Class 12 History Chapter 6 Bhakti-Sufi Traditions Important Questions with Answers in English

Q. What is meant by the “great” and “little” traditions, and who coined these terms?

Answer: Robert Redfield, a twentieth-century sociologist, coined “great tradition” for the cultural practices observed by dominant groups such as priests and rulers, and “little tradition” for local practices that did not necessarily match them. Both, he found, changed over time through interaction with each other.

Q. Define saguna and nirguna bhakti.

Answer: Saguna bhakti is devotion to a specific deity with attributes, visualised in an anthropomorphic form, such as Vishnu, Shiva or a form of the goddess. Nirguna bhakti is devotion to an abstract, formless god, without attributes or a fixed image.

Q. What is a khanqah, and who typically headed one?

Answer: A khanqah is a sufi hospice, the centre of a sufi community’s social and spiritual life. It was headed by a teaching master known as a shaikh in Arabic, or a pir/murshid in Persian, who enrolled disciples and appointed a successor.

Q. What does the word “silsila” literally mean?

Answer: Silsila literally means “a chain”. It signified a continuous, unbroken spiritual link between a master and his disciples, stretching back as a genealogy to the Prophet Muhammad himself, through which spiritual power and blessings were believed to pass.

Q. Name the five symbols of the Khalsa Panth.

Answer: The five symbols defined by Guru Gobind Singh are: uncut hair, a dagger, a pair of shorts, a comb, and a steel bangle.

Q. What is a zimmi, and what tax did this status require?

Answer: A zimmi (“protected”) was a non-Muslim who followed a revealed scripture, such as Jews and Christians, and later Hindus in India, and lived under Muslim rulership. In exchange for the right to be protected by Muslim rulers, a zimmi paid a tax called jizya.

Q. What are malfuzat, in one line?

Answer: Malfuzat (literally “uttered”) are the recorded conversations of sufi saints, compiled by their followers, usually with the shaikh’s own permission, for a clearly didactic purpose.

Q. What is meant by “be-shari’a” sufis?

Answer: Be-shari’a sufis were mystics such as the Qalandars, Madaris, Malangs and Haidaris, who scorned the khanqah for mendicancy and celibacy, ignored ritual, and openly defied the shari’a — in contrast to ba-shari’a sufis, who complied with it.

Q. What is the Tevaram, and by what method was it classified?

Answer: The Tevaram is a collection of compositions by the Nayanar saints Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar. It was compiled and classified in the tenth century on the basis of the music of the songs.

Q. Distinguish between be-shari’a and ba-shari’a sufis.

Answer: Ba-shari’a sufis complied with the shari’a and lived an organised, khanqah-centred life under a shaikh’s guidance, formalised through silsilas — the Chishtis, Suhrawardis and Naqshbandis fall in this category. Be-shari’a sufis (Qalandars, Madaris, Malangs, Haidaris) rejected the khanqah for mendicancy and celibacy, ignored ritual, practised extreme asceticism, and openly defied the shari’a, earning them their name.

Q. What is a wali, and what powers were such a person believed to hold?

Answer: A wali (plural auliya, “friend of God”) was a sufi who claimed proximity to Allah, acquiring His grace (barakat) to perform miracles (karamat). After a shaikh’s death his dargah drew devotees who sought his blessings for material and spiritual benefits, since saints were believed to be even closer to God in death.

Q. What were the five pillars of Islam accepted, in principle, by every convert?

Answer: The five pillars are: shahada (belief in one God, Allah, and Muhammad as His messenger), namaz/salat (prayer five times a day), zakat (giving alms), sawm (fasting during the month of Ramzan), and hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca).

Q. Why is the term “Sufism” itself considered an outsider’s coinage rather than the sufis’ own word?

Answer: “Sufism” is an English word coined in the nineteenth century by outside scholars describing the tradition; the word used within Islamic texts themselves is tasawwuf. Historians derive tasawwuf variously from suf (wool, the coarse clothing sufis wore), safa (purity), or suffa (the platform outside the Prophet’s mosque where close followers gathered) — none of which is the English coinage “Sufism”.

Q. What is a dargah, and on which occasion did it draw the largest number of pilgrims?

Answer: A dargah is the tomb-shrine of a sufi shaikh, which became a devotional centre after his death. It drew pilgrims (ziyarat) throughout the year, but especially on the shaikh’s urs, his death anniversary, believed to mark the union of his soul with God.

