Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 14

The correct answer is B, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian writer whose novel traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the imagined town of Macondo and became the best known work of magical realism; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Option A is wrong because Chinua Achebe of Nigeria wrote Things Fall Apart, on an Igbo community meeting colonial rule, the most widely read African novel. Option C is wrong because Pablo Neruda of Chile was a poet, honoured for collections such as Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, not a novelist. Option D is wrong because Paulo Coelho of Brazil wrote The Alchemist, a much later and far simpler fable about a shepherd's journey. All four are writers of the global south, which is how the options are built.

The correct answer is C, Girish Karnad. Girish Karnad wrote Yayati in 1961, his first play, which takes from the Mahabharata the story of the old king who asks his son to trade youth with him, and Tughlaq in 1964, on the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. He wrote in Kannada and translated his own work into English, and his other plays include Hayavadana, Nagamandala and Tale-Danda. He received the Jnanpith Award in 1998 and the Padma Bhushan, and he also worked widely as an actor and film director. A is wrong because Viju Khote was a Hindi film actor. B is wrong because Shreeram Lagoo was a Marathi and Hindi actor and stage director rather than the author of these plays. D is wrong because Mohammed Zahur Khayyam was a music composer. Exam tip: Girish Karnad — Yayati, Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Nagamandala; wrote in Kannada, Jnanpith 1998.

The correct answer is B, Michelle Obama. The Light We Carry is her second book, written after the memoir Becoming, and it sets out the habits and ideas she uses to face uncertainty. Option A is wrong because Hillary Clinton's books include Living History, Hard Choices and What Happened. Option C is wrong because Kamala Harris wrote The Truths We Hold: An American Journey. Option D is wrong because Oprah Winfrey's titles include What I Know For Sure and books written with others on wellbeing. Barack Obama's own books, Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope and A Promised Land, are asked in the same way, so learn which title belongs to which of the two. The pattern in these questions is a set of four well known public figures who have all written books.

The correct answer is C, Satyameva Jayate. Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya popularised the slogan Satyameva Jayate, meaning truth alone triumphs, and it was later adopted as the national motto of India. The line comes from the Mundaka Upanishad, and it is written in Devanagari on the abacus of the Lion Capital of Ashoka, which India adopted as the State Emblem in January 1950. Malaviya founded Banaras Hindu University in 1916, edited the newspaper Abhyudaya, served four terms as president of the Congress and was given the Bharat Ratna in 2015. A is wrong because Vande Mataram was written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and appears in his novel Anandamath. B is wrong because Jai Jawan Jai Kisan was Lal Bahadur Shastri's slogan, raised during the 1965 war. D is wrong because Inquilab Zindabad was popularised by the poet Hasrat Mohani and used by Bhagat Singh. Exam tip: Satyameva Jayate, from the Mundaka Upanishad, popularised by Malaviya, India's national motto.

The correct answer is A, Thiruvalluvar. He composed one thousand three hundred and thirty couplets arranged in one hundred and thirty-three chapters and grouped in three parts, on virtue, wealth and love; because the work preaches conduct without attaching itself to any one religion, people of every faith in the Tamil country honour it, and it is commonly called the Tamil Veda. Option B is wrong because Ilango Adigal wrote the epic Silappadikaram, the story of Kovalan and Kannagi. Option C is wrong because Kambar wrote the Kamba Ramayanam, the Tamil telling of the Ramayana, several centuries later. Option D is wrong because Tolkappiyar wrote the Tolkappiyam, the oldest surviving work on Tamil grammar and poetics, which belongs to the Sangam age itself. Carry the number of couplets and the names of the three parts with the author, since the question is often set on those details rather than on the name alone.

The correct answer is A, Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish writer whose tale of an elderly gentleman who reads too many books of chivalry, takes up a lance and rides out with his squire Sancho Panza is regarded as the first modern novel in Europe. Option B is wrong because Dante Alighieri of Italy wrote the Divine Comedy, a long poem describing a journey through hell, purgatory and paradise. Option C is wrong because Giovanni Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, a hundred stories told by young people who have fled a plague. Option D is wrong because Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince, a short treatise on how rulers actually keep power, from which the word machiavellian comes. The four names all belong to the same broad period, which is why they appear together as options.

