Who wrote the book called Tahqiq-i-Hind, which gives a detailed description of North India ?

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Correct — option (2), Al-Biruni. The book named in the stem is Tahqiq ma li'l-Hind, usually shortened to Tahqiq-i-Hind or Kitab-ul-Hind and known in English translation as Alberuni's India. Its full title translates roughly as a critical study of what India says, whether accepted by reason or refused, and the title states the method: al-Biruni set out to record Indian doctrine as Indians themselves held it, and then to weigh it. Abu Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, who lived from about 973 to about 1050, was a Khwarazmian scholar of the Islamic golden age — an astronomer, mathematician, geographer, chronologist and linguist who spent much of his life at Ghazni and who travelled to the Indian subcontinent in 1017 in the wake of the Ghaznavid campaigns. He learnt Sanskrit, read Indian astronomical and philosophical texts in the original, and produced a work that deliberately left aside military and political history in favour of religion, philosophy, astronomy, the sciences, law, custom, festivals and the calendar. He worked out a method for converting dates of the Hindu calendar into the Greek, Arab and Persian reckonings; he distinguished between the monotheism of the learned and the popular worship of images; and he stated his own rule of writing plainly — that he would set out the theories of the Hindus exactly as they are, and place beside them the similar theories of the Greeks. That temper of enquiry is why he is called a founder of Indology and a pioneer of comparative religion. Note two things about the phrasing of the stem. First, the book is a description of the India al-Biruni could reach and read about, in the north and north-west, and the paper's 'North India' reflects that. Second, the book is one of two texts on which his reputation as an Indologist rests, the other being his translations from and commentary on Indian astronomy. He wrote a great deal else — his own catalogue of his output up to his sixty-fifth lunar year lists one hundred and three titles across astronomy, mathematics, geography, chronology and religion. The answer to be marked is option (2).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Mahmud of Ghazni, who lived from 2 October 971 to 30 April 1030 and ruled the Ghaznavid empire from 998, is the ruler in whose reign al-Biruni came to India, not the author of the book. He is remembered in Indian history for repeated raids into the subcontinent, for the plunder of temple towns and above all for the sack of the temple of Somnath in Gujarat, and for turning Ghazni into a wealthy capital that attracted scholars and poets from across the Islamic world — Firdausi, the author of the Shahnama, and al-Biruni himself among them. The confusion the option invites is a real one and worth naming: al-Biruni's presence in India is a consequence of Mahmud's campaigns, so the two names appear in the same sentence in every textbook. But the patron is not the author, and this is a distinction MPSC tests in several forms — Amir Khusrau and Alauddin Khalji, Abul Fazl and Akbar, al-Biruni and Mahmud.  (c) Ibn Battuta is the wrong traveller by three centuries. Born at Tangier in Morocco on 24 February 1304 and dead in 1368 or 1369, he travelled for thirty years from 1325 across Africa, Asia and the Iberian peninsula, covering a distance greater than any traveller of the pre-modern world, and dictated his account near the end of his life under a title meaning a gift to those who contemplate the wonders of cities and the marvels of travelling — the book universally called the Rihla. He reached India in the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, who made him qazi of Delhi and later sent him as an envoy to China, and his account is a first-rate source for the fourteenth century: the sultan's character and his experiments, the postal system, the cities, the coinage, the customs of the court. He is the standard answer to a question about a fourteenth-century description of India, which is exactly why he is offered against an eleventh-century book.  (d) Abd-al-Razzaq Samarqandi, who lived from 1413 to 1482, is later still and belongs to the south rather than the north. He was a Persian chronicler of the Timurid court and served for a time as ambassador of Shah Rukh, in which capacity he came to Kozhikode — Calicut — in the early 1440s; his narrative of what he saw on the Malabar coast and at the court he visited in the Deccan is a valuable source for fifteenth-century south India and for the Vijayanagara empire of that period. He also wrote a long chronicle of the Timurid dynasty. Nothing in his work answers to Tahqiq-i-Hind or to a description of the north in the eleventh century. Placing the four options on a timeline settles the question at once: al-Biruni in the eleventh century, Ibn Battuta in the fourteenth and Abd-al-Razzaq in the fifteenth, with Mahmud of Ghazni as the ruler contemporary with the first of them.

Concept: Foreign accounts are among the most important sources for medieval Indian history, because they record what Indian court chronicles took for granted or preferred not to say, and because their authors were outsiders describing what struck them as strange. They should be learnt as a chronological series with the ruler or dynasty each is attached to. Al-Biruni came in 1017 with the Ghaznavids and wrote Tahqiq ma li'l-Hind, an encyclopaedic account of Indian religion, philosophy, astronomy, custom and calendar, written from the Sanskrit sources he had learnt to read. Marco Polo touched the southern coast at the end of the thirteenth century. Ibn Battuta arrived from Morocco in the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq, served as qazi of Delhi and left the Rihla. Abd-al-Razzaq Samarqandi came as a Timurid envoy to Calicut and the Deccan in the 1440s, Nicolo Conti and Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz described Vijayanagara in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the seventeenth century brought the European travellers of the Mughal period — Thomas Roe, Francois Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Niccolao Manucci. Al-Biruni stands apart from all of them in method: he was not a traveller recording impressions but a scholar reading Indian texts in Sanskrit and comparing Indian doctrines with Greek ones, which is why he is described as a founder of Indology and a pioneer of the comparative study of religion.

State PCS 2022 Q92 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q92 — History PYQ with Answer