Q. What is a masnavi, and give one example named in this chapter.

Answer: A masnavi is a long poem composed by sufis to express ideas of divine love using human love as an allegory. Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat, the romance of Padmini and Ratansen of Chittor read as an allegory of the soul’s journey to the divine, is the example named in this chapter.

Q. Distinguish between the roles of a murid and a khalifa within a khanqah.

Answer: A murid was an ordinary disciple enrolled by the shaikh. A khalifa was the specific successor the shaikh formally appointed to carry the silsila forward after his death — every khalifa began as a murid, but not every murid became a khalifa.

Q. Why does NCERT say the term “musalman” is barely found in Sanskrit inscriptions between the eighth and fourteenth centuries?

Answer: Instead of a religious label, people were identified by their region of origin (Turushka for Turks, Tajika for people from Tajikistan, Parashika for Persians) or by older ethnic terms reused for new arrivals (Shaka, Yavana), or by the broad term mlechchha, marking anyone outside caste norms who spoke a non-Sanskrit language — rarely a marker of “Muslim” as a religious community opposed to “Hindu”.

Q. What made the Nalayira Divyaprabandham significant to the Alvar tradition?

Answer: The Nalayira Divyaprabandham, compiled by the tenth century, gathered the compositions of the twelve Alvars into a single anthology. Its significance lay in the claim that it was as important as the Vedas — it came to be called the “Tamil Veda”, asserting that vernacular bhakti poetry could carry the same authority as Sanskrit scripture.

Q. Why is it difficult for historians to establish with certainty whether Kabir was born a Hindu or a Muslim?

Answer: The difficulty is a source problem, not a lack of interest. Kabir’s own verses use only the words “guru” and “satguru”, naming no specific preceptor at all. The claim that he was born Kabirdas, a Hindu, and raised by a poor Muslim julaha (weaver) family, initiated into bhakti by a guru named Ramananda, comes not from Kabir but from Vaishnava hagiographies composed from the seventeenth century onward, roughly 200 years after his lifetime — late enough that these are traditions ABOUT Kabir’s importance to later devotees, not eyewitness biography. Historians add a chronological problem on top of this: making Ramananda and Kabir genuine contemporaries requires assigning implausibly long lifespans to one or both of them. The honest conclusion is therefore not that Kabir’s origin is settled either way, but that the surviving evidence cannot settle it, and the later traditions linking him to Ramananda are better read as evidence of how important his legacy became to different religious communities, each keen to claim him, than as reliable biography.

Q. Explain why malfuzat, though compiled with the shaikh’s own permission and clearly intended for a didactic purpose, are still treated by historians as valuable sources despite this obvious bias.

Answer: Malfuzat record the actual conversations of a sufi saint, compiled by disciples over centuries and across regions — the Fawa’id-al-Fu’ad, Nizamuddin Auliya’s conversations compiled by Amir Hasan Sijzi, is the chapter’s own example. Because they were compiled WITH the shaikh’s permission, and for a didactic purpose (to teach and glorify the silsila), they obviously cannot be read as neutral transcripts: a shaikh’s own words, chosen for what they teach, will present him and his tradition favourably. Yet this same bias is exactly what makes them useful in a different way — they let historians see how a sufi order wanted itself to be remembered, what values and stories it thought worth preserving, and (through incidents like Source 9, where Nizamuddin Auliya declines a royal land grant) how the community defined its own ideals of austerity and distance from worldly power. Historians therefore read malfuzat neither as unbiased fact nor as worthless propaganda, but as evidence of a tradition’s self-image, cross-checked wherever possible against other genres such as tazkiras and maktubat.

Q. What problems do tazkiras pose for historians, and why are they still considered valuable despite these problems?

Answer: Tazkiras (“to mention and memorialise”) are biographical accounts of saints, such as the Siyar-ul-Auliya of Mir Khwurd Kirmani (the first sufi tazkira written in India, on the Chishtis) and the Akhbar-ul-Akhyar of Abdul Haqq Muhaddis Dehlavi. Their central problem is that authors often wrote to establish the precedence of their own order and to glorify its spiritual genealogy, so a tazkira is rarely a disinterested account — and many details in tazkiras are, in NCERT’s own words, “often implausible, full of elements of the fantastic”. Despite this, historians still value them highly, for two reasons: first, because a tazkira is often the only surviving record of a saint’s life and sayings at all, so rejecting it outright would mean losing the only window onto that figure; and second, because even a fantastical or self-glorifying account still reveals how a religious community understood its own history and wished to present it, which is itself a legitimate object of historical study, so long as the historian reads the account as a claim about identity and memory rather than as settled fact.

Q. Discuss the ways in which the Alvars, Nayanars and Virashaivas expressed critiques of the caste system.

Answer: The Alvars (devotees of Vishnu) and Nayanars (devotees of Shiva), from about the sixth century, drew bhaktas from every social background, from Brahmanas to artisans, cultivators and even castes considered “untouchable” — itself a challenge to a system that reserved liberation for the twice-born. Their own verses make the critique explicit: Tondaradippodi, though a Brahmana, wrote that Vishnu preferred devoted “outcastes” over unaffiliated Chaturvedins, and Appar, a Nayanar, mocked “rogues who quote the law books” and asked what use gotra and kula (lineage and clan) were next to bowing to Shiva. In Karnataka, Basavanna’s Virashaiva/Lingayat movement (twelfth century) went further still: it directly challenged the very idea of caste and of ritual “pollution” attributed to certain groups by Brahmanas, questioned the theory of rebirth, and encouraged practices the Dharmashastras disapproved of, such as post-puberty marriage and the remarriage of widows — winning support precisely among those the Brahmanical social order had marginalised. Where the Alvars and Nayanars worked mostly within existing structures (their compositions still entered temple ritual under Brahmana intermediaries), the Lingayats built an alternative religious and social order around vachana literature and their own funerary practice (burial, not the Dharmashastra-prescribed cremation), making theirs the more thoroughgoing critique of the three.

Q. Explain, with examples, how oral transmission over centuries has shaped what survives of Kabir’s and Mirabai’s compositions today.

Answer: Neither Kabir nor Mirabai is known to have written down their own verses; both composed orally, and their compositions were carried forward by devotees who sang and remembered them, generation after generation, before any of it was written down. For Kabir, this produced three separate, overlapping manuscript traditions compiled long after his death — the Kabir Bijak (Kabirpanth, Varanasi/Uttar Pradesh), the Kabir Granthavali (Dadupanth, Rajasthan), and verses within the Adi Granth Sahib — and by the nineteenth century, printed anthologies attributed to him circulated as far apart as Bengal, Gujarat and Maharashtra. Because oral transmission allows each generation of devotees to elaborate, modify, or drop verses that no longer felt relevant, NCERT is explicit that historians “may never be able to tell with certainty” which verses are genuinely Kabir’s own, despite attempts to analyse language, style and content. Mirabai’s case is similar: her biographies “have been reconstructed primarily from the bhajans attributed to her, which were transmitted orally for centuries”, transmitted orally for centuries before being fixed in writing, so what survives is shaped as much by what devotees across Gujarat and Rajasthan chose to keep singing as by anything Mirabai herself composed. In both cases, oral transmission means the surviving corpus is best understood as a living, collectively authored tradition carrying the poet-saint’s name, not a fixed, single-author text.

Q. Why do you think kings tried to establish connections with the Nayanars and with the sufis?

Answer: Both the Nayanars and the sufis commanded a popular following that rulers could not generate through military or administrative power alone. The Nayanars were revered by Vellala peasants, so the Chola kings (ninth to thirteenth centuries) built magnificent temples adorned with sculpture recreating the saints’ visions, took the initiative of organising Tamil Shaiva hymns into the Tevaram for temple ritual, and (as an inscription of about 945 records) had the Chola ruler Parantaka I consecrate metal images of Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar, carried in festival processions — all of which tied royal legitimacy to popular devotion. Sultans in Delhi faced a similar problem in a different form: ruling over a non-Muslim majority, they could not easily impose the shari’a through the ulama without risking opposition, so they instead sought out sufis, whose authority came directly from God rather than from jurists, and whose popularity, piety and reputed miraculous powers (karamat) made them a bridge to ordinary subjects. Kings also wanted their own tombs built near sufi shrines, believing the auliya could intercede with God on their behalf even after death — so in both cases, association with a popular religious figure supplied a kind of legitimacy that political power by itself could not.

Q. What does Akbar’s 1598 farman on the Khambat church, read alongside his and Aurangzeb’s dealings with Hindu religious figures, tell us about Mughal religious policy?

