[ruler's name] Shahi construction, one dynasty later. Reading the second word rather than the shape of the title is what separates the two.

Concept: Almost everything known about the Delhi Sultanate comes from a small shelf of Persian chronicles written by men attached to the court, and prelims questions on this topic are really questions about that shelf. The essential list runs: Minhaj-i-Siraj's Tabaqat-i-Nasiri for the Slave dynasty; Amir Khusrau's poetical works, including the Khaza'in-ul-Futuh, for the Khaljis; Ziauddin Barani's Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi and Fatawa-i-Jahandari for the Khaljis and early Tughlaqs; Isami's Futuh-us-Salatin from the Deccan, in verse; Shams-i-Siraj Afif's Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi for Firuz Shah Tughlaq; and Yahya bin Ahmad Sirhindi's Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi for the Sayyids. Alongside them stand the travel accounts, above all Ibn Battuta's Rihla. These are court histories written for patrons, so they are not neutral — Barani was an orthodox Sunni who judged the Sultans against the sharia and complained that they legislated on their own authority, and Isami wrote from the rival Bahmani court. Reading them as evidence means knowing who paid for each one.

State PCS 2025 Q64 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q64 — History PYQ with Answer