Books & Authors Quiz: Classical Indian Literature

The Arthashastra sets out the duties of a king, the working of ministers and spies, taxation, law, trade, agriculture and warfare, and it is one of the main sources for Mauryan administration.

That play, whose title means the little clay cart, was written by Shudraka, and it is unusual among Sanskrit dramas because its hero is an impoverished merchant and its plot turns on ordinary city life rather than on gods and kings.

The Harshacharita is a biography of his patron and one of the earliest historical biographies written in Sanskrit, while Kadambari is a romance in ornate prose and is often described as one of the first novels in any Indian language.

He wrote the Rajatarangini, whose name means the river of kings, in Kashmir in the twelfth century. Because he arranged rulers in order of time and used inscriptions, coins and earlier records, the work is treated as the earliest piece of history writing in India in the modern sense.

The Ashtadhyayi, meaning the work in eight chapters, fixed the rules of Sanskrit in a set of short formulas and is admired as the earliest scientific grammar of any language, since it describes the whole language through a compact system of rules.

The Ramayana is accordingly called the Adi Kavya, the first poem.

Mudrarakshasa, meaning the signet ring of Rakshasa, is a political drama in which Chanakya outwits the minister Rakshasa and secures the throne for Chandragupta Maurya.

Pitaka means basket, so the canon is called the three baskets. The Vinaya Pitaka contains the rules of discipline for monks and nuns, the Sutta Pitaka holds the discourses of the Buddha, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka deals with philosophy and the analysis of mind and matter.

The Thirukkural is a work of short couplets arranged under three heads, virtue, wealth and love, and it is written so plainly that it is quoted as a guide to conduct rather than read only as literature.

The Panchatantra, meaning the five treatises, uses talking animals to teach practical wisdom and statecraft, and the frame story explains that it was composed to educate princes who had no taste for formal learning.

Ashvaghosha wrote the Buddhacharita, a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit verse, and also Saundarananda, and tradition places him at Kanishka's court along with the physician Charaka and the Buddhist scholar Vasumitra.

The Bhagavad Gita is a section of the Bhishma Parva of the epic, in which Krishna counsels Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.