Books & Authors Quiz: Books by Freedom Fighters and Leaders

The correct answer is B, Mahatma Gandhi. He wrote the book in Gujarati under the title Satya Na Prayogo, publishing it in parts in his journal, and Mahadev Desai translated it into English. It covers his childhood, his years in England and South Africa and the beginning of his work in India.

Option A, Jawaharlal Nehru, also wrote an autobiography, which appeared under the title Toward Freedom, so he is the closest distractor here. Option C, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, wrote India Wins Freedom, an account of the years leading to Independence rather than a full life story. Option D, Rajendra Prasad, wrote an Atmakatha and the book India Divided. Note also that Gandhi's Hind Swaraj is often placed in such options, but it is a political tract of 1909 and not an autobiography.

The correct answer is A, Jawaharlal Nehru. He wrote The Discovery of India during his imprisonment at Ahmednagar Fort, and the book traces Indian history, thought and civilisation from the earliest times to the national movement of his own day.

Option B, Subhas Chandra Bose, wrote The Indian Struggle, his own account of the freedom movement, which is the title most often placed beside Nehru's in these questions. Option C, Sarojini Naidu, is remembered for her poetry, The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time and The Broken Wing, rather than for prose on history. Option D, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, wrote Gita Rahasya and The Arctic Home in the Vedas. Since Nehru wrote several well-known books, it helps to hold the three together: The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and his autobiography.

The correct answer is C, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. He wrote Gita Rahasya during his imprisonment at Mandalay in Burma, reading the Bhagavad Gita as a call to selfless action rather than to withdrawal from the world, an interpretation that suited his own politics of active resistance.

Option A, Lala Lajpat Rai, wrote Unhappy India and The Story of My Deportation. Option B, Bipin Chandra Pal, was the third member of the Lal Bal Pal trio and is remembered chiefly as an orator and editor rather than for this book. Option D, Aurobindo Ghosh, wrote Essays on the Gita as well as The Life Divine, which is exactly why he is placed in these options: two of the four names have written on the Gita. The distinguishing detail is the prison, Mandalay, which belongs to Tilak.

The correct answer is A, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. India Wins Freedom is his account of the national movement and of the negotiations in the years around Independence, written from the position of a Congress president of that period. Azad is also remembered for editing the journals Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh.

Option B, Rajendra Prasad, wrote India Divided, a title so close in sound that it is placed here deliberately. Option C, Lala Lajpat Rai, wrote Unhappy India, the third member of this confusing group of titles. Option D, Vallabhbhai Patel, is not associated with a famous book of his own, although his letters and speeches have been published in collected volumes. Learn the three India titles as a single line: Unhappy India by Lajpat Rai, India Divided by Rajendra Prasad, India Wins Freedom by Azad.

The correct answer is B, Dadabhai Naoroji. In this book he argued that British rule was steadily transferring India's wealth to England through salaries, pensions, home charges and the profits of trade, an argument known as the drain of wealth theory. He is also called the Grand Old Man of India.

Option A, Romesh Chandra Dutt, wrote The Economic History of India and belongs to the same school of economic criticism, which makes him the strongest distractor. Option C, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was a moderate leader and Gandhi's political mentor, known for his work in the Imperial Legislative Council and for the Servants of India Society rather than for this book. Option D, Mahadev Govind Ranade, was a social reformer and economist of the earlier generation. Naoroji goes with the drain theory, Dutt with the economic history.

The correct answer is C, Bhagat Singh. He wrote the essay in Lahore jail in 1930, answering a fellow prisoner who had suggested that his disbelief came from vanity. The piece is a reasoned statement of his rationalist position and is the best known of his prison writings.

Option A, Chandrashekhar Azad, was his close associate in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, but he left no comparable writing. Option B, Ram Prasad Bismil, was a revolutionary of the Kakori case and a poet, and his autobiography written before his execution is a separate item. Option D, Surya Sen, led the Chittagong armoury raid and is remembered for that action rather than for any book. All four names come from the same revolutionary stream, so the question tests whether the candidate has attached the essay to the right one.

