Match List – I with List – II and select the correct answer using the code given below the lists.
List – I (Disciple)
A. Kabir
B. Amir Khusrau
C. Surdas
D. Mardana
List – II (Guru)
1. Guru Nanak Dev
2

Question

Match List – I with List – II and select the correct answer using the code given below the lists.
List – I (Disciple)
A. Kabir
B. Amir Khusrau
C. Surdas
D. Mardana
List – II (Guru)
1. Guru Nanak Dev
2. Swami Ramananda
3. Nizamuddin Auliya
4. Vallabhacharya
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, A-2, B-3, C-4, D-1: Kabir with Swami Ramananda, Amir Khusrau with Nizamuddin Auliya, Surdas with Vallabhacharya and Mardana with Guru Nanak Dev. Take them one at a time. Kabir, the weaver-poet of Varanasi and the towering voice of the nirguna stream of the Bhakti movement, is placed by the tradition in the line of Swami Ramananda, the Vaishnava teacher of Varanasi who broke with convention by admitting disciples without regard to caste; the well-known story has the young Kabir lying across the steps of a ghat before dawn so that Ramananda, descending to bathe, would step on him and involuntarily utter the name of Rama, which Kabir then claimed as his initiation. Amir Khusrau, the Persian poet of Delhi who served seven sultans, was a devoted murid of the Chishti saint Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya — the most securely documented pair on the list, and the one you can still see, since Khusrau lies buried a few steps from his master in the Nizamuddin dargah complex in Delhi. Surdas, the blind poet of Krishna's childhood whose padas fill the Sursagar, belongs to the Pushtimarg of Vallabhacharya and is counted the first of the Ashtachhap, the eight poets of that sampradaya. Mardana was the Muslim minstrel of Talwandi who accompanied Guru Nanak Dev on his long journeys, playing the rabab while the Guru sang, and he is remembered as Nanak's earliest and most constant companion; verses attributed to him are preserved in the Guru Granth Sahib. Two of these pairs — Khusrau and Mardana — are matters of documented record; the other two are the settled tradition of the sampradayas concerned, and that is what the examiner is testing.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Gets Surdas and Mardana right but swaps the first two, sending Kabir to Nizamuddin Auliya and Amir Khusrau to Swami Ramananda. Both halves of the swap are impossible. Kabir's world is Varanasi and the vernacular nirguna Bhakti of the fifteenth century; Nizamuddin Auliya was a Chishti Sufi of Delhi who died in 1325, generations earlier and in a different tradition. Amir Khusrau, for his part, was a Persian-writing Muslim courtier and Sufi disciple in Delhi, and had no connection whatever with a Vaishnava Bhakti teacher of Varanasi.  (c) The worst of the four, because it gets every pair wrong. It repeats the Kabir–Nizamuddin and Khusrau–Ramananda swap of option (a), and then adds a second swap at the other end, tying Surdas to Guru Nanak Dev and Mardana to Vallabhacharya. Surdas belongs to the Krishna-devotion of Braj and the Pushtimarg; Mardana belongs to Nanak's travelling company in Punjab. Nothing in this option survives contact with the actual figures.  (d) The dangerous near-miss. It settles the first two pairs exactly as the key does — Kabir with Ramananda, Khusrau with Nizamuddin Auliya — and then reverses the last two, giving Surdas to Guru Nanak Dev and Mardana to Vallabhacharya. A candidate who is sure only of Kabir and Khusrau, and who guesses the tail, lands here half the time. The check is simple and worth internalising: Surdas sang of Krishna in Braj Bhasha and stands at the head of Vallabhacharya's Ashtachhap, while Mardana was the rabab player who walked beside Guru Nanak. Their traditions do not overlap even geographically.

Concept: Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries north India produced several devotional lineages that a prelims paper likes to shuffle together, because each is organised around a guru and the disciples who carried his teaching forward. Ramananda's line in Varanasi opened Vaishnava devotion to disciples of every caste and gave the nirguna poets, Kabir foremost among them, their vernacular voice. Vallabhacharya's Pushtimarg in the Braj country worshipped Krishna in his childhood form and gathered around it the eight poets called the Ashtachhap, of whom Surdas is the greatest. Guru Nanak Dev, founding the Sikh tradition in Punjab, travelled for decades with the Muslim rabab player Mardana at his side. Running parallel to all of these is the Chishti silsila of Sufism, whose Delhi khanqah under Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya drew in the poet and musician Amir Khusrau. The paper mixes a Sufi pir into a list of Bhakti gurus deliberately: the shared vocabulary of guru and disciple, of poet and master, is exactly what makes the confusion possible.

State PCS 2025 Q132 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q132 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer