Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 15

The correct answer is B, Gitanjali. The collection, whose title means an offering of songs, was rendered into English by the poet himself, and the prize that followed in 1913 made Tagore the first Asian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Option A is wrong because Gora is a novel about identity and orthodoxy in colonial Bengal, admired but not the work cited for the prize. Option C is wrong because Ghare Baire, translated as The Home and the World, is the novel of the Swadeshi years that Satyajit Ray later filmed. Option D is wrong because Chokher Bali is an earlier novel of domestic life. Three more facts travel with this one and are asked as often: Tagore wrote Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem of India, and Amar Shonar Bangla, the national anthem of Bangladesh, and he returned his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

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 A, Amir Khusrau. Khusrau served a line of Sultans at Delhi, was a disciple of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and was given the title Tuti-e-Hind, the parrot of India. Khazain-ul-Futuh, also called Tarikh-i-Alai, records the campaigns of Alauddin Khalji, and his Qiran-us-Sadain and Nuh Sipihr belong to the same body of work. Option B is wrong because Ziauddin Barani wrote the Tarikh-i-Firozshahi and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari in the reign of Firoz Shah Tughlaq. Option C is wrong because Minhaj-us-Siraj wrote the Tabaqat-i-Nasiri, which ends in the time of Balban. Option D is wrong because Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan traveller whose Rehla describes the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq from the eyes of an outsider. Learn each Sultanate chronicle with its author and its ruler, because the four names in this question appear together in paper after paper.

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 C, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. Devdas, the story of a young man ruined by his own indecision and by the rigidity of the society around him, is the most often filmed of all Indian novels, and its author also wrote Parineeta, Srikanta and Palli Samaj. Option A is wrong because Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay wrote Pather Panchali, the novel of village childhood on which Satyajit Ray based his first film. Option B is wrong because Kazi Nazrul Islam is the rebel poet, author of Bidrohi and Agnibina, and the national poet of Bangladesh. Option D is wrong because Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay wrote Ganadevata, for which he became the first Bengali writer to receive the Jnanpith Award. Since the four names belong to the same language and the same century, learn them as a set with one title attached to each.

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 B, Abul Fazl. He was a minister and a close friend of Akbar and wrote the Akbarnama, of which the Ain-i-Akbari forms the third volume, setting out the departments of state, the revenue of the provinces, the ranks of the nobility, the coins, the crops and the customs of the country. Option A is wrong because Abdul Qadir Badauni wrote the Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh, a history of the same reign but written in private and sharply critical of the emperor's religious policy. Option C is wrong because Faizi, the brother of Abul Fazl, was the poet laureate of the court and not the author of this work. Option D is wrong because Raja Todar Mal was the revenue minister whose system the Ain describes, not its writer.

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, the Bhagavad Gita. Written in the thirteenth century and also called the Bhavartha Dipika, the Dnyaneshwari explains the Gita verse by verse in Marathi poetry, and its importance lies in taking scripture out of Sanskrit and placing it before ordinary readers, which laid the foundation of the Varkari devotional tradition. Option B is wrong because the Ramayana was retold in Marathi by later poets, and the famous regional retellings are Tulsidas in Awadhi, Kambar in Tamil and Krittibas in Bengali. Option C is wrong because the Rigveda was not the subject of any such vernacular commentary in this tradition. Option D is wrong because the Arthashastra of Kautilya is a treatise on statecraft and economy and has no devotional commentary. The same saint also wrote the philosophical work Amrutanubhav, which is the usual second half of a two-part question.

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 C, Ziauddin Barani. Barani lived at the court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq and wrote in the reign of Firoz Shah Tughlaq. His Tarikh-i-Firozshahi is a history of the Sultanate from Balban onwards and his Fatwa-i-Jahandari sets out his own idea of how a Muslim ruler ought to govern, which makes him the most opinionated of the Sultanate historians. Option A is wrong because Isami wrote the Futuh-us-Salatin in the Deccan, a verse history of the Sultans. Option B is wrong because Shams-i-Siraj Afif wrote a later work of the same name, on Firoz Shah alone, and the shared title is the trap in this question. Option D is wrong because Amir Khusrau was a poet whose histories cover the Khalji age.

