Abdur Razzaq, who visited Calicut (present-day Kozhikode) in the fifteenth-century was:
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → Ambassador of Persia
Abdur Razzaq, who wrote of the port of Calicut (present-day Kozhikode) in his travelogue of the 1440s, was an ambassador sent by the ruler of Persia; he also left one of the important accounts of the city of Vijayanagara.
NCERT (2025-26): “A strange nation? … The travelogue of Abdur Razzaq written in the 1440s is an interesting mixture of emotions and perceptions. On the one hand, he did not appreciate what he saw in the port of Calicut (present-day Kozhikode) in Kerala, which was populated by ‘a people the likes of whom I had never imagined’, describing them as ‘a strange nation’.… Finding out about the city … Several travellers visited the city and wrote about it. Notable among their accounts are those of an Italian trader named Nicolo de Conti, an ambassador named Abdur Razzaq sent by the ruler of Persia, a merchant named Afanasii Nikitin from Russia, all of whom visited the city in the fifteenth century, and those of Duarte Barbosa, Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz from Portugal, who came in the sixteenth century.” |