Answer: Akbar’s 1598 farman ordered the officials of Khambat (Gujarat) not to obstruct Jesuit padris who wished to build a church there, explicitly instructing that “the order of the Emperor should be obeyed in every way” so the padris could worship freely. Read alongside Aurangzeb’s 1661-62 letter to a Jogi, addressing him respectfully as “the possessor of the sublime station” and sending a cloth and money as an offering “under the protection of Sri Shiv Jio”, the two documents together show that religious accommodation of non-Muslim institutions and holy figures was not confined to Akbar’s reign alone or to his personal reputation for tolerance; even Aurangzeb, usually remembered for a more orthodox policy, is shown here maintaining respectful, even devotional, correspondence with a non-Muslim religious figure. This suggests Mughal religious policy in practice was considerably more flexible and pragmatic on the ground than a simple “tolerant Akbar vs orthodox Aurangzeb” narrative would suggest, and that maintaining good relations with a wide range of religious institutions and figures, Hindu, Jaina, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish alike, served the practical purpose of securing the loyalty of a religiously diverse empire.

Q. Discuss the major beliefs and practices that characterised Sufism.

Answer: Sufism (the Islamic term is tasawwuf) began in the early centuries of Islam as a movement of ascetic, mystical dissent against the Caliphate’s growing materialism and against rigid, scholastic methods of interpreting the Qur’an. In place of dogmatic legal interpretation, sufis sought salvation through intense devotion, love of God, and imitation of the Prophet Muhammad as a perfect human being, arriving at an understanding of the Qur’an rooted in personal experience.

By the eleventh century, this had crystallised into an organised institutional life. Sufis gathered around a khanqah (hospice) headed by a teaching master, the shaikh (Arabic) or pir/murshid (Persian), who enrolled disciples (murids) and named a successor (khalifa); from the twelfth century, silsilas formalised this master-disciple relationship into an unbroken spiritual chain stretching back to the Prophet, through which blessings and spiritual power passed. Initiation involved a formal oath, a patched garment, and shaved hair. After a shaikh’s death, his tomb (dargah) became a devotional centre, drawing pilgrims (ziyarat) especially on his urs (death anniversary, marking the soul’s union with God); such a shaikh was venerated as a wali, believed to hold barakat (grace) enabling karamat (miracles).

Not all sufis accepted this organised, khanqah-based life: be-shari’a mystics such as the Qalandars, Madaris, Malangs and Haidaris instead took to mendicancy and celibacy, openly defying the shari’a, in contrast to the ba-shari’a sufis (such as the Chishtis) who complied with it. Music and dance, especially qawwali, were central to devotional practice for many orders, evoking divine ecstasy through zikr (reciting the Divine Names) or sama’ (“audition”, mystical music) — a practice through which Indian sufi orders, above all the Chishtis, absorbed and interacted closely with indigenous devotional traditions.

Q. Analyse, with illustrations, why bhakti and sufi thinkers adopted a variety of languages to express their ideas.

Answer: Both bhakti and sufi movements aimed to reach ordinary people directly, not only a scripture-trained elite, so using the region’s own spoken language was a natural and, in many cases, a deliberate strategy rather than an incidental choice. In the south, the Alvars and Nayanars sang in Tamil rather than Sanskrit from as early as the sixth century, and their compositions were later claimed to be as significant as the Vedas themselves (the Nalayira Divyaprabandham as the “Tamil Veda”). In Karnataka, Basavanna and the Lingayats composed their vachanas in Kannada, not Sanskrit, deliberately bypassing the language of Brahmanical learning that had excluded so many of their followers.

Sufis in Delhi similarly conversed in Hindavi, the language of ordinary people, rather than confining themselves to Persian or Arabic; Baba Farid’s verses in the local language were valued enough to be incorporated into the Guru Granth Sahib itself. Some sufis went further and composed masnavis, long poems using human romantic love as an allegory for divine love, in regional languages — Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat, on the romance of Padmini and Ratansen of Chittor, is the chapter’s example. Around Bijapur, Chishti sufis composed short Dakhani poems — charkhanama (spinning-wheel songs), lurinama (lullabies) and shadinama (wedding songs) — likely sung by women at everyday household chores, probably drawing on the pre-existing Kannada vachanas and Marathi abhangs of the Pandharpur sants; this was one of the very routes by which Islam gradually reached Deccan villages. Finally, Kabir’s poems survive in several languages and dialects, some in the sant bhasha, the special language of nirguna poets, while Baba Guru Nanak expressed his ideas through shabad in Punjabi, the language of his region, sung in ragas while Mardana played the rabab. In every case, the choice of language was itself doing ideological work: it challenged the elite, sect-specific control of classical Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic scripture and made devotion directly accessible to the people the movements most wanted to reach.

Q. “Historians of religion must read a hagiography with an awareness of its own genre conventions, not as a plain factual record.” Discuss this statement with reference to Jahanara’s account of her pilgrimage to Ajmer and the Vaishnava hagiographies of Kabir.

