Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 9

Eric Arthur Blair chose the pen name George Orwell, taking the surname from the river Orwell in England, and under it wrote Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Burmese Days and the essay Shooting an Elephant.

Sampooran Singh Kalra took the pen name Gulzar, meaning a garden in bloom, and is known both for Urdu poetry and for film lyrics, and for the collection Raat Pashmine Ki.

Netaji is a title of respect given to Subhas Chandra Bose by his followers, and he did not publish his writing under it.

The takhallus is the pen name a poet adopts, such as Ghalib, Mir, Faiz or Firaq, and by convention the poet mentions it in the closing couplet of a ghazal.

He was a leading figure of the Nayi Kavita movement, edited the Tar Saptak anthologies that introduced a generation of poets, and wrote the novels Shekhar Ek Jivani and Nadi ke Dweep.

Vaidyanath Mishra wrote in Hindi as Nagarjun, a name taken from the Buddhist philosopher, and in Maithili as Yatri, meaning the traveller; he is known for Balchanama and for sharply political poems.

As a boy Tagore wrote poems in an archaic Vaishnava style and presented them as the work of a poet named Bhanusimha, and the collection is therefore called Bhanusimha Thakurer Padavali.

She took a man's name so that her novels would be judged as serious literature rather than as light romances by a woman, and she wrote Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss under it.

Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan first wrote under the takhallus Asad and later chose Ghalib, which means dominant or victorious, and he names himself in the closing couplet of many ghazals.

He took the name from the call of a Mississippi riverboat crew, where mark twain meant a sounding of two fathoms, that is water deep enough to be safe.

He is always written as Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, the pen name meaning the unique or the unlike-any-other, and he wrote Saroj Smriti, Ram ki Shakti Puja and the poem Bhikshuk.

He wrote first in Urdu as Nawab Rai, and after the colonial administration seized his collection Soz-e-Watan he adopted the name Premchand, under which he wrote Godan, Nirmala, Gaban, Rangbhoomi and the story Kafan.

Ashadh ka Ek Din imagines the poet Kalidasa torn between his village love and the glory offered by the court at Ujjayini, and it is counted the first fully modern Hindi play; Aadhe Adhure and Lahron ke Rajhans are his other major works.

Tughlaq uses the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq to speak about idealism turning into failure, and Hayavadana draws on a tale from the Kathasaritsagara about exchanged heads; Nagamandala and Yayati are also his, and he received the Jnanpith Award.

A Doll's House ends with Nora leaving her husband and her children, a conclusion that scandalised audiences and made the play a landmark of realistic social theatre; Ghosts and An Enemy of the People belong to the same phase of his work.

Pygmalion, in which a professor of phonetics trains a flower girl to speak like a duchess, is his most widely known play, and his others include Arms and the Man, Man and Superman and Saint Joan.

In Waiting for Godot two tramps pass the time by a bare tree waiting for a man who never arrives, and the play became the defining work of the Theatre of the Absurd, the movement that refused ordinary plot and meaning in order to show life as it felt after…

The Natyashastra lays down the rules of the stage, of acting, gesture, music and stagecraft, and gives the theory of rasa, the set of aesthetic moods a performance is meant to create in its audience; it is the foundation of all later Indian dramatic and dance theory.

Swapnavasavadattam, the dream of Vasavadatta, turns on King Udayana and his queen and is regarded as his finest work; Urubhanga and Pratima Nataka are also his.

It tells the story of King Pururavas and the celestial nymph Urvashi.