Books & Authors Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 2

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

'Ace Against Odds' is the autobiography of Sania Mirza, India's most successful woman tennis player, published in 2016 and written with her father Imran Mirza and Shivani Gupta.

The Marathi poet wrote Maze Vidyapeeth (My University), drawing on his own life among the mill workers and the poor of Bombay.

The French writer Dominique Lapierre wrote The City of Joy, published in 1985.

'Tomb of Sand' won the International Booker Prize in 2022, and that win was a first on both counts. The novel was written in Hindi by Geetanjali Shree as 'Ret Samadhi' (2018) and translated into English by the American translator Daisy Rockwell, who shared the prize money with her.

Netaji wrote The Indian Struggle, his own political account of India's freedom movement. Bose wrote the first part, covering 1920 to 1934, while living in Europe for medical treatment; it was published in London in 1935 and was banned in India by the British government.

The revolutionary Sachindranath Sanyal wrote Bandi Jivan, an account of his life as a prisoner. Sanyal was closely linked with Rash Behari Bose in the Banaras conspiracy and was sent to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans.

Pairs 2 and 4 are right; pairs 1 and 3 name the wrong authors. The Hammira-Mahakavya, a Sanskrit poem on the Chauhan ruler Hammira of Ranthambore, was written by the Jain poet Nayachandra Suri in the fifteenth century.

'Indian Unrest' (1910) was written by the British journalist Valentine Chirol, not by Annie Besant. Chirol, a writer for The Times, collected his articles on the rise of Indian nationalism into this book and called Bal Gangadhar Tilak the 'father of Indian unrest'.

Hsuan Tsang, also written Hiuen Tsang or Xuanzang, reached India in the seventh century and spent years in the empire of Harshavardhana of Kannauj, who received him with honour; he studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Shilabhadra, attended the great religious assemblies at Kannauj and at Prayag, and recorded…

This is one of the striking facts of Mughal cultural history: the emperor who withdrew court patronage from musical performance presided over a reign in which the largest number of Persian treatises on Indian classical music was written, as scholars turned from the court to the book.

He was an officer of Jahangir's court who continued the record of the reign after the emperor stopped writing his own memoir, and his Iqbalnama-i-Jahangiri is one of the main Persian sources for the period.

'281 and Beyond' is the autobiography of VVS Laxman, published in 2018. The title comes from his innings of 281 against Australia at Eden Gardens in the Kolkata Test of March 2001, when India followed on and still won, in one of the greatest Test matches ever played.

Mrichchhakatika, The Little Clay Cart, is a ten-act Sanskrit play written by Shudraka, a king-poet of the classical age.

Kalila wa Dimna is the Arabic version of the Panchatantra, named after two jackals, Karataka and Damanaka, who appear in its first book.

It is a later Mahayana Buddhist text of ritual and prophecy, not a work of Ashvaghosha. Ashvaghosha was a Buddhist poet, dramatist and philosopher of the first–second century CE, linked by tradition to the court of the Kushana king Kanishka.

Binodini Dasi, a leading actress of the Bengali stage, wrote Amar Katha ("My Story"), which first appeared in parts between 1910 and 1913 and was published as a book in 1913.

Tomb of Sand is the English translation of her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi. Ret Samadhi was translated into English by the American translator Daisy Rockwell.

He wrote Why am I an Atheist in October 1930 in the Lahore Central Jail, answering a fellow prisoner who told him his disbelief was only vanity.

The name itself means the birth of Kumara, that is Kartikeya, the son of Shiva and Parvati, and the poem tells how Shiva and Parvati were married and how their son was born to kill the demon Taraka.