The correct answer is C, Victor Hugo, the French novelist, poet and dramatist whose Les Miserables follows the convict Jean Valjean through the France of the early nineteenth century, and whose The Hunchback of Notre-Dame made the cathedral of Paris a character in its own right. Option A is wrong because Alexandre Dumas wrote The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, historical adventure of a very different temper. Option B is wrong because Gustave Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, the study of a provincial doctor's wife that became the model of literary realism. Option D is wrong because Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, early science and adventure fiction. All four are French, so the question is settled by the titles, not by the country.

The correct answer is B, Tolkappiyam. Ascribed to Tolkappiyar, it belongs to the Sangam age and lays down the rules of Tamil letters, words and poetic composition, including the division of poetry into akam, the inner world of love, and puram, the outer world of war and public life. Option A is wrong because the Tirukkural of Thiruvalluvar is a book of moral couplets and not a grammar. Option C is wrong because the Manimekalai of Sattanar is a Buddhist narrative epic and the sequel to the Silappadikaram. Option D is wrong because the Nalayira Divya Prabandham is the collection of the hymns of the Alvars, the Vaishnava poet saints, and belongs to the age of bhakti that came later. The word akam and the word puram are worth memorising with this answer, since a question on the classification of Sangam poetry is drawn straight from the Tolkappiyam.

The correct answer is C, Jawaharlal Nehru. The Prime Minister was the first President of the Sahitya Akademi, elected when the academy was set up in 1954, and he held the office until his death in 1964. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan was its first Vice President and succeeded him as President.

Option A, Dr. Rajendra Prasad, was the first President of India and inaugurated several national institutions of the period, but he did not head the Akademi. Option B, Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, the philosopher who later became President of India, was the Akademi's first Vice President and its second President, which makes him the strongest distractor in the set. Option D, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, was the first Education Minister of India and the moving spirit behind the three national academies, and he was the first Chairman of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, so his name belongs to the same story but to a different chair.

The correct answer is A, Razmnama. Akbar set up a translation department in which Sanskrit works were rendered into Persian, and the Mahabharata was translated there as the Razmnama, a name that means the book of war. Option B is wrong because Sirr-i-Akbar is the Persian translation of the Upanishads made under Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan, three generations later. Option C is wrong because Anwar-i-Suhaili is a Persian version of the Panchatantra fables and belongs to a different line of translation. Option D is wrong because Majma-ul-Bahrain, the mingling of two oceans, is Dara Shikoh's own study of what Hindu and Muslim mysticism have in common. Keep Akbar with the Razmnama and Dara Shikoh with the other two names. Questions on the translation department are common, so it is worth remembering that Akbar ordered the Sanskrit epics and Dara Shikoh the Upanishads.

The correct answer is B, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. He is the poet of national feeling in modern Hindi, and Urvashi, Rashmirathi, Kurukshetra and Hunkar are his chief works; Urvashi brought him the Jnanpith Award in 1972. Option A, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, wrote Madhushala, the most widely recited long poem of the Halavad manner, along with Nisha Nimantran and his autobiography Kya Bhoolun Kya Yaad Karun. Option C, Mahadevi Verma, is of Chhayavad and wrote Yama, Neerja and Deepshikha. Option D, Nirala, also of Chhayavad, wrote Ram ki Shakti Puja and Saroj Smriti. Because all four are modern poets of nearly the same years, papers test the work rather than the age, so tie Urvashi and Rashmirathi firmly to Dinkar. Dinkar also sat in the Rajya Sabha and received the Padma Bhushan, and lines from Rashmirathi are still quoted in speeches, which is why his name recurs in paper after paper.

The correct answer is A, V. S. Khandekar. Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar retold the story of King Yayati from the Mahabharata as a novel about desire and its cost, and for it he became the first writer in Marathi to receive the Jnanpith Award. Option B is wrong because Kusumagraj, the pen name of Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar and the author of the play Natsamrat, received the award after him, and Marathi Language Day is observed on his birthday, 27 February. Option C is wrong because Vinda Karandikar, a poet, received it later still. