Choose the correct pairs for authors.
(a) Storia-Do-Mogor
(b) Travel in Mughal Empire
(c) Early Travels in India
(d) Historical Fragment
(i) Burnier
(ii) Niccolao Manucchi
(iii) William Foster
(iv) Ro

Question

Choose the correct pairs for authors.
(a) Storia-Do-Mogor
(b) Travel in Mughal Empire
(c) Early Travels in India
(d) Historical Fragment
(i) Burnier
(ii) Niccolao Manucchi
(iii) William Foster
(iv) Robert

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (2): (a)-(ii), (b)-(i), (c)-(iii), (d)-(iv). Storia do Mogor is the work of Niccolao Manucci, the Venetian who reached India as a teenager in the 1650s, served as an artilleryman in Dara Shukoh's camp and later practised as a physician, and who spent decades assembling a sprawling account of the later years of Shah Jahan and the reign of Aurangzeb — written in a mixture of Italian, French and Portuguese, and later translated into English by William Irvine. Travels in the Mughal Empire is by François Bernier, printed in this booklet as 'Burnier', the French physician who was in India between 1656 and 1668 and attached himself to the noble Danishmand Khan; his book is the source of the famous and much-debated argument that there was no private property in land in Mughal India, and of the comparisons between Indian and European cities that generations of historians have argued with. Early Travels in India is the collection edited by William Foster — and this is the pair that catches candidates, because Foster is not a traveller at all but a modern editor, who gathered the narratives of the English visitors of the years around 1600, among them Ralph Fitch, William Hawkins, William Finch, Thomas Coryat and Edward Terry, and published them as a single volume. Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire, printed here in the shortened form 'Historical Fragment' and credited only to the bare forename 'Robert', is the work of Robert Orme, the eighteenth-century historian of the East India Company. Two fixed pairs settle the item without needing the third or fourth. Attach Storia do Mogor to Manucci and options (3) and (4) die at once, since they send it to Foster and to Bernier respectively. Then attach Travels in the Mughal Empire to Bernier: option (1) gives that book to Foster, so it falls, and option (2) is left standing alone.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The strongest distractor on the item, because it gets both the first and the last pair right — Storia do Mogor to Manucci, Historical Fragments to Robert Orme — and then swaps the middle two. It hands Travels in the Mughal Empire to William Foster and Early Travels in India to Bernier, which is exactly backwards. Bernier wrote one book, from his own eight years in India; Foster wrote none of the travels but edited the English narratives of an earlier generation into a collection. The distinction between a traveller and an editor of travellers is the single fact this option is testing, and it is worth carrying because the same pair of names recurs in this area across papers.  (c) Every pair displaced. Storia do Mogor goes to William Foster, Travels in the Mughal Empire to Manucci, Early Travels in India to Robert Orme and Historical Fragments to Bernier. The first pair alone retires it: Storia do Mogor is the most securely attributed of the four titles, a work whose authorship is inseparable from Manucci's own extraordinary biography as an artilleryman turned physician who never went home. When an option displaces the pair you are surest of, there is no need to check the remaining three — a matching item is all or nothing, and one certain mismatch is fatal.  (d) Gets only the last pair right. It gives Storia do Mogor to Bernier, Travels in the Mughal Empire to Foster and Early Travels in India to Manucci, leaving Historical Fragments correctly with Robert Orme. The chain of errors starts from a single confusion — treating Bernier and Manucci as interchangeable because both were Europeans at Aurangzeb's court in the same decades — and a candidate who separates them by profession and nationality will not make it: Bernier was a French physician who published his own travels soon after returning to Europe, Manucci a Venetian adventurer whose vast manuscript was not printed in English until long after his death.

Concept: European accounts of Mughal India are examined as a fixed roster, and the profitable way to hold them is by nationality, by the reign each writer saw and by the one argument or detail each is remembered for. The seventeenth-century group is the core: François Bernier, French physician, in India 1656–68, attached to Danishmand Khan, author of Travels in the Mughal Empire and of the claim that the emperor was the sole proprietor of the soil; Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, French jeweller, six voyages, remembered for his descriptions of the diamond mines and the court's gems; Niccolao Manucci, Venetian, artilleryman turned physician, author of the Storia do Mogor covering Shah Jahan's last years and Aurangzeb's reign; and Jean de Thévenot and the Dutch and Portuguese writers around them. The English group of the previous generation — Ralph Fitch, William Hawkins, Sir Thomas Roe, William Finch, Thomas Coryat and Edward Terry — belongs to Akbar's and Jahangir's reigns, and several of their narratives were collected in the modern era by the editor William Foster. Alongside them sit the later historians of the Company period, of whom Robert Orme is the standard example, writing history rather than travel.

State PCS 2026 Q5 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q5 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer