Books & Authors Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 5

Ashvaghosha, a Sanskrit poet and Buddhist thinker, is placed at the court of the Kushana ruler Kanishka in the first and second centuries of the common era, and he also wrote the Saundarananda and is associated with the fourth Buddhist council held in Kashmir under Kanishka.

The Meghaduta, or Cloud Messenger, is his short lyric poem in which a yaksha banished from his home asks a passing monsoon cloud to carry a message to his wife in Alaka, and the cloud's route becomes a description of the Indian landscape.

Ibn Battuta, a qazi from Tangier in Morocco, reached Delhi in the 1330s, and the Sultan, impressed by his learning, appointed him qazi of the capital and later sent him as an envoy to the court of China.

Straight from the Heart is the autobiography of Kapil Dev, the fast bowler who captained India to its first World Cup win in 1983 at Lord's. The book came out in 2004 and describes his rise from Chandigarh, the 175 not out against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells and his years…

She was born at Skopje, came to India as a nun, took Indian citizenship in 1948 and founded the Missionaries of Charity at Kolkata in 1950.

Manimekalai, one of the five great epics of Tamil literature, was written by Sithalai Sathanar, a grain merchant of Madurai, in the post-Sangam period.

The line comes from Gandhi's writings on health, where he treats the body as a servant of the spirit. Gandhi wrote widely on diet, fasting, nature cure and self-control, most famously in his little book on health.

Gulbadan Begum, a daughter of Babur, wrote the Humayun Nama, an account of the life of her half-brother Humayun. Gulbadan Begum wrote the book in Persian at the request of her nephew Akbar, who wanted material for the official history of his reign, the Akbarnama of Abul Fazl.

Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, in Gujarati in 1909. He wrote it in about ten days on board the ship Kildonan Castle while returning from London to South Africa.

Bankim died in 1894, more than fifty years before the Partition of 1947, so he could not have written about it.

The richly illustrated manuscript of the Badshah Nama that now lies in the Royal Library at Windsor reached King George the Third in 1799 as a gift from the Nawab of Awadh.

Babur's memoir was written in Chagatai Turkish and was translated into Persian in Akbar's time by Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, one of the nine jewels of the court, so that the book could be read by the Persian speaking nobility of the empire.

The Nobel Prize is awarded every year in six categories: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace and Economic Sciences.

She wrote Stri Purush Tulana, A Comparison between Women and Men, in Marathi in 1882. Tarabai Shinde was born in Buldhana in Berar and was associated with Jyotirao Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Geneva-born philosopher, published The Social Contract (Du contrat social) in 1762.

Bose wrote The Indian Struggle, 1920–1934 in Europe, where he lived in the mid-1930s for medical treatment. The book was first published in London in 1935.

His play takes up the later life of Rama, after the events of the Ramayana.

Jhumpa Lahiri, born in London to Bengali parents and brought up in the United States, moved to Rome and began writing in Italian rather than in English.

Oliver Twist, published in parts between 1837 and 1839, is his second novel and follows an orphan boy through a workhouse and the streets of London.

Bernier was a French physician who spent about twelve years in India in the middle of the seventeenth century and was attached to Prince Dara Shikoh as his physician, later serving the noble Danishmand Khan; he therefore watched the war of succession among Shah Jahan's sons from close quarters.