Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 13

She was a daughter of Babur and a sister of Humayun, and she wrote her account of the family at the request of her nephew Akbar, who wanted material for the Akbarnama.

Babur's memoir was written in Chagatai Turkish and was translated into Persian in Akbar's time by Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, one of the nine jewels of the court, so that the book could be read by the Persian speaking nobility of the empire.

Babur wrote his memoirs in Chagatai Turkish, the language of his homeland in Central Asia, and the book is admired for its plain, observant prose about the men, fruits, animals and rivers of the countries he passed through.

Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar retold the story of King Yayati from the Mahabharata as a novel about desire and its cost, and for it he became the first writer in Marathi to receive the Jnanpith Award.

Ascribed to Tolkappiyar, it belongs to the Sangam age and lays down the rules of Tamil letters, words and poetic composition, including the division of poetry into akam, the inner world of love, and puram, the outer world of war and public life.

Written in the thirteenth century and also called the Bhavartha Dipika, the Dnyaneshwari explains the Gita verse by verse in Marathi poetry, and its importance lies in taking scripture out of Sanskrit and placing it before ordinary readers, which laid the foundation of the Varkari devotional tradition.

Devdas, the story of a young man ruined by his own indecision and by the rigidity of the society around him, is the most often filmed of all Indian novels, and its author also wrote Parineeta, Srikanta and Palli Samaj.

The collection, whose title means an offering of songs, was rendered into English by the poet himself, and the prize that followed in 1913 made Tagore the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He published Anandamath in 1882, and the song Vande Mataram that appears in it became the rallying cry of the freedom movement and was adopted as the national song of India; his other well-known works are Durgeshnandini, Kapalkundala and Devi Chaudhurani.

Tamil tradition holds that assemblies of poets, called Sangams, met under the patronage of the Pandya kings, and Madurai, the Pandya capital, is the seat remembered in the accounts that survive; the poems collected there form the oldest body of Tamil literature.

The Silappadikaram, whose name means the tale of the anklet, follows the merchant Kovalan, his wife Kannagi and the dancer Madhavi, and ends with Kannagi proving her husband's innocence before the Pandya king and bringing fire upon Madurai; she is worshipped afterwards as a goddess of chastity.

In the Sangam poems the word muvendar stands for the three crowned rulers of the Tamil country, the Chera, the Chola and the Pandya, each with a port and an inland centre of power, and the poems praise their gifts and their wars.

He composed one thousand three hundred and thirty couplets arranged in one hundred and thirty-three chapters and grouped in three parts, on virtue, wealth and love; because the work preaches conduct without attaching itself to any one religion, people of every faith in the Tamil country honour it, and it…

James Mill did publish A History of British India in 1817 in three volumes, so the first statement is correct.

Girish Karnad wrote Yayati in 1961, his first play, which takes from the Mahabharata the story of the old king who asks his son to trade youth with him, and Tughlaq in 1964, on the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq.

The Light We Carry is her second book, written after the memoir Becoming, and it sets out the habits and ideas she uses to face uncertainty.

Orbital, a short novel that follows six astronauts through a day of orbits around the earth, won the Booker Prize in 2024 for the British writer Samantha Harvey.

The American writer Walter Isaacson, who had earlier written the authorised life of Steve Jobs and books on Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin, published his biography of Elon Musk in 2023 after following him for two years.

Spare is his own account of his life in and away from the British royal family, and the title refers to the old saying about an heir and a spare, the second son.

The South Korean writer Han Kang received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2024 for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical trauma, and she is known for the novel The Vegetarian.