Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 11

The correct answer is B, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Azad, who presided over the Congress during the Quit India years and became independent India's first Education Minister, dictated this account of the last phase of the freedom struggle and of Partition; his birthday, the eleventh of November, is observed as National Education Day. Option A is wrong because Jawaharlal Nehru's own books are The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and the autobiography published as Toward Freedom. Option C is wrong because Rajendra Prasad wrote India Divided and an autobiography of his own. Option D is wrong because Sardar Patel, who integrated the princely states and is called the Iron Man of India, left speeches and letters rather than a memoir of this name.

The correct answer is A, Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract (1762) that the English people are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and are slaves once the election is over. He used the line to attack representative government. For Rousseau sovereignty rested in the general will of the people and could not be handed over to deputies, so only direct democracy counted as real self-rule. The remark is quoted in polity papers as the classic criticism of indirect democracy. Option B is wrong because John Locke defended representative government and the natural rights to life, liberty and property, and his Two Treatises justified the settlement of 1688 in England. Option C is wrong because Plato, in The Republic, wanted rule by philosopher-kings and distrusted democracy altogether. Option D is wrong because Aristotle, in Politics, classified constitutions and called man a political animal, but this saying is not his. Exam tip: Rousseau — The Social Contract, general will, 'man is born free but everywhere he is in chains'.

The correct answer is A, Kapil Dev. Straight from the Heart is the autobiography of the all-rounder Kapil Dev, who captained India to its first cricket World Cup title in 1983 at Lord's and who was the first bowler to take four hundred Test wickets. The frank tone the title promises runs through his account of that campaign and of his later years. Option B is wrong because Mohinder Amarnath, the player of the match in the 1983 final, did not write this book. Option C is wrong because Bishan Singh Bedi, the left-arm spinner and former captain, is not its author. Option D is wrong because Ravi Shastri, the all-rounder who became a commentator and coach, did not write it either. Learn the World Cup pair together: Kapil Dev for 1983 and Straight from the Heart for the book.

The correct answer is A, Shashi Tharoor. Kerala: God's Own Country is an illustrated book on the land, people and culture of Kerala, written by Shashi Tharoor with photographs by M.F. Husain and brought out in 2009. Tharoor, a former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and later a Member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, has written many other books, among them The Great Indian Novel, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, An Era of Darkness and Why I Am a Hindu. 'God's Own Country' is also the tourism tagline of Kerala. Option B is wrong because Jeet Thayil is a poet and novelist known for Narcopolis, which reached the Booker shortlist in 2012. Option C is wrong because Sudha Murthy writes fiction and essays such as Wise and Otherwise, Dollar Bahu and Three Thousand Stitches. Option D is wrong because Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai was a Malayalam novelist who wrote Chemmeen and won the Jnanpith Award in 1984. Exam tip: Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel; Thakazhi - Chemmeen; Thayil - Narcopolis.

The correct answer is A, B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar, trained as an economist before he became the chief architect of the Constitution, submitted this study at the London School of Economics and published it in 1923; it traces the history of Indian currency and argues for a stable measure of value, and its reasoning fed into the debate from which the Reserve Bank of India emerged. Option B is wrong because M. Visvesvaraya, the engineer and Diwan of Mysore, wrote Planned Economy for India in 1934. Option C is wrong because C. D. Deshmukh was the first Indian Governor of the Reserve Bank and later Finance Minister, and his own book is the memoir The Course of My Life. Option D is wrong because V. K. R. V. Rao is known for his work on national income and for founding the Institute of Economic Growth.

The correct answer is C, Kautilya. Kautilya, also known as Chanakya and as Vishnugupta, was the minister and guide of Chandragupta Maurya, and his Arthashastra is a manual of statecraft that deals with the duties of a king, the organisation of the treasury, taxation, trade, spying, law and war; it is the earliest Indian work usually placed under economics and politics together. Option A is wrong because Chandragupta Maurya was the ruler served by Kautilya and not the author. Option B is wrong because Kalidasa was the Sanskrit poet and dramatist of works such as Abhijnanasakuntalam and Meghadutam. Option D is wrong because Megasthenes was the Greek ambassador at the Mauryan court whose own account of India was called Indica, a different book altogether. The Arthashastra was rediscovered in 1905 by R. Shamasastry, who found a manuscript of it in Mysore and published it.

