Books & Authors Quiz: Regional Literature: Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia and Assamese Classics

Narsinh Mehta was a fifteenth century devotional poet of Gujarat who is honoured as the Adi Kavi, the first poet of the language, and his bhajan Vaishnav Jan To lists the qualities of a true devotee, which is why Gandhi made it part of the daily prayer at his ashram.

He published Saraswatichandra in four parts between 1887 and 1901, and the long social novel about a learned young man and the world around him is treated as the work with which the modern Gujarati novel begins.

His Heer, composed in 1766, is the version of the tragic love story of Heer and Ranjha that is still sung and quoted across Punjab, and it is the answer whenever an examiner names the qissa.

Her poem Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu calls on the old poet of Heer to speak again over the suffering of Partition, her novel Pinjar tells the story of an abducted woman of those years, and she received the Jnanpith Award in 1981 for the collection Kagaz Te Canvas.

The fifteenth century poet composed the Odia Mahabharata, along with the Chandi Purana and the Vilanka Ramayana, and in writing the epic in the speech of ordinary people rather than in Sanskrit he earned the title Adikavi, the first poet of Odia.

He is called the father of Odia fiction and of modern Odia prose and is titled Utkala Byasa Kabi, and his novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha is a sharp, ironic account of how a scheming landlord dispossesses a poor weaver couple of their small plot of land.

Writing in the fourteenth century, he put the Ramayana into Assamese verse in seven books, which is what the name Saptakanda records, and the work is counted among the first translations of the epic into any modern Indian language.

The fifteenth and sixteenth century Vaishnava saint founded the Ekasarana faith and shaped much of Assamese cultural life: he composed the devotional songs known as Borgeet, wrote the one-act plays called Ankiya Nat that are staged as Bhaona, gave rise to the dance tradition now called Sattriya, and wrote the…

A leading writer of the Jonaki era that began with the magazine of that name in 1889, he wrote humour, satire, plays and the much loved collection of folk tales Burhi Aair Sadhu, meaning Grandmother Tales, and he composed O Mur Apunar Desh, which is now the state song of…

Manvini Bhavai is his novel of rural Gujarat during a devastating famine, written from the inside of peasant life, and it is the work for which he received the Jnanpith Award.

A nineteenth century scholar and reformer, he compiled Hemkosh, which was the first Assamese dictionary to be arranged on etymological lines and which fixed much of the modern spelling of the language; the work was published after his death.