Indian History Quiz: Bhakti and Sufi Movements

The correct answer is C, a hospice. A khanqah was the hospice or lodge where a Sufi master lived with his disciples, taught, held assemblies of devotional music and fed whoever came to the door, whatever their faith or caste. It was the working centre of a silsila, and the Chishti khanqahs at Ajmer, Delhi and Ajodhan drew visitors of every background, which is why they mattered so much to the social history of the Sultanate period. Option A and option D are wrong because the words for heaven and hell in this vocabulary are jannat and jahannum, not khanqah. Option B is wrong because the tomb of a Sufi saint is called a dargah, and the death anniversary observed there is the urs. Students should also remember jamaat khana for a larger community hall and sama for the musical assembly held inside the khanqah.

The correct answer is D, Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya. Mahbub-i-Ilahi means the beloved of God, and it is the title by which this Chishti master of Delhi has been known for seven centuries. He kept his distance from the Sultans, refused their grants, and his hospice at Ghiyaspur became the most visited centre of the order; Amir Khusrau was his best-known disciple. Option A, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, brought the Chishti order to India and settled at Ajmer, where he is remembered as Gharib Nawaz, the helper of the poor. Option B, Baba Fariduddin Ganjshakar, taught at Ajodhan in Punjab, wrote in the local language, and a number of his verses were later included in the Sikh scripture. Option C, Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki, was the successor of Moinuddin Chishti at Delhi and the master of Baba Farid, so the four names form a single line of succession.

The correct answer is B, Nizamuddin Auliya. Amir Khusrau served as a poet at the courts of several Delhi Sultans, but his spiritual allegiance was to Nizamuddin Auliya, and he was buried beside his master. He is called the Tuti-i-Hind, the parrot of India, wrote works such as the Khazain-ul-Futuh and the Nuh Sipihr, composed in the early Hindavi speech from which Hindi and Urdu grew, and tradition credits him with shaping qawwali. Option A, Fariduddin Ganjshakar, was the master of Nizamuddin Auliya himself and belongs to an earlier generation at Ajodhan. Option C, Shaikh Salim Chishti, lived in the sixteenth century at Sikri, where Akbar built Fatehpur Sikri near his hospice, three centuries after Khusrau. Option D does not belong to the line of Chishti masters that examiners test.

The correct answer is A, Guru Angad Dev. The second Guru standardised and popularised Gurmukhi, the script in which the hymns of the Gurus were written down, and this made it possible to preserve the teaching of the movement in the language its followers actually spoke. Option B, Guru Amar Das, the third Guru, is remembered for strengthening the langar, the free community kitchen where people of all castes ate together, and for organising the manji system of preaching centres. Option C, Guru Ram Das, the fourth Guru, founded the city of Amritsar. Option D, Guru Nanak Dev, the first Guru and founder of the faith, preached one formless God, the remembrance of the divine name and honest labour, and travelled widely on his udasis, but the script itself is credited to his successor.

The correct answer is B, Vishnu. The Alvars were the twelve Vaishnava saint-poets of the Tamil country, active roughly between the sixth and the ninth centuries, whose hymns were later gathered as the Divya Prabandham and sung in temples. Option A is the standard trap: the devotees of Shiva in the same region and the same centuries were the sixty-three Nayanars, and questions often swap the two groups. Options C and D are wrong because neither Surya nor Shakti had a comparable Tamil movement of this kind, though local cults existed. Two further details are worth remembering: Andal was the one woman among the Alvars and Karaikkal Ammaiyar among the Nayanars, and these singers composed in Tamil rather than Sanskrit, which is why the Bhakti movement is said to have begun in the south and travelled north.

The correct answer is C, Shankaracharya. Writing in the eighth century, he argued that Brahman alone is real, that the individual soul is not different from Brahman, and that the world as ordinarily perceived is the work of maya; this is Advaita, non-dualism. Option A, Ramanujacharya, taught Vishishtadvaita or qualified non-dualism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in which souls and matter are real attributes of one supreme being, and he made devotion to Vishnu central. Option B, Madhvacharya, taught Dvaita or dualism, holding that God and the soul are eternally distinct. Option D, Vallabhacharya, taught Shuddhadvaita, pure non-dualism, and founded the Pushtimarg school of Krishna devotion to which Surdas belonged. Nimbarka, with his Dvaitadvaita, completes the set of five acharyas that examiners ask students to match.

The correct answer is B, Awadhi. Tulsidas retold the story of Rama in the Awadhi speech of eastern Uttar Pradesh, which put the epic within reach of people who could not read Sanskrit and made the Ramcharitmanas the most widely recited devotional work of north India. Option A, Braj, was the language of Surdas, whose Sursagar sings of the childhood of Krishna, and of much of the Krishna poetry of the Ashtachhap poets. Option C, Maithili, was the language of Vidyapati of Mithila. Option D is wrong, and it is the trap in this question: the Sanskrit Ramayana of Valmiki is a different and far older work, and the whole point of Tulsidas was to compose in the spoken language. Tulsidas also wrote the Vinay Patrika and the Hanuman Chalisa is traditionally attributed to him.

The correct answer is B, the Suhrawardi order. Established in India at Multan by Shaikh Bahauddin Zakariya, it held that a mystic could accept land, wealth and office from the state and still lead a spiritual life, and its shaikhs worked closely with the Sultans of Delhi. Option A, the Chishti order, took the opposite view: its masters refused state grants, lived on futuh or unasked offerings, kept their hospices open to all and deliberately stayed away from court, which is one reason the order became the most popular in India. Option C, the Firdausi order, was a smaller branch that flourished mainly in Bihar under Shaikh Sharafuddin Yahya Maneri. Option D, the Naqshbandi order, arrived later, in the Mughal period, and is associated with Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and with opposition to practices it considered un-Islamic, including sama.

The correct answer is B, Ajmer. Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, remembered as Gharib Nawaz or helper of the poor, brought the Chishti order to India towards the end of the twelfth century and settled at Ajmer in Rajasthan, where his tomb became one of the most visited shrines in the subcontinent for Hindus and Muslims alike. Option A, Delhi, holds the tombs of his successors Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki, Nizamuddin Auliya and Nasiruddin Chiragh-i-Dehlavi, which is why it is the most tempting wrong answer. Option C, Multan, was the seat of Shaikh Bahauddin Zakariya of the rival Suhrawardi order. Option D, Fatehpur Sikri, is where Shaikh Salim Chishti lived; Akbar built his new capital near the saint’s hospice in the sixteenth century, and the white marble tomb there is his, not Moinuddin’s.

The correct answer is B, Karnataka. Basavanna was a minister in the Kalachuri court in twelfth-century Karnataka and led the Virashaiva or Lingayat movement, whose followers wore the linga on their body, rejected temple ritual, Brahmanical authority and caste, and composed short prose-poems called vachanas in Kannada; Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu belong to the same circle. Option A, Bengal, is the region of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition of kirtan. Option C, Assam, is where Shankaradeva founded the Ekasarana dharma and established the sattras and namghars. Option D, Maharashtra, is the home of the Varkari tradition of Jnaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath and Tukaram, centred on the shrine of Vitthala at Pandharpur. Matching a saint to his region and language is the commonest form this question takes.