A teacher in Lucknow reads out an excerpt from a fourteenth-century travel account. The traveller writes that on one journey he was attacked by fever and tied himself to his saddle with a cloth so that he would not fall off from weakness. When he reached a town, the townsfolk came out with greetings for one another, but nobody greeted him, as he knew none of them. He wept from loneliness until a fellow pilgrim, seeing his distress, came up and greeted him. The teacher then asks the class to identify the account and to place it beside other travel writing.
Who wrote the account from which the teacher reads?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → Ibn Battuta
Option (1) Al-Biruni — Incorrect. Al-Biruni wrote the Kitab-ul-Hind in the eleventh century. It is a study of Indian society and learning, far earlier than this account.
Option (2) Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi — Incorrect. Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi wrote in Persian about south India in the 1440s, a century later.
Option (3) Ibn Battuta — Correct. The fever, the saddle and the lonely arrival come from the Rihla of Ibn Battuta, who shows that a traveller could feel homesick, or fall ill.
Option (4) Mahmud Wali Balkhi — Incorrect. Mahmud Wali Balkhi travelled widely in the 1620s, long after the fourteenth century.
NCERT (2026-27): “2.1 An early globe-trotter … |