The correct answer is C, Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, setting out the theory that species change over generations through natural selection, in which individuals better suited to their surroundings leave more offspring. He followed it with The Descent of Man. Option A is wrong because Gregor Mendel, the monk whose pea plant experiments founded genetics, published his findings as a scientific paper, not as this book. Option B is wrong because Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the earlier and now rejected theory of inheritance of acquired characters. Option D is wrong because Alfred Wallace independently reached a similar idea of natural selection and presented a joint paper with Darwin, but the book itself is Darwin's. This title is asked in the biology chapter as well.

The correct answer is A, Penguin Random House India. 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 book is a portrait of the author's mother, Mary Roy, the educationist who founded a school in Kerala and won the 1986 Supreme Court case on the inheritance rights of Syrian Christian women. Penguin Random House is the largest trade publisher in the world and its Indian arm publishes much of the country's serious literary writing. B is wrong because HarperCollins India, though a major literary publisher here, did not bring out this title. C is wrong because Hachette India publishes a wide list but not this memoir. D is wrong because Rupa Publications is an older Indian house known for popular and general interest books. Exam tip: link the book to both names — Arundhati Roy as the author and Penguin Random House India as the publisher.

The correct answer is B, Gunnar Myrdal. The Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal published this long three-volume study of South and South East Asia in 1968, examining why the region stayed poor and pointing to institutions, land relations, administration and what he called the soft state; the title deliberately echoes Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Option A is wrong because Amartya Sen's books are Poverty and Famines, Development as Freedom, The Argumentative Indian and, with Jean Dreze, An Uncertain Glory. Option C is wrong because Simon Kuznets is remembered for national income accounting and for the curve named after him rather than for this book. Option D is wrong because W. Arthur Lewis is known for his model of a dual economy with surplus labour, which is a theoretical contribution and not this study.

The correct answer is D, Jaishankar Prasad. Kamayani is his long poem built on the figures of Manu, Shraddha and Ida, and it is held to be the highest achievement of Chhayavad; Prasad also wrote the plays Skandagupta and Chandragupta and the collection Ansu. The other three options are the remaining poets of the same movement, which is what makes the question worth asking. Option A, Nirala, wrote Ram ki Shakti Puja, Saroj Smriti, Anamika and Parimal. Option B, Sumitranandan Pant, wrote Pallav and Chidambara, for which he became the first Hindi writer to win the Jnanpith Award in 1968. Option C, Mahadevi Verma, called the modern Meera, wrote Yama, Neerja and Deepshikha. Remember the four names as a set, each with one work attached.

The correct answer is B, Aryabhata. The Aryabhatiya is a short Sanskrit work in verse, written by the astronomer and mathematician Aryabhata, which states an accurate approximation for pi, explains the daily rotation of the earth as the cause of the apparent motion of the stars, and gives the correct reason for eclipses. India's first satellite, launched in 1975, was named after him. Option A is wrong because Varahamihira wrote the Brihat Samhita, an encyclopaedic work on astronomy and natural phenomena. Option C is wrong because Brahmagupta wrote the Brahmasphutasiddhanta, which first set out rules for calculating with zero. Option D is wrong because Bhaskara II wrote the Siddhanta Shiromani, whose mathematical section is the famous Lilavati. Learn all four pairs together, as papers often mix them.

The correct answer is A, Vagdevi, the goddess Saraswati. Along with a citation and a cash prize, every Jnanpith laureate receives a bronze replica of Vagdevi, Saraswati as the goddess of speech and learning, which is a fitting emblem for a literary honour and a detail asked directly in objective papers.

Option B, Nataraja, the dancing form of Shiva, is associated with the Sangeet Natak Akademi and with Indian classical dance, not with the Jnanpith. Option C, the goddess Lakshmi, stands for wealth and prosperity and appears on no major literary award. Option D, Gautama Buddha, appears on various peace and scholarship honours but not on this one, though the Jain family that founded Bharatiya Jnanpith gives the trust its strong link with Indian philosophy. Contrast the statue with the Sahitya Akademi Award, whose winner receives an engraved copper plaque and a shawl rather than any statue.

