UPPSC 2025 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 149 of 150

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).

• (a)Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (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)(A) is false, but (R) is true — 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)Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A) — 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.

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.

The Assertion here is a fact about an author; the Reason is a claim about an institution, and the two are not the same kind of statement. Test them separately. Did Babur write his memoirs in Chagatai Turki? Yes — the work is a landmark of Turkic prose. Was Turki the official language of the Mughal court? No — Persian was, and the proof is that the memoirs had to be translated into Persian for that court to read them. It is worth noticing how much of the trap depends on an assumption about ethnicity: the dynasty was Turkic in origin, so a candidate infers that its government must have been Turkic in language. Dynasties routinely govern in a language other than their own — the Delhi Sultans, also of Turkic origin, likewise administered in Persian. Having settled the substance, read the printed option text, because this paper has swapped the meanings of (a) and (d).

• The Baburnama, also called the Tuzk-e-Babri or Tuzuk-i-Baburi and titled 'Vaqayi' (The Events) by Babur, is 'written in the Chagatai language, known to Babur as Türki'
• Chagatai was 'the spoken language of the Timurids' — Babur's mother tongue, not the administrative language of the empire he founded
• Persian was 'Classical Persian, the literary language of the Mughal court', and it was the language of Mughal administration, chronicles and poetry
• Akbar had the memoirs translated into Classical Persian by his courtier Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan in 1589-90 CE — the clearest evidence that the court's working language was Persian
• Persian had already been the administrative language of the Delhi Sultanate before the Mughals, so the Mughals inherited rather than introduced it; Turkic origin and Persianate government went together for both dynasties
• Jahangir's own memoirs, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, were composed in Persian — three generations after Babur, the family memoir had moved into the court's language

• This booklet's rotated assertion-reason code — no letter keeps its usual meaning. All 20 assertion-reason items here run (a) both true / R does NOT explain A, (b) A true / R false, (c) A false / R true, (d) both true / R IS the explanation: the standard code shifted one place. Always read the printed option text rather than reciting the layout
• Inferring the language of government from the ethnicity of the dynasty. The Mughals were Turkic and governed in Persian, exactly as the Turkic Delhi Sultans had done before them
• Confusing the language a book was written in with the language it is usually read in. The illustrated Baburnama manuscripts that survive from Akbar's workshop carry the Persian translation, not Babur's Chagatai original

UPPSC likes medieval-history assertion-reason pairs in which the Assertion is a solid textbook fact and the Reason is a plausible-sounding generalisation about the period that quietly overreaches — here, promoting the dynasty's ancestral tongue to the status of official language. UPSC prefers to test the same ground positively, asking who translated what into Persian under which emperor, so the Akbar-era translation programme is the common thread worth holding for both.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Babur's memoirs, the Baburnama, were originally composed in which language?

  • (a)Classical Persian
  • (b)Chagatai Turkic
  • (c)Arabic
  • (d)Braj Bhasha

  Answer(b) Chagatai Turkic — the spoken language of the Timurids, which Babur himself called Türki; Akbar later had it translated into Persian by Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Persian translation of the Baburnama was made during the reign of Akbar by

  • (a)Abul Fazl
  • (b)Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan
  • (c)Badauni
  • (d)Faizi

  Answer(b) Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan — the translation was completed in 1589-90 CE, and its very existence shows that the Mughal court's working language was Persian, not Turki.