Books & Authors Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers

Every book in the list is paired with its real author. Dayabhaga, written by Jimutavahana in Bengal in the twelfth century, is a work on Hindu law of inheritance; under it a son gets a share in family property only after the father's death.

The Rihla, meaning journey, is the Arabic travel book of Ibn Battuta, the Moroccan traveller from Tangier who reached India in 1333.

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist who writes on politics, history and ideas, and The World After Gaza is his book on how the conflict in West Asia is read differently in the West and in the formerly colonised world.

The Emperor of Gladness, released in May 2025, is a novel by the Vietnamese-American writer and poet Ocean Vuong. Vuong was born near Saigon in 1988 and came to the United States as a child refugee.

Arundhati Roy's memoir 'Mother Mary Comes to Me' was brought out in India in September 2025 by Penguin Random House India, under its literary imprint Hamish Hamilton.

'Mother Mary Comes to Me' is Arundhati Roy's memoir, published in September 2025, and it is built around her difficult, loving bond with her mother Mary Roy.

The book takes its title from the Emergency, which ran from 1975 to 1977, and recalls those years through the author's own experience of them.

The line comes from her famous Hindi poem Jhansi Ki Rani, which celebrates Rani Lakshmibai's fight in the Revolt of 1857.

The English naturalist published this book in London on 24 November 1859, setting out his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Among the four thinkers listed, Machiavelli is the one who wrote a work called The Art of War (Dell'arte della guerra), published in Florence in 1521.

Rameshwar Bhattacharya's best-known work is the Shivayan, also called Shivasankirtan, a long Bengali poem on Shiva composed in the early eighteenth century.

In this poem Amir Khusrau sets out to show that India is superior to other lands, praising its climate, its languages, its arts and music, and even its animals.

In Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's Bengali novel Anandamath (1882), the monk-rebels are shown three images of the Mother Goddess standing for the motherland: as she was, as she is and as she will be.

Bharavi, a Sanskrit poet of the sixth century CE, wrote the Kiratarjuniyam. The Kiratarjuniyam is a mahakavya in eighteen cantos.

The book tells the story of the Christian Medical College at Vellore, one of India's oldest teaching hospitals, and it was written by Dr. V I Mathan, a physician long associated with that institution.

Test Cricket: A History, published in 2025, was written by the English cricket writer and journalist Tim Wigmore.

Four Stars of Destiny is the autobiography of General M. M. Naravane, who served as India's Chief of the Army Staff.

Why Bharat Matters, published in 2024, was written by S. Jaishankar, who wrote it while serving as India's External Affairs Minister.

The words 'ascending sense of reverence and descending sense of contempt' are Ambedkar's own description of how the caste order works.

Madhyama-vyayoga is a one-act Sanskrit play by Bhasa, based on an episode from the Mahabharata. Bhasa is one of the earliest known Sanskrit dramatists, admired by Kalidasa himself.