About whom the following statements are related ?
i. Religion was separated from politics.
ii. Adopted a policy of seclusion towards brave women who followed Sati.
iii. To stop child marriage and wido

Question

About whom the following statements are related ?
i. Religion was separated from politics.
ii. Adopted a policy of seclusion towards brave women who followed Sati.
iii. To stop child marriage and widow marriage was encouraged.
iv. Claimed that the final decision regarding the social law will be his.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), Akbar. All four printed statements describe measures of Akbar's reign, and taken together they describe no other Mughal. Statement i, the separation of religion from politics, is the substance of sulh-i-kul, the doctrine of peace with all that governed his later policy: he abolished the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims, in 1564, opened the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575 to debate among scholars of every faith, admitted Rajputs to the highest ranks of the nobility, and detached office and revenue from religious affiliation. Statement iv is the mahzar of 1579, the declaration by which the leading ulema accepted that where the jurists differed on a disputed question, the emperor's decision should prevail — a claim to be the final authority in religious and social law, and the sharpest expression of what statement i describes in general terms. Statements ii and iii belong to his social regulations. Akbar restrained the practice of sati, forbidding the compulsion of a widow and requiring his officers to intervene where force was used, and Abul Fazl records the emperor himself riding to prevent one such burning; and his regulations set a minimum age for marriage, discouraging the marriage of children, while widow remarriage was permitted rather than condemned. The English of statements ii and iii is awkwardly translated — statement iii in particular reads as a broken sentence — but their subject matter is unmistakable. No other name in the options can carry even two of these four, so the answer is Akbar.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Babur's Indian reign lasted from 1526 to 1530, four years spent almost entirely in fighting: Panipat against Ibrahim Lodi in 1526, Khanwa against Rana Sanga in 1527, Chanderi in 1528 and the Ghaghra against the Afghans in 1529. He left a remarkable book, the Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turkish, with its observations on the plants, animals and manners of Hindustan, but he left no social legislation, no religious settlement and no administrative structure — those were the work of his grandson. A candidate who picks Babur has usually recognised that the statements sound like an innovator's programme without asking whether the reign in question was long enough for one.  (b) Humayun ruled from 1530 to 1540 and again from 1555 to 1556, and the interval tells the story: he was driven out of India by Sher Shah Suri after Chausa in 1539 and Kannauj in 1540, spent years in exile in Persia, and recovered Delhi only months before his death from a fall on the steps of his library. His reign is remembered for military reverses, for the administrative debt the Mughals owed to Sher Shah's interlude, and for the Persian artists he brought back with him. It contains nothing resembling a policy on sati, on the age of marriage or on the emperor's authority in disputed law, and a candidate choosing him is answering from dynastic order rather than from the content of the statements.  (d) Aurangzeb is the exact opposite of statement i, which is what makes him the instructive wrong answer. He reimposed the jizya on non-Muslims in 1679, some hundred and fifteen years after Akbar abolished it, discouraged music at court, sponsored the compilation of the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri as a digest of Hanafi law, and made orthodoxy rather than sulh-i-kul the declared basis of the state. A ruler who governs by the sharia as expounded by the jurists cannot at the same time claim, as the mahzar allowed Akbar to claim, that his own decision overrides theirs. This option catches the candidate who registers only that the statements concern religion and social custom, without noticing which way each of them points.

Concept: Akbar's reign is asked about as a set of dated measures, and they fall into three groups. The first is fiscal and religious: the abolition of the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and of the jizya in 1564, both of which removed a legal disability from non-Muslims and made revenue policy indifferent to faith. The second is institutional: the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri from 1575, where scholars of many religions disputed in his presence; the mahzar of 1579, by which the leading ulema conceded that the emperor's ruling should prevail on questions where jurists differed; and the Din-i-Ilahi of 1582, a small circle of disciples rather than a religion in any ordinary sense. The third is social: restraint on sati so that no widow could be compelled, discouragement of child marriage through a minimum age, and permission for widows to remarry. Behind all three lies sulh-i-kul, peace with all, and behind that a political calculation — a Turkish-Persian dynasty ruling an overwhelmingly non-Muslim population could not afford a state defined by one community. The alliance with the Rajputs, sealed by marriage and by high mansabs, is the same policy in another form.

State PCS 2023 Q13 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q13 — History PYQ with Answer