Who among the following had translated Chintamani Bhatt's Sanskrit text 'Suka Saptati' in Persian and gave it the title 'Tutinama' ?

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Correct — C, Khwaza Ziya-uddin Nakhshabi. Ziya-ud-din Nakhshabi — the name is also transliterated Khwaja Ziya'al-Din Nakhshabi — was a Persian-writing physician and Sufi who migrated to Badaun, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, in the fourteenth century. There, in about 1330-1335, he recast the Sanskrit Sukasaptati, the 'Seventy Tales of the Parrot', into Persian and gave the new work the title Tutinama, literally 'Book of the Parrot'. It is a frame narrative: a parrot holds a merchant's wife at home night after night by beginning a story and leaving it unfinished until dawn. Nakhshabi did not translate mechanically — he reworked and abridged the tales for a Persian readership, which is why the Tutinama is normally described as his version rather than a plain rendering. The work later became famous through the lavishly illustrated manuscript produced for Emperor Akbar in the 1560s, a large part of which is now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. One caution on the stem: the attribution of the Sukasaptati to Chintamani Bhatta comes from Indian textbook accounts and is the commission's framing; the authorship of that Sanskrit collection, which is dated to roughly the twelfth century, is not securely settled, and nothing in the answer depends on it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Abdur Razzaq was a fifteenth-century Timurid envoy sent from Herat by Shah Rukh, who visited Calicut and the Vijayanagara court of Devaraya II in 1442-43. He is a source, not a translator — his account of what he saw survives in the Matla-us-Sadain wa Majma-ul-Bahrain. Wrong century and wrong kind of work.  (b) The strongest distractor, because Amir Khusrau really was the great Persian literary figure of the Delhi Sultanate in exactly this period and really did write on Indian themes. But his works are his own compositions — the Khazain-ul-Futuh, the Tughlaq Nama, the Nuh Sipihr, the Persian masnavis — not a translation of the Sukasaptati. Fame in Persian letters is not the same as authorship of this particular text.  (d) Shihabuddin al-Umari was an Arab administrator and encyclopaedist at Damascus and Cairo who wrote the Masalik-ul-Absar. His account of India is second-hand: he never came to India, and he wrote in Arabic, not Persian.

Concept: Translation from Sanskrit into Persian was one of the long continuities of medieval Indian court culture, running from the Sultanate into the Mughal period. Firoz Shah Tughlaq had Sanskrit manuscripts taken from Nagarkot rendered into Persian; Nakhshabi's Tutinama belongs to the same fourteenth-century current, though it was a private literary project rather than a royal commission. Under Akbar the practice was institutionalised in a translation bureau, which produced the Razmnama (the Mahabharata), a Persian Ramayana, and Nizamuddin Panipati's Jug-Bashisht from the Yogavasistha; Dara Shukoh's Sirr-i-Akbar, a Persian version of the Upanishads, is the seventeenth-century culmination. The Tutinama's own afterlife is part of this story — Akbar had it illustrated, and its miniatures are among the earliest surviving works of the Mughal atelier.

State PCS 2022 Q82 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2022 Q82 — History PYQ with Answer