Which of the following is NOT correctly matched ?
(Books) — (Writers)

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Tughlaqnama — Ibn Battuta. This is the mismatched pair. The Tughlaq Nama is a Persian masnavi written by Amir Khusrau, the poet of Delhi who served a line of Sultans from Balban's court onwards; it is his last historical masnavi (his last work proper is generally taken to be Nihayat ul-Kamal, 1325), composed to celebrate Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq's overthrow of Khusrau Khan in 1320 and the founding of the Tughlaq dynasty. Ibn Battuta was not a court poet at all — he was a Moroccan traveller from Tangier who reached Delhi in the 1330s, was appointed qazi of Delhi by Muhammad bin Tughlaq, and was later sent by that Sultan as an envoy towards China. What he left behind is the Rihla, the travel account he dictated after returning to Morocco, formally titled Tuhfat-un-Nuzzar fi Ghara'ib-il-Amsar wa Aja'ib-il-Asfar. He is therefore linked to the Tughlaqs as an eyewitness, not as the author of the Tughlaqnama — and it is that half-truth the question is built on.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Correctly matched, so it is not the answer. Minhaj-us-Siraj Juzjani, who rose to be the chief qazi at Delhi, wrote the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri as a general history running down to about 1260 and dedicated it to Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud — from whom it takes its name. It is the single most important contemporary source for the Ilbari or 'Slave' Sultans, including Iltutmish and Raziyya.  (b) Correctly matched, so it is not the answer — and it is the option most students wrongly attack, because they remember that Ziauddin Barani also wrote a Tarikh-i-Firozshahi. Two separate works carry that title: Barani's, which closes in the opening years of Firoz Shah Tughlaq's reign, and Shams-i-Siraj Afif's, which is the fuller account of that reign. Pairing the title with Afif is therefore perfectly legitimate.  (d) Correctly matched, so it is not the answer. Gulbadan Begam was a daughter of Babur and a half-sister of Humayun, and she wrote her account of Humayun's reign — the Humayun-nama, also called Ahwal-i-Humayun Badshah — at Akbar's request, so that the material could feed into Abul Fazl's Akbarnama. It is the only surviving history of the period written by a woman of the Mughal household.

Concept: Medieval Indian history is reconstructed largely from Persian-language texts, and the exam expects you to hold the text and its author together as one unit. Those texts fall into recognisable families: court chronicles commissioned or patronised by rulers (Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, the two Tarikh-i-Firozshahis, Padshahnama), literary or poetic works by court poets (Amir Khusrau's Tughlaq Nama, Qiran-us-Sadain, Khazain-ul-Futuh), memoirs and family histories written from inside the household (Baburnama, Humayun-nama, Jahangir's Tuzuk), and outsiders' travel accounts (Al-Biruni's Kitab-ul-Hind, Ibn Battuta's Rihla). Recognising which family a title belongs to is usually enough to spot a wrong pairing.

State PCS 2019 Q131 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q131 — History PYQ with Answer