The term Zillillah was first used by

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Correct — A, Balban. 'Zillillah' is the booklet's spelling of Zill-Allah, 'the Shadow of God', and in Indian history the title belongs first to Ghiyas-ud-din Balban, ninth sultan of the Mamluk (Slave) dynasty, crowned in the Qutb Minar complex on 18 February 1266 and dead on 13 January 1287. His formal styles were Zil-i-Ilahi, Shadow of God, and Niyabat-i-Khuda, vice-regency of God — the sultan holds the throne as God's deputy on earth, not as the first among the Turkish nobility who put him there. That distinction was the whole point. Balban had himself been one of the Turkan-i-Chihalgani, the Forty Shamsi slave-nobles who made and unmade sultans through the twenty chaotic years after Iltutmish's death, and he had run the state as naib to Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud from 1246 before taking the throne himself. A man who had seen four of Iltutmish's descendants enthroned and murdered needed a source of authority the Forty could not vote on, so he built one out of divine sanction and enforced it as court ritual: sijda, prostration before the sultan, and paibos, the kissing of his feet — both Iranian usages, both offensive to the orthodox on the ground that such reverence is owed to God alone. He claimed descent from Afrasiyab, the legendary Turanian king of the Shahnama, banished wine and laughter from the court, and, in Barani's account, 'never conversed with persons of low origin or occupation'. The title and the ceremonial were one programme, and Balban is where it starts.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The strongest wrong answer, because Iltutmish (r. 1211–1236) also needed a theory of legitimacy — but he took the opposite route, deriving it from the Caliph rather than directly from God. In 1228 the Abbasid Caliph al-Mustansir sent robes of honour recognising his authority in India, and the deed of investiture reached Delhi on 18 February 1229. His titles from it were Nasir Amir al-Mu'minin, Auxiliary of the Commander of the Faithful, and Yamin Khalifat Allah, Right Hand of God's Deputy — a deputy of the deputy, not a shadow of God.  (c) The word 'first' is what defeats this option rather than the fact. Mughal court theology under Akbar (r. 1556–1605) does rest on divinely illumined kingship — Abul Fazl builds it on farr-i izadi, the divine light descending on the just ruler, and Akbar's Mahzar of 1579 made him the final arbiter in disputed religious questions. But Akbar reigned nearly three centuries after Balban's coronation in 1266, so whatever vocabulary his court used, it cannot be the first use.  (d) Alauddin Khalji (r. 1296 – 4 January 1316) ran in the other direction: he detached policy from religious sanction altogether, told the qazi that he issued orders for the good of the state without consulting what the Shariat permitted, and reached for a secular imperial model instead, styling himself Sikandar-i-Sani, the Second Alexander. His famous measures — market control, the dagh-o-chehra branding and description of horses and troopers — are administrative, not sacral.

Concept: Every Delhi sultan faced the same structural problem and each answered it differently, which is why 'who first used this title' is a real question and not trivia. The sultan was a Turkish military commander, usually of slave origin, ruling a largely non-Muslim population through a nobility of other slave commanders who considered themselves his equals. He therefore needed an account of why his commands bound them. Three answers were tried. The caliphal answer, taken by Iltutmish, made the sultan the lieutenant of the Abbasid Caliph, and so grounded his authority outside India altogether. The divine answer, Balban's, cut out the intermediary: the sultan is Zill-Allah, the Shadow of God on earth, and Niyabat-i-Khuda, God's vice-regent, which makes obedience to him a religious duty and disobedience a sin. The imperial-secular answer, Alauddin Khalji's, dispensed with sanction and rested on force, surveillance and administrative reach. Balban expressed his in ceremony because ceremony is what a court sees daily — the sombre wine-free assembly, the prostration, the refusal to be seen laughing, the sultan sitting unapproachable at its centre. Barani, whose father and grandfather served under Balban, reports that 'no sovereign had ever before exhibited such pomp and grandeur in Dehli'.

State PCS 2025 Q88 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q88 — History PYQ with Answer