Books & Authors Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 4

Tamil tradition holds that assemblies of poets, called Sangams, met under the patronage of the Pandya kings, and Madurai, the Pandya capital, is the seat remembered in the accounts that survive; the poems collected there form the oldest body of Tamil literature.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract (1762) that the English people are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and are slaves once the election is over.

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya popularised the slogan Satyameva Jayate, meaning truth alone triumphs, and it was later adopted as the national motto of India.

Abode of Love is credited to Narendra Modi, who wrote several books in Gujarati long before becoming Prime Minister.

Phule wrote Gulamgiri, meaning slavery, in Marathi in 1873, and dedicated it to the people of America who had fought to free slaves, drawing a line between their struggle and the condition of the lower castes in India.

'Ace against Odds' is the autobiography of the tennis player Sania Mirza, brought out in 2016 and written with her father Imran Mirza and the journalist Shivani Gupta.

The Malayalam poet, known simply as Akkitham, received the 55th Jnanpith Award, given for the year 2019. He was the sixth Malayalam writer to be honoured, the language whose G. Sankara Kurup had won the very first Jnanpith for 1965.

He was the first Indian and also the first person from Asia to be awarded a Nobel Prize in any category, and the prize brought Indian writing to the notice of readers across Europe.

Al-Biruni, a scholar from Khwarizm in Central Asia, came to India in the train of Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century.

The Panchatantra teaches practical wisdom (niti) through animal fables, each story showing the right and wrong way to act. The Sanskrit collection is credited to Vishnu Sharma, who, according to its frame story, composed it to educate the dull sons of King Amarashakti in statecraft and worldly sense.

The Kiratarjuniya, a Sanskrit epic poem of the sixth century, was written by Bharavi. The Kiratarjuniya tells, in 18 cantos, a story from the Vana Parva of the Mahabharata: Arjuna performs penance to win divine weapons, and Shiva tests him by appearing as a Kirata, a mountain hunter.

The Kathasaritsagara, whose name means the ocean of the streams of story, was composed in Sanskrit verse in the eleventh century by Somadeva of Kashmir for the queen Suryavati, and it is a vast frame narrative drawing on the lost Brihatkatha of Gunadhya; the Vetala Panchavimshati, known in Hindi as…

Marco Polo belonged to a family of merchants of the Republic of Venice, then the leading trading city of the Mediterranean, and he travelled overland to the court of Kublai Khan in China, returning by sea at the end of the thirteenth century.

She was a daughter of Babur and a sister of Humayun, and she wrote her account of the family at the request of her nephew Akbar, who wanted material for the Akbarnama.

A Better India: A Better World was written by N R Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of Infosys, and published in 2009.

Kerala: God's Own Country is an illustrated book on the land, people and culture of Kerala, written by Shashi Tharoor with photographs by M.F.

The American historian William Hardy McNeill wrote Plagues and Peoples, published in 1976. The book was one of the first to treat infectious disease as a force in world history.

The remark that the commerce of India is the commerce of the world, and that whoever commands it exclusively is the dictator of Europe, is attributed to Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia from 1682 to 1725.

Narayana Bhatta, a Vaishnava scholar of the sixteenth century, wrote the Sanskrit text Vraja Bhakti Vilasa in 1552, describing the sacred sites of the Braj region around Mathura and Vrindavan.

Cleanliness was a lifelong concern for him; he cleaned latrines himself at Sabarmati and Sevagram, insisted that every satyagrahi do the same, and declared on more than one occasion that sanitation mattered more than political freedom, because a nation that could not keep itself clean would not know what to…