chapter 20

Which of the following statements is true regarding the state of science and technology in Mughal India?

Mughal India did not enjoy the same pace of advancement that was being set during the scientific revolution in Western Europe.

For Babur and his successors, their ruling family would always be "The House of Timur," prompting historians to sometimes refer to the line as the Timurids. However, because of their claims to the legacy of Genghis Khan, they would be better known to the world as the _________.

Mughals

After Jahangir's death in 1627, his son Khurram inherited the throne and reigned as Sha Jahan. His rule coincided with perhaps the high point of Mughal cultural power and prestige, as reflected in its iconic monument, the _________.

Taj Mahal.

The desire for a new Mongol empire, now allied with Islam, created opportunities for military action to unite and settle the nomadic tribes Chaghatay, leading to the rise in the fourteenth century of _________, or Tamerlane.

Temur Gurgan

Aurangzeb's long rule renewed the Mughal trend of expanding into the Northeastern areas controlled by the Ahoms, whom he ultimately succeeded in converting into _________after a military standstill, while in other areas potentially troublesome groups were lavishly bribed into joining the Mughal fold.

Mughal clients.

The net effect of this rural economic expansion was that Mughal India's growth failed to keep pace, roughly speaking, with that of China from the mid-sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.

False

Women of the nomadic Turkic peoples of the Asian steppe and their descendants, such as the Timurids, often enjoyed a degree of independence, power and influence far lesser than even those of Hindu, Sikh or Muslim elites in India.

False

While the great majority of Indian Muslims remained adherents of the Sunni and Hanafi School of interpretation of Islamic law, the non-mainstream Shi'ite branch of the _________attained considerable influence despite its small numbers through its blend of both Shi'i mysticism with practices borrowed from devotional cults of Hinduism

Isma'ilis.

After 1600, Akbar was faced with a domestic insurrection led by his own son Salim which nearly brought an untimely end to the latter's claims as heir apparent. In the end, however, Salim was able to prevail and ascended the throne as _________.

Jahangir.

Another group which developed outside of the Sunni mainstream included the Maddawis, who preached the arrival of the _________ or "rightly guided one," a savior who would lead an Islamic renewal and reunite all the Islamic lands.

Mahdi

Akbar's attempt to create a new divine faith was doomed to failure in part because:

many followers joined the new divine faith for opportunitic/political, rather than, spiritual reasons

The basic administrative unit of the Mughals was the _________, a unit comprising an area usually containing a town and from a dozen to about a hundred villages. Mughal agricultural expansion went hand in hand with systematic integration of the rural and town and city economies.

pargana

In the wake of the collapse of the Mongol Empire, the largest in world history, the Central Asian heartland of the Turkic peoples evolved into a _________, many of whose rulers claimed descent from Genghis Khan.

patchwork of smaller states

Under Aurangzeb, a more powerful Islamic state meant, not just military expansion, but _________of the Mughal state, and thus a stricter adherence to Islamic precepts than had ever been exacted by former Mughal rulers, for whom it had often been enough to demand tribute or occasional military aid from these small states in order for them to secure their status as autonomous client states.

political expansion.

In the realm of the visual arts, and just like with the Safavid Persians and the Ottomans, one of the more interesting aspects of Islam as practiced by the Mughals, is that, like the prohibitions regarding wine and other intoxicants, the injunctions against depicting the human form in art were often largely ignored in the _________.

private chambers of the royal court.

Which of the following is not a long-term consequence of the creation of a world trading system by the European maritime powers:

puestos.

The main challenge faced by the Timurids was how to create a uniform administrative structure that did not rely on the unusual gifts of a particular ruler for its own perpetuity. This meant moving from what social scientists call "charismatic" leadership -one in which loyalty is invested in a leader because of his personal qualities- toward _________leadership -in which the institution itself commands primary respect and loyalty.

rational-legal".

Because of the difficulties involdved in Humayun's own succession to the throne, his death was kept a secret for several weeks, while the court worked out plans for a _________, or the setting up of a guardian for an underage or incapacitated monarch to rule in his or heer stead, for the emperor's son, fourteen-year-old Ud-Din Akbar.

regency

Under Aurangzeb, there were two major watershed trends: the start of an ongoing decades-long war with the Marathas, a federation of fiercely independent Central Indian clans; and his controversial bid for a more robust and legalistically effective _________of Mughal India.

