Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 12

The correct answer is B, Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan, who was a scholar of comparative religion; besides having the Upanishads rendered into Persian as the Sirr-i-Akbar, or the greatest secret, he wrote the Majma-ul-Bahrain, the mingling of two oceans, on the common ground between Hindu and…

Aurangzeb ended official history writing after the first ten years of his reign, which the Alamgirnama of Mirza Muhammad Kazim had covered, so Khafi Khan wrote his history privately; his very name is understood to mean the one who wrote in secret.

Two different books carry the title Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi, and the difference between them is the commonest trap in this topic: Barani’s runs from the reign of Balban down to the early years of Firoz Shah Tughlaq, while the other, by Shams-i-Siraj Afif, is devoted to the reign of Firoz Shah…

The correct answer is A, Abdul Hamid Lahori, who followed the method Abul Fazl had established and produced the official chronicle of Shah Jahan’s reign; a work of the same title by Muhammad Amin Qazwini belongs to the same court, and the Amal-i-Salih of Muhammad Salih Kambo is a further…

The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri is Jahangir’s own memoir, written by the emperor in Persian and carried forward by others once his health failed, and it is notable for its close observation of plants, animals and paintings as much as for its politics.

The correct answer is C, Chagatai Turkish, which was Babur’s mother tongue; the memoirs are also called the Tuzuk-i-Baburi, and Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan translated them into Persian during Akbar’s reign, which is how they reached the wider Mughal court.

Its value lies in what the official chronicles leave out: the life of the household, the journeys of the women of the family and the quarrels among the princes, described by someone who was present.

His other works include the Qiran-us-Sadain on the meeting of Bughra Khan and Kaiqubad, the Miftah-ul-Futuh on Jalaluddin Khalji, the Nuh Sipihr in praise of India, and the Tughlaq Nama.

It traces history from the beginning of the world down to his own day and is the main source for the early sultans of Delhi, including Razia.

The correct answer is B, Abul Fazl, one of the nine jewels of Akbar’s court, who wrote the Akbarnama in three volumes; the Ain-i-Akbari is its third volume and is a gazetteer of the empire in five books, describing the departments, the provinces, the revenue, the coinage, the army and…

The name itself means the birth of Kumara, that is Kartikeya, the son of Shiva and Parvati, and the poem tells how Shiva and Parvati were married and how their son was born to kill the demon Taraka.

The Progressive Writers' Association held its first conference at Lucknow in 1936 and Premchand, who had begun his career writing in Urdu under the name Nawab Rai before turning to Hindi, presided over it and delivered its opening address.

He wrote the poem in Urdu early in the twentieth century as a song in praise of the land, and it was later set to music and became one of the best loved patriotic songs of the country.

The ruler of Golconda who founded the city of Hyderabad wrote verse in Dakhani, the southern form of the language, and the collection that survives under his name is counted as the first complete diwan in it, which is why the earliest chapter of Urdu literature belongs to the Deccan…

Akbar set up a translation department in which Sanskrit works were rendered into Persian, and the Mahabharata was translated there as the Razmnama, a name that means the book of war.

Barani lived at the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq and wrote in the reign of Firoz Shah Tughlaq.

He was a minister and a close friend of Akbar and wrote the Akbarnama, of which the Ain-i-Akbari forms the third volume, setting out the departments of state, the revenue of the provinces, the ranks of the nobility, the coins, the crops and the customs of the country.

Khusrau served a line of Sultans at Delhi, was a disciple of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and was given the title Tuti-e-Hind, the parrot of India.

This is one of the striking facts of Mughal cultural history: the emperor who withdrew court patronage from musical performance presided over a reign in which the largest number of Persian treatises on Indian classical music was written, as scholars turned from the court to the book.

He was an officer of Jahangir's court who continued the record of the reign after the emperor stopped writing his own memoir, and his Iqbalnama-i-Jahangiri is one of the main Persian sources for the period.