The correct answer is A, B. R. Ambedkar. He prepared the text in 1936 as the presidential address for a conference at Lahore, but the organisers withdrew the invitation over its contents, so the speech was never delivered and he published it himself. His other well-known works include The Problem of the Rupee, Who Were the Shudras and The Buddha and His Dhamma.

Option B, Jyotirao Phule, wrote Gulamgiri in the previous century and founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, so he belongs to the earlier phase of the same struggle. Option C, Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, led the Self-Respect Movement in the south and is associated with the journal Kudi Arasu. Option D, Narayana Guru, led the reform movement in Kerala with the teaching of one caste, one religion, one God. The undelivered speech of 1936 is the detail that fixes the answer to Ambedkar.

The correct answer is A, Subhas Chandra Bose. The Indian Struggle is his own narrative and analysis of the Indian national movement, written during his years in Europe, and it reflects the impatience with gradual methods that later separated him from the Congress leadership.

Option B, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History, both of which are broader works of history. Option C, V. D. Savarkar, wrote The Indian War of Independence 1857, in which he described the revolt of 1857 as a planned national war rather than a mutiny, and Hindutva. Option D, M. N. Roy, wrote India in Transition and founded the Communist Party of India abroad. Note how similar the titles of options A and C sound; the word struggle belongs to Bose and the words war of independence to Savarkar.

The correct answer is B, on the voyage from London to South Africa in 1909. Gandhi wrote the book in Gujarati on board the ship while returning from a deputation to London, casting it as a dialogue between an editor and a reader in which he explains what true self-rule means and criticises modern industrial civilisation.

Option A, Yerwada jail in 1932, is the place and year of the Poona Pact rather than of this book. Option C, the Sabarmati Ashram in 1919, is associated with the Rowlatt satyagraha and with his journals, not with Hind Swaraj, which was already ten years old by then. Option D, Champaran in 1917, was his first satyagraha in India, over indigo cultivation. The chain to remember is short: 1909, on the ship, written in Gujarati, in the form of a dialogue.

The correct answer is C, his daughter Indira. Nehru wrote the letters from prison, telling her the story of the world from ancient times onwards, and they were later collected as Glimpses of World History. The shorter and earlier set written to her as a child was published as Letters from a Father to His Daughter.

Option A, Mahatma Gandhi, exchanged a great deal of correspondence with Nehru, but that correspondence is published separately and is not this book. Option B, Motilal Nehru, was his father and a leader of the Swaraj Party, and letters run the other way in that relationship. Option D, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, wrote his own book, India Wins Freedom. In the exam, connect the word letters with Indira and the word discovery with Ahmednagar Fort, and the Nehru questions are settled.

The correct answer is A, Bal Gangadhar Tilak. He ran Kesari in Marathi and Maratha in English, and it was through the writing in Kesari that he reached ordinary readers in Maharashtra, a reach that also brought him prosecutions for sedition.

Option B, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, is associated with the journal Sudharak of the reformist school and with the Servants of India Society. Option C, Aurobindo Ghosh, wrote for Bande Mataram and later brought out Karmayogin. Option D, Annie Besant, published New India and Commonweal and led the Home Rule movement. Since one question of this kind appears in most papers, keep a short list of pairs ready: Kesari with Tilak, Al-Hilal with Azad, Bande Mataram with Aurobindo, Mooknayak with Ambedkar and Harijan with Gandhi.

The correct answer is B, Sarojini Naidu. The Golden Threshold was her first collection of poems, and it was followed by The Bird of Time and The Broken Wing. Because of her poetry she is called the Nightingale of India, and she was also a leader of the national movement and the first woman to be president of the Indian National Congress at its Kanpur session.

Option A, Toru Dutt, was an earlier Indian poet writing in English and French, remembered for Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. Option C, Kamala Das, belongs to a much later generation of Indian English poetry. Option D, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote Gitanjali, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, and his name is placed in these options precisely because it is the first that comes to mind for Indian poetry.