SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 23 September 2025, Shift 1 · General Awareness · Question 12 of 100

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Consider the following statements about 'Negotiating Mughal Law' by Nandini Chatterjee: 1) The book explores legal pluralism and property rights through a landlord family’s experience across Indian empires. 2) It is a literary biography focusing on Mughal emperors’ personal lives and poetic patronage. Which of the above statements is/are correct?

(a)Only statement 1 is correct
(b)Only statement 2 is correct
(c)Both statements 1 and 2 are correct
(d)Neither statement 1 nor 2 is correct

Answer

Why

Correct — A. Nandini Chatterjee's Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires (Cambridge University Press, 2020) is a micro-history of a landholding family in Malwa, central India.

Its chapters follow the family's deals, disputes and courts under the Mughals, then the Marathas and the British. Statement 1 holds, and statement 2 does not → option (a).

Why the others are wrong

(b)
Only statement 2 is correct — Statement 2 is false. The book studies the Mughal Empire from below, through a landlord family, not the emperors' private lives or patronage of poets.
(c)
Both statements 1 and 2 are correct — Statement 1 is true but statement 2 is not. Cambridge describes the book as far from 'the glittering courts of the emperors and nobles'.
(d)
Neither statement 1 nor 2 is correct — Statement 1 is true. The book is built on a reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents from a landlord family of Malwa.

Concept

Chatterjee writes a history of the Mughal Empire from below. It rests on a reconstructed archive of Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents kept by one family of landlords (zamindars) in Malwa, who flourished there from at least the 16th to the 20th century.

The family's papers show law in many forms: Islamic law in a mostly non-Muslim society, land deals and court disputes, and later life under Maratha and British-era rule.

Key facts

Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires, by Nandini Chatterjee, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
It is a micro-history of a landlord family in Malwa, central India.
It draws on Persian, Hindi and Marathi documents.
Nandini Chatterjee is a historian at the University of Exeter.

Study next

The zamindar in Mughal land revenueThe Marathas in Malwa in the 18th centuryMughal administration: subas, sarkars and parganas

Common traps

Picking (c) because statement 2 mentions the Mughals — the book is about a landlord family, not emperors.
Reading 'Mughal Law' as a history of the emperors — the subtitle names a family of landlords.

Here a recent history book is tested by pairing its real subject with a plausible wrong one, a biography of the emperors.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: History — all 218 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.