Foreign Travellers in India: Megasthenes to Bernier and the Book Each Wrote

Foreign Travellers: Three Facts Per Traveller Win the Marks

For over two thousand years visitors from Greece, China, Arabia, Morocco, Persia, Italy and France recorded what they saw in India. Their books are a major source for historians because they describe cities, markets, rulers and beliefs from an outsider's eye.

Exam questions on this topic are almost always a three-way match. A question gives you one of three things: the traveller, the ruler or court he visited, or the book he wrote. You must supply another. For example, Megasthenes came to the court of Chandragupta Maurya and wrote Indica; Hiuen Tsang came in the time of Harshavardhana and wrote Si-Yu-Ki.

So for each traveller, store exactly three facts: home country, the ruler visited, and the book. Add one extra line about what he observed. That is all SSC, UPSC, CTET and BPSC TRE-4 normally test, and it fits in a single page of revision.

1. The book Indica, a description of Mauryan India, was written by:

2. The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Fa-Hien visited India during the reign of:

3. Si-Yu-Ki, the Records of the Western World, was written by:

4. Kitab-ul-Hind, a scholarly account of Indian science and customs, was written by the scholar who accompanied:

5. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, author of the Rihla, was appointed qazi of Delhi by:

6. Which of the following travellers visited the Vijayanagara empire?

7. Francois Bernier, author of Travels in the Mogul Empire, was a:

8. Which one of the following pairs of traveller and description is correctly matched?