Which Sikh Guru gave the idea of the Gurmukhi script?

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 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.