Answer: A hagiography is a devotional biography written by a follower, and NCERT is direct about the consequence: such accounts “may not be literally accurate”, but they still “allow a glimpse into the ways in which devotees perceived the lives” of the person they describe. This means a historian reading a hagiography is not simply extracting facts from it, but is also reading the conventions of the genre itself — what a devotee thought was WORTH recording, and how devotion was expected to be performed and described.

Jahanara’s own 1643 account of her pilgrimage to the Ajmer dargah of Muinuddin Chishti, written in her biography of the saint titled Munis al Arwah, illustrates this well. She describes not sleeping on a leopard skin, not turning her back to the tomb, walking barefoot and kissing the ground, circling the tomb seven times, and applying perfume with her own hand — a very specific vocabulary of bodily humility and devotion. A historian does not read this passage chiefly to learn the literal temperature of the floor Jahanara walked on; the value of the passage is that it shows what gestures a Mughal princess’s own biography of a saint considered the RIGHT way to represent pious devotion for a text of this genre, in this period.

The Vaishnava hagiographies of Kabir, composed from the seventeenth century onward — about 200 years after Kabir’s own lifetime — make the same point from the opposite direction: they claim he was born Kabirdas, a Hindu, raised by a poor Muslim julaha family, and initiated into bhakti by Ramananda. Kabir’s own verses, however, use only “guru” and “satguru”, naming no specific preceptor, and historians find it very difficult to make Ramananda and Kabir genuine contemporaries. Taken as plain fact, this hagiographic claim would settle Kabir’s birth religion; read instead as a hagiography of a particular tradition (Vaishnava bhakti) making a claim on Kabir’s legacy roughly two centuries later, it becomes evidence of something else entirely — how important Kabir’s memory had become to later religious communities competing to claim him as their own. In both cases, the historian’s task is the same: to treat the hagiography neither as fiction to be dismissed nor as fact to be repeated, but as a text whose own conventions and distance from the events it describes must be accounted for before anything in it is used as evidence.

Q. Discuss the range of textual sources — treatises, malfuzat, maktubat and tazkiras — that historians use to reconstruct the history of sufi traditions, and the strengths and limitations of each.

Answer: NCERT identifies four broad genres of sufi-related text, each with its own strengths and its own genre-specific bias. Treatises or manuals on sufi thought and practice, such as Ali bin Usman Hujwiri’s Kashf-ul-Mahjub (d. c. 1071), let historians trace how ideas from OUTSIDE the subcontinent shaped sufi thought in India — their strength is systematic doctrinal exposition, but they speak in the voice of a single author’s own understanding of tasawwuf, not of sufi practice as lived on the ground.

Malfuzat (“uttered”), such as the Fawa’id-al-Fu’ad, Nizamuddin Auliya’s conversations compiled by Amir Hasan Sijzi, record a shaikh’s actual spoken teaching, compiled by disciples across regions and even centuries. Their strength is direct access to a shaikh’s own voice and everyday concerns (Source 9’s account of Nizamuddin Auliya declining a royal land grant is this genre at its most useful); their limitation is that they were compiled WITH the shaikh’s permission for an openly didactic purpose, so they present him and his order favourably by design.

Maktubat (“written”), letters from sufi masters to disciples, such as the Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani of the seventeenth-century Naqshbandi Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, reveal both the shaikh’s own religious convictions and the spiritual and worldly concerns of the RECIPIENTS who prompted the letters — a genuinely two-sided window, though again filtered through what one master chose to write to particular individuals, and Sirhindi’s own views (often set against Akbar’s more liberal outlook) obviously cannot stand for sufi opinion in general.

Tazkiras, biographical accounts such as the Siyar-ul-Auliya of Mir Khwurd Kirmani (the first Indian sufi tazkira, on the Chishtis) and the Akhbar-ul-Akhyar of Abdul Haqq Muhaddis Dehlavi, are the most narrative-rich genre and often the only surviving life-account of a given saint, but their authors frequently wrote to establish the precedence of their own order and glorify its spiritual genealogy, and NCERT itself notes many details in tazkiras are “implausible, full of elements of the fantastic”.

Taken together, these four genres are complementary rather than substitutable: a treatise gives doctrine, malfuzat give a shaikh’s spoken voice (with its didactic bias), maktubat give a two-way personal exchange (filtered through one master’s correspondence), and tazkiras give narrative continuity across generations (at the cost of order-glorifying invention). A historian who used only one genre would get a systematically skewed picture of a sufi tradition; reading them against each other, and against non-textual evidence, is how the bias in each is kept in check.