Match the pairs.
(a) Jiyauddin Barni
(b) Khwaja Abu Malik Isami
(c) Ibn Batuta
(d) Ahmed Yadgar
(i) Fatuh-Us-Salatin
(ii) Kitab-Ur-Rahlah
(iii) Tariq-e-Salatin Afgana
(iv) Fatwa-e-Janhadari

Question

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Correct — option (1): (a)-(iv), (b)-(i), (c)-(ii), (d)-(iii). Take the pair that needs no thought first. Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveller who reached India in the 1330s, was made qazi of Delhi by Muhammad bin Tughlaq and was later sent as the Sultan's envoy towards China, wrote the Rihla — printed here as Kitab-ur-Rahlah, literally the book of the journey. Only one of the four options contains that pair, and the item is therefore settled by a single recall: option (1). The remaining three pairs confirm it. Ziauddin Barani, who served at the courts of Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah Tughlaq, wrote two works the syllabus cares about — the Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, a narrative history, and the Fatawa-i-Jahandari, printed here as Fatwa-e-Janhadari, which is not a chronicle at all but a treatise on the principles of government, a book of political advice on how a sultan should rule. Khwaja Abu Malik Isami wrote the Futuh-us-Salatin in 1350, a verse history of the Muslim rulers of India composed in the Deccan and dedicated to Bahman Shah, the founder of the Bahmani kingdom — which gives this apparently north-Indian list a direct Deccan connection worth remembering for a Maharashtra paper. Ahmad Yadgar's Tarikh-i-Salatin-i-Afghana, printed here as Tariq-e-Salatin Afgana, is a history of the Afghan sultans, that is of the Lodi and Sur rulers, and so belongs to the end of the Sultanate period rather than to its middle. Two things are worth noticing about the printed page. The English column drops the 'kh' from Tarikh and transposes letters in Jahandari, while the Marathi column prints both correctly, so a candidate reading only the English is matching against damaged titles. And the answer to the whole item is available from one pair, which is why scanning the options for your strongest recall beats reading them in order.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The tidy straight-down permutation, wrong on every pair. It gives Barani the Futuh-us-Salatin, Isami the Rihla, Ibn Battuta the history of the Afghan sultans and Ahmad Yadgar the Fatawa-i-Jahandari. The third pair is the absurd one and the fastest kill: Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan traveller of the fourteenth century who left India before the Afghan dynasties existed, so a history of the Lodi and Sur sultans cannot be his. Options that run (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) in order are a standing feature of matching questions and are marked more often than they deserve, because the eye reads order as correctness.  (c) Also wrong throughout. Barani is given the Rihla, Isami the Afghan history, Ibn Battuta the Fatawa-i-Jahandari and Ahmad Yadgar the Futuh-us-Salatin. The first pair alone disposes of it, since the Rihla is a travel narrative by a foreign visitor and Barani was a court official at Delhi writing about the sultans he served. A useful check on any option in this area is the type of work: a traveller's account, a court chronicle, a treatise of political advice and a dynastic history are four different kinds of book, and an option that hands a genre to the wrong kind of author is wrong without any need to recall the title.  (d) Every pair displaced again: Barani takes the Afghan history, Isami the Fatawa-i-Jahandari, Ibn Battuta the Futuh-us-Salatin and Ahmad Yadgar the Rihla. Two of these are chronologically impossible. Barani wrote in the middle of the fourteenth century, well before the Lodis, and Ahmad Yadgar wrote of the Afghan sultans and cannot be the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller. Anchoring a matching column in time before matching it by title is the discipline that makes this option collapse without any specialised knowledge — three of the four names belong to the fourteenth century and one does not.

Concept: The Delhi Sultanate is known almost entirely through Persian writing, and the syllabus expects a candidate to distinguish the kinds of writing rather than merely list the titles. Court chronicles form the largest group: Minhaj-us-Siraj's Tabaqat-i-Nasiri for the early sultans, Amir Khusrau's verse histories, Ziauddin Barani's Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, Shams-i-Siraj Afif's continuation of the same title, and Yahya Sirhindi's Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi. A second kind is the treatise of political advice, of which Barani's Fatawa-i-Jahandari is the classic instance — a statement of how a sultan ought to govern, not a record of what happened. A third is the travel account, dominated by Ibn Battuta's Rihla, which is valuable precisely because an outsider notices what a court historian takes for granted: prices, roads, the postal system, court ceremonial and the sultan's temperament. A fourth is dynastic history written afterwards, such as Ahmad Yadgar's account of the Afghan sultans. Isami's Futuh-us-Salatin belongs to a fifth category, verse history written outside Delhi, and its dedication to Bahman Shah ties the north Indian story to the founding of the Bahmani kingdom in the Deccan.

State PCS 2026 Q13 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q13 — History PYQ with Answer