Awards & Honours Quiz: Literary Awards of India

The correct answer is B, Hindi. The Vyas Samman was instituted in 1991 by the K. K. Birla Foundation and is given for an outstanding literary work in Hindi published in the previous ten years. Its first recipient was the critic and scholar Ram Vilas Sharma.

Option A, Rajasthani, is the language of the foundation's Bihari Puraskar, which is open to a writer from Rajasthan writing in either Hindi or Rajasthani, and that overlap is what makes this option tempting. Option C, Sanskrit, has no award of its own from this foundation, though a Sanskrit writer is eligible for the Saraswati Samman because Sanskrit is in the Eighth Schedule. Option D, Konkani, is likewise covered by the Saraswati Samman rather than by the Vyas Samman. The clean distinction to carry into the exam is that the Vyas Samman is for Hindi alone while the Saraswati Samman, instituted by the same foundation in the same year, is open to every Eighth Schedule language.

The correct answer is D, Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri. The Malayalam poet, known simply as Akkitham, received the 55th Jnanpith Award, given for the year 2019. The Jnanpith is instituted by Bharatiya Jnanpith and is regarded as the highest literary award in India.

Option A, Amitav Ghosh, won the 54th Jnanpith, for 2018, and was the first writer in English to receive it, English having become an eligible language in 2013. Option B, Raghuveer Chaudhari, is the Gujarati novelist who won the 51st award, for 2015. Option C, Chandrashekhara Kambara, is the Kannada playwright and poet who won the 53rd award, for 2017. All four are real laureates from nearby years, so the safe method is to anchor one pair, such as Amitav Ghosh with 2018, and count from there. Note also that the numbered award and the year of the award go together, while the announcement usually falls in a later calendar year.

The correct answer is C, K. K. Birla Foundation. The foundation instituted the Saraswati Samman in 1991 for an outstanding literary work in any of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, published in the previous ten years, and the award carries the largest cash prize of any Indian literary honour.

Option A, the Sahitya Akademi, gives its own annual award in twenty-four languages, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship and the Bhasha Samman, but not this one. Option B, Bharatiya Jnanpith, gives the Jnanpith Award and the Moortidevi Award, and because both trusts honour writing across Indian languages the two are easily confused. Option D, the Ministry of Culture, funds the Sahitya Akademi but gives no literary award in its own name; the civilian honours it deals with are the Padma awards, which are not literary awards. The same foundation gives the Vyas Samman and the Bihari Puraskar, also from 1991.

The correct answer is A, Harivansh Rai Bachchan. The Hindi poet of the Chhayavaad and Halavaad periods, best known for Madhushala, received the first Saraswati Samman in 1991 for his autobiography written in four volumes. The award was instituted that year by the K. K. Birla Foundation.

Option B, Ram Vilas Sharma, was the first recipient of the Vyas Samman, also in 1991 and also from the same foundation, which makes him the sharpest distractor in the set; the two firsts of the same year are regularly swapped. Option C, Vijay Tendulkar, was the Marathi playwright of Ghashiram Kotwal and Sakharam Binder, honoured with the Saraswati Samman later, in 2001. Option D, Kaifi Azmi, was the Urdu poet and lyricist who won the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Padma Shri but not this first. Learn the pair together: Bachchan for the Saraswati Samman and Ram Vilas Sharma for the Vyas Samman, both in 1991.

The correct answer is B, Bharatiya Jnanpith. The trust that gives the Jnanpith Award instituted the Moortidevi Award in 1983 for a creative work that carries the spirit of Indian philosophy and culture, and the work may be in any of the languages of the Eighth Schedule or in English.

Option A, the Sahitya Akademi, gives its annual award, the Fellowship, the Bhasha Samman, the Translation Prize, the Bal Sahitya Puraskar and the Yuva Puraskar, a long list that does not include this one. Option C, the K. K. Birla Foundation, gives the Saraswati Samman, the Vyas Samman, the Bihari Puraskar and the Shankar Puraskar, and since the Shankar Puraskar is also for work on Indian philosophy and culture the two are easily interchanged; the difference is that the Shankar Puraskar is for Hindi only. Option D, the Government of Madhya Pradesh, gives the Kabir Samman for poetry. Remember Bharatiya Jnanpith as the trust behind two awards, the Jnanpith and the Moortidevi.

The correct answer is B, Rabindranath Tagore. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, largely on the strength of Gitanjali in his own English rendering, and he was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any field. He also wrote the national anthems of India and Bangladesh and renounced his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

Option A, V. S. Naipaul, won the prize in 2001 but was born in Trinidad to a family of Indian descent and was a British citizen, so he is not counted as an Indian winner; his name is the usual trap in this question. Option C, Salman Rushdie, won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight's Children, not a Nobel. Option D, Sri Aurobindo, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature but never received it. Papers sometimes phrase the question as the first Asian Nobel laureate, and the answer is the same.