The correct answer is B, Amartya Sen. Amartya Sen published this book in 1981 and showed, using the Bengal famine among other cases, that famines occur not merely because food is short in a country but because groups of people lose the ability to command food, which he called a failure of entitlement; the work was central to the Nobel Memorial Prize awarded to him in 1998. Option A is wrong because Jean Dreze is Sen's co-author on Hunger and Public Action and An Uncertain Glory, not on this book. Option C is wrong because Abhijit Banerjee wrote Poor Economics and Good Economics for Hard Times together with Esther Duflo. Option D is wrong because Thomas Piketty wrote Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a study of the concentration of income and wealth in rich countries.

The correct answer is B, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy's first novel, set in Kerala and built around the childhood of the twins Rahel and Estha. It won the Booker Prize in 1997, the fiftieth year of India's independence, and made her the first Indian woman to win the award.

Option A, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, is Roy's second novel, published twenty years later in 2017, and it did not win the Booker. Option C, The Inheritance of Loss, is Kiran Desai's novel, which won the Booker in 2006. Option D, A Suitable Boy, is Vikram Seth's long novel of 1993; for all its fame it never won the Booker Prize, and it is put among the options for exactly that reason.

The correct answer is A, Viswanathan Anand. Mind Master was written by the chess Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand with the writer Susan Ninan, and it sets out the lessons in concentration, preparation and handling defeat that Anand drew from his world championship matches. Anand became India's first Grandmaster in 1988 and was the first recipient of the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna. Option B is wrong because Koneru Humpy, the first Indian woman to take the Grandmaster title, has not written this book. Option C is wrong because Pentala Harikrishna is a leading Indian Grandmaster but not its author. Option D is wrong because Gukesh Dommaraju, who won the world championship in 2024, belongs to a later generation. Match the word master with chess and the option is easy to pick.

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, Sunil Gavaskar. Sunny Days was written by the opening batsman Sunil Gavaskar, whose nickname was Sunny, and it covers his early career including the record-breaking debut series in the West Indies. He was the first batsman to score ten thousand runs in Test cricket, and he also wrote Idols, Runs and Ruins and One Day Wonders, so an examiner may name any of these titles. Option B is wrong because Dilip Vengsarkar, the batsman famous for his centuries at Lord's, did not write it. Option C is wrong because Gundappa Viswanath, Gavaskar's contemporary and brother-in-law, is not its author. Option D is wrong because Ajit Wadekar captained the side that won in the West Indies and England in 1971 but did not write this book.

The correct answer is A, P. V. Narasimha Rao. The Insider is a novel that follows a politician's climb through state and national politics, and it is read as a lightly disguised account of the system its author knew from the inside. He was a scholar of several languages and also wrote on the Ayodhya question.

Option B, I. K. Gujral, wrote an autobiography, Matters of Discretion, which is a memoir and not fiction. Option C, Morarji Desai, wrote the autobiography The Story of My Life, again a work of recollection. Option D, Chandra Shekhar, left no book that examiners ask about. The fact to hold is a simple one: Narasimha Rao is the only Prime Minister of India to have published a novel, so any question mentioning fiction and the office of Prime Minister points to him.

The correct answer is A, Salim Ali. Salim Ali, known as the Birdman of India, was the ornithologist whose surveys built the modern study of Indian birds, and The Book of Indian Birds is his best-known work, long used as a field guide. His autobiography is titled The Fall of a Sparrow, and he was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan. Option B is wrong because Jagadish Chandra Bose, who demonstrated that plants respond to stimuli, wrote Response in the Living and Non-Living. Option C is wrong because Birbal Sahni was a palaeobotanist who studied fossil plants and founded the institute that carries his name. Option D is wrong because M S Swaminathan is remembered as the leading figure of India's Green Revolution in agriculture rather than as the author of this book.

The correct answer is C, Sachin Tendulkar. Playing It My Way is the autobiography of Sachin Tendulkar and was published shortly after he retired from international cricket. It covers his boyhood in Mumbai, his coaching under Ramakant Achrekar and his long career for India.

Option A, Kapil Dev, wrote Straight from the Heart, which deals with the 1983 World Cup victory among other events of his career. Option B, Sunil Gavaskar, wrote Sunny Days, and also Idols and Runs n Ruins, so he is a frequent name in the same question set. Option D, Rahul Dravid, has not written an autobiography of this name; the books associated with him were written by others about his career, which is exactly the distinction between autobiography and biography that the question is testing.