"Islamification".

The Mughals' primary challenge for control over Hisdustan and the crucial Silk Road trade came from the _________ princes and their Persian +allies.

Afghan.

The Mughals' expansion into Bengal foreshadowed a clash with a very different kind of enemy, the Shan people of Southeast Asia called the _________.

Ahoms.

The Mughals gave India one of its most prolific eras in terms of profusion and syntheis of literary genres, with _________remaining the chief languages of literature.

Arabic and Persian

Zahir Ud-din Muhammad Babur's claims to legitimate rule were considerable: his father was a direct descendant of Tamerlane, while his mother claimed the lineage of Genghis Khan. Much of our knowledge of him comes from the autobiographical work, the _________, perhaps the first by a sitting ruler.

Baburnama.

Great mosque projects also represent highlights of Mughal artistic sophistication and monumental scope. Among them, the Friday Delhi Mosque in Shahjahanabad and Aurangzeb's huge _________.

Badshahi Mosque in Lahore

Despite early tactical losses by the British in attempting to maneuver for themselves a piece of the Indian spice trade in relation to the ongoing Mughal power struggles in the interior territories, by 1750, the British and the French East India Companies had surpassed the Dutch for supremacy over the region's trade. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, the British would come to dominate Indian trade after securing _________.

Bengal and much of Northern India.

Harrington, the creator of the innovative concept of _________, a form of thought according to which the state supports basic religious principles, without espousing a particular denomination, was, along with Locke, greatly influenced by the New World experience in their constitutional treatises.

Civil Theology.

Despite these internal conflicts, Aurangzeb's military prowess helped him to secure key areas that had long eluded Mughal efforts: Bijapur, Golconda and much of the Maratha lands of the _________region of South Central India.

Deccan.

Akbar's first military success came at a very young age as he was forced to repel a force sent by one of Humayun's old enemies to attack Delhi in 1557. Under Akbar's leadership, the Mughal armies were able to bring the eastern, southern and western flanks of their lands into their fold and again anchoring Islam in the former areas of its influence, the heartland of Northern India, or _________.

Hindustan

In order to defend Hindustan, the Mughals built a seiresseries of fortresses throughout their inner domains and along the frontier. Which of the following is not the site of one such fortress?

Hyderabad.

Aided by the ease of travel within the Mongol Empire, _________had, by the fourteenth century, become the dominant religion among the Central Asian Turkic peoples.

Islam.

During the seventeenth century, all but one of the following European nations largely supplanted Iberian influence in the region:

Italy

The first European merchants ships to reach India in 1498 belonged to _________.

Portugal.

Akbar ordered the building of the city of Fatehpur Sikri to give thanks to and honor the memory of _________, a Sufi holy man who had predicted the birth of a male son to Akbar, on the site of the holy man's camp in the village Sikri.

Salim Chisti.

These discriminatory religious policies also created great distrust and many difficulties in dealing with self-governing, non-Muslim groups within the empire, most notably among the _________, who blended Hindu and Muslim traditions.

Sikhs.

The House of Timur's new rulers, especially his son Humayun, were now faced with the problem of consolidating, organizing, and administering Babur's vast domain. Unfortunately, Humayun's interests were geared more toward Islamic _________mysticism, poetry, astrology, and, at times, wine and opium than they were toward responsible leadership.

Sufi.

Under Akbar's tolerant approach to religion, all the religious "people of the book" enjoyed protected status and practices among both Muslims and non-believers which he deemed disquieting were reformed or discontinued. Among these, the disturbing ritual of sati, in which:

a newly widowed women were forced to commit suicide by fire.

A century before Akbar, Indian mathematicians had pushed their calculations of the value of pi to within nine decimal places, and expanded their facility with geometric relationships surrounding sine, cosine and tangent to the point that some of the fundamental concepts of infinite series and _________had been worked out.

calculus.

Fathullah Shirazi, a gifted Indian engineer, astronomer and philosopher:

came up with the concept for a multi-barreled gun -similar in design to that of Leonardo Da Vinci.

As was the case in China, the "inner" world of the household and the "outer" world of business, politics and warfare were clearly defined by_______.

gender.

The primary criteria used in this selection process, as with any fiscal-military state, were military and administrative skills. An elaborate, graded system of official ranks was created in which the recipients, called _________, were awarded grants of land along with the revenues those working the land generated.

mansabdars.

One key obstacle to imposing a centralized administrative system over a collection of previously autonomous small client states was solved by the Mughals through _________from among this vast pool of multi-ethnic and multi-religious nobles.

the recruitment of administrative officials.

Like Buddhism before it, Islam promised emancipation from the restrictions of the caste system, and a shared brotherhood of believers without regard for ethnicity, race, job or social standing.

True

The mosque at Fatehpur Sikri soon became the object of veneration and pilgrimage thanks largely to Akbar's generous patronage.

True

Under Jahangir, the Mughal Empire remained a "war state" given to aggressive conquest and territorial expansion.

True

Like his hero and model, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane he proved at times surprisingly liberal in his treatment of those who surrendered peacefully, but he was ruthless to those who dared do otherwise.

True.

Outside of the realm of influence of the Mughals, the family life of the higher castes went on largely as it had from the time of the Guptas.

True.

Unlike Genghis Khan and Tamerlane before him, Babur's youthful accomplishments led him to believe that God had provided him with a special destiny to fulfill.

True.

While this new philosophy did not end Akbar's military campaigns, which he saw as ordained by God, it ultimately did lead him to conducting spirited religious debates with his subjects and formulating a new religion he called _________, or "divine faith."

din-i ilahi.

The Persian tradition of miniature painting flourished in Mughal India, as did larger works on a variety of surfaces, while charcoal sketches and the _________painting technique were the artistic media of choice.

gouache

One of Aurangzeb's most resented policies was the reinstatement of the jiziya, a _________on non-Muslims, including a new tax on Hindu pilgrims.

graduated head tax.

A particular problem for the long term health of Humayun's dynasty was the _________, or the creation of a regular system for previously improvised or ad hoc activities or things, of traditional nomadic succession practices among the House of Timur's rulers.

institutionalization

Continued military campaigns ultimately undermined the Mughal Empire from within and reduced the flow of money and goods from south to north and east to west across Central India. By the early eighteenth century, as conflict chaos worsened, the Maratha frontier started actually expanding into the weakened Mughal _________, allowing the Mughals old enemies, the Persians, to step in and assume control in the wake of the Mughal power vacuum.

interior territories

By borrowing heavily from Sufi mysticism, Persian court protocols, Zoroastrian sun and fire veneration, and even Muslim and Christian Neo-platonic spiritualism, Akbar's divine faith sought to:

limit the power of Sunni Islamic clerics and draw followers from other religions

Sha Jahan did away with the_________of former Mughal rulers and established a more legalistic and exclusively pro-Muslim environment more aligned with Sunni theology, as the idea of a unified Muslim world governed by Quranic law steadily gained ground at the Mughal court, a trend which would reach its pinnacle of power under the reign of Sha Jahan's own son, Aurangzeb.

religious pluralism.

Though these Shan people had recently coverted to Hinduism, they had no caste system and drew upon a legacy of _________that the Mughals had not encountered before in their opponents.

self-confident expansion.

Akbar's Sufi mystical training had increasingly predisposed him toward tolerance and eclecticism, which gradually developed into a personal philosophy he called _________, or "at peace with all."

sulh-i kull.

Vasco da Gama's pioneering voyage in capturing the spice trade led to the construction of a network of _________from which to conduct business with the Indian mainland, a pattern quickly imitated by other European maritime powers.

supply chain.

While relations between Muslims and India's other religions were syncretic, in that they co-existed but remained largely separate, the political and social systems created by the Mughals were in many respects a successful example of the _________of an "extraction state" and several centuries of ruling more settled areas.

synthesis.

Architecturally, the Mughals bequeathed India what are to this day its most iconic landmarks, most notably its mausoleums, including all but one of the following:

the temple complex at Khajuraho.

Perhaps the most spectacular scientific and technical development of the Mughal era was the construction, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of:

twenty-one seamless celestial globes using a variation of the ancient "lost-wax" casting technique.

Attempts by the Mughals to create a uniform system of taxation and military obligation among so many minority rulers at the rural level, comprising nearly ninety percent of the subcontinent's population, had to go through the clan council, a body made up of a network of "village chiefs" known as _________, who conducted most of the real business.

zamindars.