question_answer

Read the following extract carefully and answer the questions that follow:

A warning for Europe

Bernier warned that if European kings followed the Mughal model:

Their kingdoms would be very far from being well-cultivated and peopled, so well built, so rich, so polite and flourishing as we see them. Our kings are otherwise rich and powerful; and we must avow that they are much better and more royally served. They would soon be kings of deserts and solitudes, of beggars and barbarians, such as those are whom I have been representing (the Mughals)... We should find the great Cities and the great Burroughs (boroughs) rendered uninhabitable because of ill air, and to fall to mine (ruin) without any bodies (anybody) taking care of repairing them; the hillocks abandoned, and the fields overspread with bushes, or fill?d with pestilential marishes (marshes), as hath been already intimated.

(i) In what ways did Bernier condemn Mughal rulers?

(ii) What contrasts do the account of Bernier and Abul Fazi?s Ain-i-Akbari?

(iii) ?Pride has its fall if power and negligence of duty rules any one?. Explain the statement in relevance to the Bernier?s warning.

Answer:

(i) Bernier condemns the Mughals as the kings of deserts, solitudes, beggars and barbarians.

(ii) Abul Fazal who was one of the nine gems in the court of Akbar has written in glowing terms about the reign of Akbar, the land, the people and the crops, customs etc. Abul was a scholar and he had first-hand knowledge of India. On the other hand Bernier did not know much about Mughals or India.

(iii) Bernier had noted the decay and he knew that the Mughal empire was on the downward trend. He had witnessed the corruption in the officers of the state and the negligence that is why he felt that the power had its fall if power and negligence of duty rules any one.