A historian compares two Muslim communities of the past. The first was a linguistically diverse trading community of the Punjab, Sind and Gujarat, belonging to a branch of a Shi'a sect. Its devotional poems, sung at daily prayer meetings, were passed on by word of mouth for a long time and were written down only much later. The second community lived on the south-western coast of India. There, after marriage, a woman continued to live in the house of her birth with her children, and her husband came to stay with them.
In which script were the devotional poems of the first community finally recorded?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → The Khojaki script, derived from the local landa mercantile script
Option (1) The Khojaki script, derived from the local landa mercantile script — Correct. The first community is the Khojahs, and their poems are the ginan. These were passed on orally and later written in the Khojaki script. That script came from landa, a clipped script used by merchants.
Option (2) The Khojaki script, derived from the Devanagari script — Incorrect. Khojaki is right, but its source is wrong. It grew out of the local landa mercantile script.
Option (3) The landa script, derived from the older Khojaki script — Incorrect. This reverses the link. Landa was the older merchants' script, and Khojaki was derived from it.
Option (4) The Perso-Arabic script used in the Mughal court — Incorrect. The court's Perso-Arabic script was used for Persian writing. The Khojahs recorded the ginan in their own Khojaki script drawn from landa.
NCERT (2026-27): “5.2 The popular practice of Islam … “The ginan were transmitted orally before being recorded in the Khojaki script that was derived from the local landa (“clipped” mercantile script) used by the linguistically diverse community of Khojahs in the Punjab, Sind and Gujarat.” |