Which of the following statements are true?
(A) Mughal court chronicles were written in Persian, though the mother tongue of the Mughals was Turkish.
(B) Persian was later Indianised and a new language, Urdu, sprang from the interaction of Persian and Hindavi.
(C) The Mughal chronicle Akbar Nama was originally written in Turkish language.
(D) It was only after the arrival of the British East India Company that Mahabharata was translated into Persian as the Razmnama.
(E) ‘Kitabkhana’ in the Mughal period was the centre of manuscript production, scriptorum.
Choose the correct answer from the options given below :
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 1
The correct answer is Option (1) → (A), (B), (E) only
(A) Mughal court chronicles were written in Persian, though the mother tongue of the Mughals was Turkish. Correct. Mughal court chronicles were written in Persian. As the Mughals were Chaghtai Turks by origin, Turkish was their mother tongue; it was Akbar who made Persian the leading language of the court.
(B) Persian was later Indianised and a new language, Urdu, sprang from the interaction of Persian and Hindavi. Correct. Persian became Indianised by absorbing local idioms, and Urdu sprang from its interaction with Hindavi.
(C) The Mughal chronicle Akbar Nama was originally written in Turkish language. Incorrect. The Akbar Nama was written in Persian. It was Babur’s memoirs that were written in Turkish and later translated into the Persian Babur Nama.
(D) It was only after the arrival of the British East India Company that Mahabharata was translated into Persian as the Razmnama. Incorrect. The translation was commissioned by the Mughal emperors themselves, along with that of the Ramayana; the Company had nothing to do with it.
(E) ‘Kitabkhana’ in the Mughal period was the centre of manuscript production, scriptorum. Correct. The centre of manuscript production was the imperial kitabkhana, a scriptorium where the emperor’s manuscripts were kept and new ones produced.
Note: This question is taken from the chapter ‘Kings and Chronicles’ which was there in the pre-rationalised NCERT and has been deleted from subsequent editions of NCERT, including the NCERT book (2026-27).
NCERT (Pre-rationalised): “2.1 From Turkish to Persian … Mughal court chronicles were written in Persian. Under the Sultans of Delhi it flourished as a language of the court and of literary writings, alongside north Indian languages, especially Hindavi and its regional variants. As the Mughals were Chaghtai Turks by origin, Turkish was their mother tongue. Their first ruler Babur wrote poetry and his memoirs in this language. It was Akbar who consciously set out to make Persian the leading language of the Mughal court. Cultural and intellectual contacts with Iran, as well as a regular stream of Iranian and Central Asian migrants seeking positions at the Mughal court, might have motivated the emperor to adopt the language. Persian was elevated to a language of empire, conferring power and prestige on those who had a command of it. It was spoken by the king, the royal household and the elite at court. Further, it became the language of administration at all levels so that accountants, clerks and other functionaries also learnt it. Even when Persian was not directly used, its vocabulary and idiom heavily influenced the language of official records in Rajasthani and Marathi and even Tamil. Since the people using Persian in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came from many different regions of the subcontinent and spoke other Indian languages, Persian too became Indianised by absorbing local idioms. A new language, Urdu, sprang from the interaction of Persian with Hindavi. Mughal chronicles such as the Akbar Nama were written in Persian, others, like Babur’s memoirs, were translated from the Turkish into the Persian Babur Nama. Translations of Sanskrit texts such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into Persian were commissioned by the Mughal emperors. The Mahabharata was translated as the Razmnama (Book of Wars).… 2.2 The making of manuscripts … All books in Mughal India were manuscripts, that is, they were handwritten. The centre of manuscript production was the imperial kitabkhana. Although kitabkhana can be translated as library, it was a scriptorium, that is, a place where the emperor’s collection of manuscripts was kept and new manuscripts were produced.…” |