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.
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → Marco Polo
Option (1) Marco Polo — Correct. The excerpt is from Ibn Battuta's Rihla. He travelled in China as far as Beijing in the fourteenth century. Marco Polo had visited China (and also India) earlier, from his home base in Venice, in the late thirteenth century.
Option (2) Niccolao Manucci — Incorrect. Manucci was an Italian who came to India much later, in the Mughal period.
Option (3) Duarte Barbosa — Incorrect. Duarte Barbosa was a Portuguese writer who described trade and society in south India. He never set out for China from Venice.
Option (4) Antonio Monserrate — Incorrect. Antonio Monserrate was a Jesuit priest at the court of Akbar in the sixteenth century.
NCERT (2026-27): “2.1 An early globe-trotter … |