The Mughal empire: the emperors

Nizamuddin Panipati rendered the Yogavasistha, the Sanskrit work of Advaita philosophy cast as Vasistha's instruction to Rama, into Persian during Akbar's reign, the translation being made for Prince Salim, later Jahangir. It belongs to the wider programme of translation from Sanskrit into Persian that Akbar sponsored through his maktab khana, which produced Persian versions of the Mahabharata as the Razmnama, the Ramayana, the Atharva Veda and the Lilavati, and which formed part of his broader effort to make the intellectual traditions of his Hindu subjects accessible at court.

• Option (a) is therefore correct.
• Option (b) is wrong because Humayun's reign was consumed by war and exile and supported no such programme.
• Options (c) and (d) are wrong on chronology; the Sanskrit to Persian translation associated with Shahjahan's reign is Dara Shukoh's version of the Upanishads, the Sirr i Akbar, a distinct undertaking, while Aurangzeb withdrew patronage from work of this kind altogether.

The question asks which statement is not correct.

• Option (b) is correct as a statement of fact. Tansen composed dhrupads on Hindu deities, including compositions on Shiva and on Krishna, and dhrupad remained a devotional form even at the Mughal court.
• Option (c) is correct. He composed songs in praise of his patrons, both Raja Ramchandra Singh of Rewa and Akbar, and court panegyric in musical form was ordinary practice.
• Option (d) is correct. Tansen is credited with a number of ragas, among them Miyan ki Malhar, Miyan ki Todi, Darbari Kanada and Miyan ka Sarang, and the prefix Miyan in these names records the attribution.
• Option (a) is the statement that fails, and is therefore the answer. The title conferred by Akbar was Miyan, which is why he is known as Mian Tansen. The name Tansen itself is generally traced to his earlier years and to the patronage of Raja Vikramjit of Gwalior, not to Akbar. The item turns entirely on separating the honorific Miyan from the name Tansen, and the very form of the name Mian Tansen used in the stem is the internal clue.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Gunpowder and firearms were known and used in the subcontinent well before 1526: cannon and handguns appear in the Bahmani and Vijayanagara wars and in Gujarat and Malwa through the fifteenth century, and Babur's advantage at Panipat lay not in introducing gunpowder but in the tactical system he brought from Central Asia, the tulughma flanking manoeuvre combined with the araba, carts chained together to shield field artillery served by Ustad Ali Quli and Mustafa Rumi.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The true arch and the dome entered Indian building with the Turkish conquest at the end of the twelfth century; the Qutb complex, the Alai Darwaza of 1311 and the tombs of the Tughlaqs and Lodis all precede Babur by two to three centuries.
• Statement 3 is correct. Babur was a Timurid in the male line, descended from Timur through Miran Shah and from Chingiz Khan through his mother, and his victory established the Timurid house in India, which is why the dynasty called itself Gurkani and only outsiders called it Mughal. The official answer (b) follows. Elimination route: the Lodi and Sayyid tombs standing in Delhi are enough to reject statement 2, which removes options (a) and (d), and the pre Panipat use of artillery removes (c). The governing principle is that a question crediting a founder with introducing what his predecessors already had is usually testing continuity against rupture.

• Option (c) is correct. The Ibadat Khana, the house of worship, was built at Fatehpur Sikri in 1575 and was the venue at which Akbar convened discussions on religion. Initially the debates were confined to Sunni ulama, but from 1578 they were opened to Shias, Sufis, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and the Jesuit fathers from Goa, and it was the acrimony of the Sunni theologians among themselves, recorded with evident distaste by Badauni, that is generally credited with pushing Akbar towards the doctrine of sulh-i-kul, universal peace. The mahzar or so-called infallibility decree of 1579 and the Tauhid-i-Ilahi of 1582 followed from this trajectory, and the debates themselves were discontinued in 1582.
• Option (d) is the closest distractor and is wrong in two respects: the participants were scholars and divines rather than nobles, and Akbar presided rather than merely providing a room.
• Option (a) is incorrect: the congregational mosque at Fatehpur Sikri is the Jama Masjid, entered through the Buland Darwaza.
• Option (b) is incorrect: a private prayer chamber is a personal oratory and would defeat the entire purpose of a hall built for public disputation.