The correct answer is B, The God of Small Things. Arundhati Roy's first novel, set in Ayemenem in Kerala and built around a pair of twins, won the Booker Prize in 1997, and she was the first Indian woman and the first writer living in India to win it.

Option A, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker for Kiran Desai in 2006; she is the daughter of the novelist Anita Desai, who was shortlisted three times without winning. Option C, Midnight's Children, won the Booker for Salman Rushdie in 1981 and later won the Booker of Bookers as the best winner of the prize's first twenty-five years. Option D, The White Tiger, won the Booker for Aravind Adiga in 2008. All four are genuine Booker winning novels by writers of Indian origin, so the question is purely about matching the book to its author, and the four together answer most Booker questions.

The correct answer is A, Tomb of Sand, from Ret Samadhi by Geetanjali Shree. The International Booker Prize honours a book translated into English, and the award is shared between the author and the translator. Geetanjali Shree's Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, translated by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won it in 2022, the first book in Hindi and the first in any Indian language to do so.

Option B names a later Indian winner of the prize and so cannot be the first. Option C, The Palace of Illusions, is a retelling of the Mahabharata written in English by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and a book written in English is not eligible for a prize meant for translations. Option D, Godaan, is Premchand's Hindi novel of 1936, long before the International Booker existed in its present form, which began as the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and took its current shape in 2016. Keep the two prizes apart: the Booker Prize is for fiction written in English and the International Booker for a translated work.

The correct answer is B, Sahitya Akademi. The Akademi gives its annual award in the twenty-four languages it recognises, and it instituted the Bhasha Samman in 1996 to honour writers and scholars working in languages outside that list, as well as those who contribute to classical and medieval literature. It is a way of reaching the many Indian languages the annual award cannot cover.

Option A, Bharatiya Jnanpith, gives the Jnanpith Award and the Moortidevi Award and works only with the Eighth Schedule languages and English. Option C, the Lalit Kala Akademi, is the national academy of fine arts and gives no literary award; it shares Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi with the Sahitya Akademi, which is why the two names appear together. Option D, the K. K. Birla Foundation, gives the Saraswati Samman, the Vyas Samman and the Bihari Puraskar. Remember the Akademi as the body that handles every language question, whether inside its list of twenty-four or outside it.

The correct answer is B, Rajasthan. The Bihari Puraskar was instituted in 1991 by the K. K. Birla Foundation and goes to a writer from Rajasthan for a work in Hindi or Rajasthani. It is named after Bihari, the seventeenth century poet of the Riti period and author of the Bihari Satsai, who was associated with the court of Amber.

Option A, Bihar, is the answer the name of the award pulls candidates towards, and it is wrong: the award is named after a poet called Bihari and has nothing to do with the state of Bihar. Option C, Uttar Pradesh, and option D, Madhya Pradesh, have literary honours of their own; Madhya Pradesh gives the Kabir Samman for poetry and the Maithili Sharan Gupt Samman. The foundation's other awards are wider in reach, the Saraswati Samman covering every Eighth Schedule language and the Vyas Samman covering Hindi across the country.

The correct answer is C, Interpreter of Maladies. The collection of nine short stories, most of them about Indians and Indian Americans living between two countries, was Jhumpa Lahiri's first book and won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, an unusual honour for a debut collection of stories.

Option A, The Namesake, is her first novel, published in 2003, and was made into a film, but it won no Pulitzer. Option B, Unaccustomed Earth, is her second collection of stories, published in 2008. Option D, The Lowland, is her novel of 2013, set partly in Kolkata during the Naxalite years, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize without winning. All four are her own books, so the question is only about which one carried the Pulitzer, and the answer is the earliest of them.

The correct answer is A, a distinguished work of Indian fiction, translations included. The JCB Prize for Literature was instituted in 2018 for a work of fiction by an Indian writer, and a novel translated into English from an Indian language is eligible, with a separate sum going to the translator when a translated book wins. It quickly became one of the richest literary prizes in the country.

Option B is wrong because the prize is for fiction and not for poetry; poetry is covered by the Kabir Samman of Madhya Pradesh and by the Sahitya Akademi awards. Option C is wrong because non-fiction is outside its scope, although several Indian prizes and the Sahitya Akademi awards do cover it. Option D, writing for children, is the field of the Sahitya Akademi's Bal Sahitya Puraskar, instituted in 2010. Group the newer English language prizes by year to keep them apart: the Crossword Book Award from 1998, the DSC Prize from 2010 and the JCB Prize from 2018.