Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 10

Mudrarakshasa is a political drama whose plot turns on the statecraft of Chanakya as he brings down the Nandas and places Chandragupta Maurya on the throne, and historians use it as a literary source for that change of dynasty.

Mrichchhakatika is a ten-act play about the love of a poor Brahmin merchant for a courtesan, set against a palace revolution, and its English title The Little Clay Cart comes from a toy cart that appears in the story.

Dadabhai Naoroji published Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1901, and in it he set out his drain theory, the argument that British rule was steadily draining India’s wealth to England through salaries, pensions, home charges and the profits of trade.

The tale of queen Maynamati and her son Gopichandra belongs to the Nath literature of eastern India, the body of songs and ballads around the Nathpanthi yogis.

Ashvaghosha, a Sanskrit poet and Buddhist thinker, is placed at the court of the Kushana ruler Kanishka in the first and second centuries of the common era, and he also wrote the Saundarananda and is associated with the fourth Buddhist council held in Kashmir under Kanishka.

His play takes up the later life of Rama, after the events of the Ramayana.

Dinkar is the poet of Rashmirathi, a retelling of the Mahabharata from Karna's side, and of Kurukshetra and Parashuram ki Pratiksha, and he is often called a poet of rebellion.

The award was instituted by the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1961 and is the senior literary honour given for a body of work in any of the languages recognised by the Constitution.

He deliberately chose the spoken language over Sanskrit so that the story of Rama could reach ordinary listeners, and the poem is still recited and staged across the Hindi belt.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale is said to have given her the title Bharat Kokila, the Nightingale of India. She was also the first woman to be president of the Indian National Congress, at the Kanpur session of 1925, and the first woman governor of an Indian state, in the United Provinces.

It became a marching song of the freedom movement and is played by the armed forces at ceremonial parades.

Kamayani takes the flood story of Manu from Indian tradition and turns it into a long allegory in which Manu stands for the mind, Shraddha for faith and Ida for reason.

The poem is arranged in songs meant to be sung and danced, and it is the text on which the Odissi repertoire and the Ashtapadi singing of temples rest.

The Meghaduta, or Cloud Messenger, is his short lyric poem in which a yaksha banished from his home asks a passing monsoon cloud to carry a message to his wife in Alaka, and the cloud's route becomes a description of the Indian landscape.

Rabindranath Tagore set it to music and sang it at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896, and after independence its first two stanzas were given the status of national song, declared to hold a place of honour equal to the national anthem.

The prize of 1913 made him the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any field.

India After Gandhi, published in 2007, is Ramachandra Guha's history of the Indian republic from independence onwards, covering partition, the integration of the princely states, the making of the Constitution, the wars, the Emergency and the economic changes that followed.

The Natyashastra, attributed to the sage Bharata, is the foundational text of Indian performing arts, covering the stage, acting, gesture, costume, music and above all the theory of rasa, the aesthetic flavours a performance should produce; every classical dance form traces its grammar to it.

Banabhatta was the court poet of Harshavardhana of Kanauj in the seventh century, and his Harshacharita is a biography in ornate Sanskrit prose that is a major source for the reign, alongside the account left by the Chinese traveller Hiuen Tsang.

Arthur Llewellyn Basham, a British historian of ancient India, published The Wonder That Was India in 1954 as a survey of Indian civilisation before the coming of the Muslims, and it remains one of the most widely read introductions to the subject; a companion second volume covering the medieval period…