Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Babur wrote Tuzk-e-Babri in Chagatai Turki.
Reason (R) : Turki was the official language o

Question

Given below are two statements, one is labelled as Assertion (A) and the other as Reason (R).
Assertion (A) : Babur wrote Tuzk-e-Babri in Chagatai Turki.
Reason (R) : Turki was the official language of the Mughal Court.
Select the correct answer from the code given below :
Code :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, (A) is true, but (R) is false. Before the history, note what this booklet has done to the code. All twenty assertion-reason items in this paper use a reversed layout in which (a) means 'both true, but (R) is NOT the correct explanation' and (d) means 'both true and (R) IS the correct explanation' — the opposite of the arrangement most candidates have drilled. Option (b) reads the same either way, but read it off the page rather than trusting habit. Now the substance. The Assertion is true. Babur's memoirs — the Baburnama, also called the Tuzk-e-Babri or Tuzuk-i-Baburi, and titled by Babur himself 'Vaqayi', meaning 'The Events' — were written in Chagatai, 'the Chagatai language, known to Babur as Türki'. Chagatai was the spoken language of the Timurids, Babur's own inheritance from Central Asia, and he wrote it with unusual plainness and candour, which is why the memoir is valued as literature and not merely as a source. The Reason is false. Turki was never the official language of the Mughal court. That place belonged to Persian — 'Classical Persian, the literary language of the Mughal court' — the language of the chancery, the revenue records, the histories and the poetry, and the language whose dominance became settled under Akbar. The decisive evidence sits inside the Assertion's own story: because the Mughal court read Persian and not Chagatai, Akbar had his grandfather's memoirs translated into Classical Persian by his courtier Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan in 1589-90. A book does not need translating into the language of the court it was written for. Turki survived at court as an ancestral tongue that emperors could still speak, not as the language of government. Assertion true, Reason false, which is option (b).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Requires the Reason to be true, and it is not. Persian, not Turki, was the language of the Mughal court and administration; Chagatai Turki was Babur's mother tongue and the ancestral speech of his house. If Turki really had been the official court language, Akbar would have had no reason to commission a Persian translation of the Baburnama in 1589-90 — and that translation is the plainest possible proof of which language the Mughal court actually worked in. Note also that on this booklet (a) is the 'both true, R does NOT explain A' slot, which is where a candidate looking for the standard meaning of (a) will not find it.  (c) The exact inversion of the truth, and both halves fail. The Assertion is not false: the Baburnama is one of the great works of Chagatai Turkic prose, which is precisely why it stands apart from the Persian historiography that surrounds it in the Mughal period. And the Reason is not true: Persian held the official position. Candidates reach this option by assuming that a dynasty of Central Asian Turkic origin must have governed in a Turkic language. It did not. The Timurids had already adopted Persian as the language of high culture and administration in Central Asia and Iran long before Babur crossed into India.  (d) Fails first because the Reason is false, and fails again on the logic even if it were granted. Babur wrote in Chagatai because it was his own language and the language he had grown up composing in — a fact about the author, not about the chancery he would later found in India. The status of a court language could not explain the choice in any case, since the memoirs were begun long before there was a Mughal court in India to have an official language. And watch the letter: in this booklet (d) carries the meaning candidates normally look for at (a), so it attracts anyone applying the remembered code.

Concept: Three languages have to be kept distinct when reading the Mughals. Chagatai Turkic was the ancestral and spoken language of the Timurid house — Babur's mother tongue and the language of his memoirs. Persian was the language of government, letters and prestige, inherited from the Timurid and Ilkhanid courts of Central Asia and Iran and carried into India, where it had already been the Delhi Sultanate's administrative language for three centuries. Hindavi, and later Urdu, was the language of the streets, camps and bazaars. The Mughals were a Turkic dynasty that administered in Persian, and the Baburnama's translation into Persian at Akbar's command is the neatest single illustration of that arrangement.

State PCS 2025 Q149 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q149 — History PYQ with Answer