Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 17

He received the Jnanpith Award in 1968 for his collection Chidambara, the first Hindi writer to be honoured with it; the award itself began in 1965, when it went to the Malayalam poet G. Sankara Kurup.

Maila Anchal, set in a village of north Bihar just after independence, is counted the first major regional novel, or anchalik upanyas, of Hindi; Renu also wrote Parti Parikatha and the story Maare Gaye Gulfam, on which a well known film was based.

The Bijak gathers Kabir’s verse in three parts — the Sakhi, the Sabad and the Ramaini — and it carries his Nirgun teaching, that god has no form and no image, and his attack on ritual and caste.

He is the poet of national feeling in modern Hindi, and Urvashi, Rashmirathi, Kurukshetra and Hunkar are his chief works; Urvashi brought him the Jnanpith Award in 1972.

He was the court poet of Prithviraj Chauhan, and his Prithviraj Raso, in Braj mixed with Rajasthani, is the longest and most discussed work of the Adikal or Veergatha Kal.

Bihari was a court poet of Jaipur, and his Satsai, praised for holding much meaning in few words, is the most quoted book of the Ritikal, the age of ornament and courtly love that Ramchandra Shukla placed between Samvat 1700 and 1900.

He gave Hindi prose its modern shape through plays such as Andher Nagari and Bharat Durdasha and through journals such as Kavi Vachan Sudha, and the first age of modern Hindi literature is named the Bhartendu Yug after him.

Kamayani is his long poem built on the figures of Manu, Shraddha and Ida, and it is held to be the highest achievement of Chhayavad; Prasad also wrote the plays Skandagupta and Chandragupta and the collection Ansu.

He first published under the name Nawab Rai and then took the pen name Premchand, under which he wrote Godan, Gaban, Nirmala, Sevasadan, Rangbhoomi and Karmabhoomi, and stories such as Kafan, Panch Parmeshwar and Bade Ghar ki Beti.

The Padmavat, written in Awadhi, tells of Ratnasen of Chittor and Padmavati of Singhal and carries a Sufi meaning under the love story; Jayasi also wrote the Akhrawat.

He composed the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi in the sixteenth century, retelling the story of Rama in seven books, and it remains the most widely read work of Hindi devotional poetry.

The building on Feroze Shah Road, named after Rabindranath Tagore, houses all three of India's national academies, the Sahitya Akademi for letters, the Lalit Kala Akademi for the fine arts and the Sangeet Natak Akademi for the performing arts.

She received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956 for her Punjabi poetry collection Sunehe, meaning messages, and was the first woman to be honoured by the Akademi.

The Fellowship, not the annual award, is the highest honour the Sahitya Akademi confers, and its rules restrict it to twenty-one living writers at any one time.

The Sahitya Akademi recognises twenty-four languages and gives one award in each of them every year for the most outstanding book of literary merit, so roughly two dozen names are announced together.

The Prime Minister was the first President of the Sahitya Akademi, elected when the academy was set up in 1954, and he held the office until his death in 1964.

The Government of India set up the Sahitya Akademi on 12 March 1954 as the national academy for literature, and it works today as an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture with its headquarters at Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi.

English was not an eligible language for the Jnanpith until 2013, when it was added to the languages of the Eighth Schedule for the purpose of this award.

Along with a citation and a cash prize, every Jnanpith laureate receives a bronze replica of Vagdevi, Saraswati as the goddess of speech and learning, which is a fitting emblem for a literary honour and a detail asked directly in objective papers.

The Bengali novelist received the Jnanpith for the year 1976 for Pratham Pratishruti, the first book of a trilogy about three generations of women in a Bengali household, and she was the first woman to be honoured with the award.