Books & Authors Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 3

The Mimamsa Sutra, also called the Purva Mimamsa Sutra, was composed by the sage Jaimini and is the founding text of the Mimamsa school, one of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy; it is concerned with the correct interpretation of the ritual portions of the Vedas and with the…

The Ashtadhyayi, which means eight chapters, is Panini's grammar of Sanskrit and the oldest surviving grammar of any Indian language; its roughly four thousand rules describe the language with a precision that modern linguists still study.

The Chinese Buddhist monk Hiuen Tsang, whose name is also written Xuanzang, travelled in India during the reign of Harshavardhana in the seventh century, studied at Nalanda and recorded what he saw in the Si-yu-ki, the Records of the Western World, which remains the fullest description of India in that…

Kavirajamarga, written in the ninth century and attributed to the Rashtrakuta king Amoghavarsha the First, is a treatise on poetics and is the earliest surviving literary work in the Kannada language, which is why it is quoted in every question on the beginnings of regional literature.

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.

The End of India, published in 2003, is his book of essays written in English on communal violence and the danger it poses to the idea of India.

Unfinished, published in 2021, is her memoir, written in English, and it recounts her school years in India and the United States, her win at a beauty pageant and her move from Hindi films to work abroad.

Unaccustomed Earth, published in 2008, is her second collection of short stories and, like most of her work, deals with Bengali families settled in the United States.

The boxer M.C. Mary Kom told her story in Unbreakable, written with Dina Serto and published in 2013, in which she describes her childhood in a farming family in Manipur, her fight to box at a time when few Indian women did, and her return to the ring after becoming…

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the Discourse on Political Economy in 1755, first as the article "Economy" for Diderot's Encyclopédie.

While held in Yerwada jail, Gandhi translated old Indian hymns and devotional lyrics into English, and these were published as 'Songs from Prison'.

The prose romance Vasavadatta was written by Subandhu, not Kalidasa, so this pair is wrong. Subandhu's Vasavadatta, of about the sixth or seventh century, is famous for its ornate style full of puns and long compounds.

The Golden Boat is the English title of Sonar Tari, the Bengali collection of poems Tagore published in 1894, nineteen years before his Nobel Prize, and its title poem is among the best known in modern Bengali verse.

Oliver Twist, published in instalments from 1837, is his second novel and follows an orphan boy from a workhouse into a gang of young thieves in London, giving English the figures of Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes.

The Maratha leader, called Lokmanya and described by the British as the father of Indian unrest, declared that swaraj was his birthright and that he would have it, and the sentence became the rallying cry of the extremist wing of the Congress in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Dadabhai Naoroji published Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1901, and in it he set out his drain theory, the argument that British rule was steadily draining India’s wealth to England through salaries, pensions, home charges and the profits of trade.

The tale of queen Maynamati and her son Gopichandra belongs to the Nath literature of eastern India, the body of songs and ballads around the Nathpanthi yogis.

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a Persian scholar from Khwarizm, came to India in the time of Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century, learnt Sanskrit, read Indian texts in the original and wrote the Kitab-ul-Hind, also called Tahqiq-i-Hind, a study of Indian religion, philosophy, astronomy, law and custom that is…

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni was born in Khwarezm, a region that lies in modern Uzbekistan, and came to India in the eleventh century in the train of Mahmud of Ghazni.

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.