Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 1

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.

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.

The book takes its title from the Emergency, which ran from 1975 to 1977, and recalls those years through the author's own experience of them.

The Emperor of Gladness, released in May 2025, is a novel by the Vietnamese-American writer and poet Ocean Vuong. Vuong was born near Saigon in 1988 and came to the United States as a child refugee.

'Ace Against Odds' is the autobiography of Sania Mirza, India's most successful woman tennis player, published in 2016 and written with her father Imran Mirza and Shivani Gupta.

'Mother Mary Comes to Me' is Arundhati Roy's memoir, published in September 2025, and it is built around her difficult, loving bond with her mother Mary Roy.

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.

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.

Test Cricket: A History, published in 2025, was written by the English cricket writer and journalist Tim Wigmore.

Arundhati Roy's memoir 'Mother Mary Comes to Me' was brought out in India in September 2025 by Penguin Random House India, under its literary imprint Hamish Hamilton.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

He wrote the essay in Lahore jail in 1930, answering a fellow prisoner who had suggested that his disbelief came from vanity.

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.

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.