The correct answer is C, Turkish. Babur wrote his memoirs in Chagatai Turkish, the language of his homeland in Central Asia, and the book is admired for its plain, observant prose about the men, fruits, animals and rivers of the countries he passed through. Option A is wrong for the language of composition although it is the language of the famous translation, made for the Mughal court, in which form the work is known as the Baburnama; the question asks in which language it was written. Option B is wrong because Arabic was the language of religious scholarship rather than of Mughal memoirs, and the well known Arabic work on India is Al Biruni's Kitab-ul-Hind. Option D is wrong because Urdu took shape long after Babur's death in 1530.

The correct answer is D, (A) is true but (B) is false. James Mill did publish A History of British India in 1817 in three volumes, so the first statement is correct. The second is not. Mill did not use the labels Ancient, Medieval and Modern; he split India's past into Hindu, Muslim and British periods, treating the first two as ages of superstition and British rule as the bringer of progress. Historians reject that scheme because it fixes a whole age by the religion of its rulers and hides everything else happening beneath. The Ancient, Medieval and Modern division came later, borrowed from European practice, and it too is criticised. A is wrong because the first statement is true, not false. B is wrong because the second statement is false. C is wrong because only one of the two is false. Exam tip: Mill, 1817, three volumes, and the Hindu, Muslim, British periodisation.

The correct answer is D, three chiefs. In the Sangam poems the word muvendar stands for the three crowned rulers of the Tamil country, the Chera, the Chola and the Pandya, each with a port and an inland centre of power, and the poems praise their gifts and their wars. Option A is wrong because dhamma mahamatta was an officer appointed by Ashoka of the Mauryan empire to spread and supervise his dhamma, and the term belongs to inscriptions in Prakrit, not to Tamil poetry. Option B is wrong because village headmen are named by other words in the same poems and were local figures, far below a crowned chief. Option C is wrong because the word is not a description of wealth at all; the rich householders of the Sangam age appear under separate terms. Remember the emblems along with the names, since a follow-up question may ask which dynasty used the bow, the tiger or the fish.

The correct answer is D, Chand Bardai. He was the court poet of Prithviraj Chauhan, and his Prithviraj Raso, in Braj mixed with Rajasthani, is the longest and most discussed work of the Adikal or Veergatha Kal. Option A, Jagnik, composed the Parmal Raso, from which the Alha ballads of Bundelkhand come, so he is of the right age but the wrong work. Option B, Vidyapati, wrote the Padavali in Maithili on the love of Radha and Krishna, and is often placed at the close of the Adikal. Option C, Amir Khusro, wrote riddles, mukariyan and dohas that are the earliest playful use of Khari Boli. All four belong to the same period, so the pairing of poet with work is the whole of the question.

The correct answer is C, Persian. Babur's memoir was written in Chagatai Turkish and was translated into Persian in Akbar's time by Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, one of the nine jewels of the court, so that the book could be read by the Persian speaking nobility of the empire. Option A is wrong because Turkish is the language of the original and not of the translation, and the two halves of this fact are deliberately set against each other in exam papers. Option B is wrong because there was no Arabic version of the work in the Mughal court. Option D is wrong because Urdu as a literary language developed much later, and translations of the memoir into it belong to the modern period. Remember the pair: written in Turkish, translated into Persian.

The correct answer is B, Dr. Rajendra Prasad. The first President of India published India Divided in 1946, examining the demand for partition and the arguments made on both sides in the years before independence. His other works are Satyagraha in Champaran and Atmakatha, the autobiography he wrote in Hindi while in prison.

Option A, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, wrote on philosophy and religion, not on the political question of partition. Option C, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, wrote India Wins Freedom, the title candidates most often confuse with this one because both names contain the word India and both deal with the same years. Option D, V. V. Giri, came from the trade union movement and wrote Jobs for Our Millions and Industrial Relations. Keep the pair apart: India Divided is Rajendra Prasad, India Wins Freedom is Azad.

The correct answer is B, Ilango Adigal. The Silappadikaram, whose name means the tale of the anklet, follows the merchant Kovalan, his wife Kannagi and the dancer Madhavi, and ends with Kannagi proving her husband's innocence before the Pandya king and bringing fire upon Madurai; she is worshipped afterwards as a goddess of chastity. Option A is wrong because Sattanar composed the Manimekalai, the Buddhist sequel about the daughter of Kovalan and Madhavi, and the two works together are called the twin epics. Option C is wrong because Thiruvalluvar wrote the Tirukkural, a book of couplets and not a narrative epic. Option D is wrong because Subramania Bharati was a poet of the twentieth century whose patriotic verse made him the national poet of Tamil. Fix the heroine with the epic: Kannagi belongs to the Silappadikaram and Manimekalai gives her name to the other.

The correct answer is B, Sanjaya Baru. Sanjaya Baru served as media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and wrote The Accidental Prime Minister as an insider's account of those years. Because it is written by an observer rather than by the subject, the book is counted as a memoir about Manmohan Singh and not as his autobiography.

Option A, Manmohan Singh, did not write the book, and assuming that he did is the mistake the question is designed to catch. Option C, Daman Singh, is his daughter and wrote Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan, a family account of her parents, which is a different book altogether. Option D, Natwar Singh, wrote his own memoir One Life Is Not Enough, which deals with his career in the foreign service and in politics.

The correct answer is C, Gulbadan Begum. She was a daughter of Babur and a sister of Humayun, and she wrote her account of the family at the request of her nephew Akbar, who wanted material for the Akbarnama. Her book is valued because it describes the household and the women of the court from inside, a view that the formal chronicles never give. Option A is wrong because Humayun left no memoir of his own; his reign is known through his sister and through servants of the court. Option B is wrong because Akbar was unlettered and had others write for him, Abul Fazl above all. Option D is wrong because Babur wrote about himself in the Tuzuk-i-Baburi and died before the events of his son's reign.

The correct answer is B, Aravind Adiga, whose first novel The White Tiger won the Booker Prize in 2008. The book is told as a set of letters written by Balram Halwai, a driver who rises from a poor village to become a businessman in Bangalore, and it was later made into a film.

Option A, Amitav Ghosh, has written The Shadow Lines, The Glass Palace and the Ibis trilogy and was the first English language writer to be given the Jnanpith Award, but he has not won the Booker. Option C, Chetan Bhagat, is a popular novelist whose books have been filmed, yet he has never been a Booker winner. Option D, Jhumpa Lahiri, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for her short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, which is a different prize and a different country.

The correct answer is D, Madurai. Tamil tradition holds that assemblies of poets, called Sangams, met under the patronage of the Pandya kings, and Madurai, the Pandya capital, is the seat remembered in the accounts that survive; the poems collected there form the oldest body of Tamil literature. Option A is wrong because Nagapattinam was a port on the Coromandel coast, known for trade and later for its Buddhist and Christian associations, not for a literary academy. Option B is wrong because Thiruvarur is famous as a temple town and as the birthplace of the great composers of Carnatic music, which belongs to a much later age. Option C is wrong because Thiruvallur lies near the northern edge of Tamil Nadu and has no connection with the Sangam assemblies. The safe pairing to memorise is Madurai with the Pandyas and with the Sangam, and the same city with the burning in the Silappadikaram.

The correct answer is A, Mutamid Khan. He was an officer of Jahangir's court who continued the record of the reign after the emperor stopped writing his own memoir, and his Iqbalnama-i-Jahangiri is one of the main Persian sources for the period. Option B is wrong because Inayat Khan belongs to the next reign and is associated with the Shahjahan Nama. Option C is wrong because Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, a poet and noble of Akbar's court, is remembered for translating Babur's memoir into Persian and for his Hindi couplets, not for a life of Jahangir. Option D is wrong because Abul Fazl wrote the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari and was killed in 1602, while Jahangir's reign began in 1605. The safe habit here is to learn each Mughal chronicle with the reign it covers, because the names of these officers sound alike and papers set them against one another.

The correct answer is C, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. He published Anandamath in 1882, and the song Vande Mataram that appears in it became the rallying cry of the freedom movement and was adopted as the national song of India; his other well-known works are Durgeshnandini, Kapalkundala and Devi Chaudhurani. Option A is wrong because Rabindranath Tagore wrote Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare Baire, and it was he who composed Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem, which is why the two names are offered together in this question. Option B is wrong because Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Devdas, Parineeta and Srikanta, novels of social life rather than of patriotism. Option D is wrong because Michael Madhusudan Dutt wrote the Meghnad Badh Kavya, the first Bengali epic in blank verse. Keep national song and national anthem clearly apart, because that distinction is itself a standard question.

The correct answer is D, Aurangzeb. This is one of the striking facts of Mughal cultural history: the emperor who withdrew court patronage from musical performance presided over a reign in which the largest number of Persian treatises on Indian classical music was written, as scholars turned from the court to the book. Option A is wrong because Shah Jahan, though a patron of music and himself a trained singer, did not see this volume of writing on the subject. Option B is wrong because Jahangir's court is remembered for painting above all other arts. Option C is wrong because Akbar's reign is famous for Tansen and for performance rather than for a body of musical scholarship. The point examiners want is the contrast between the emperor's own austerity and the scholarship of his age.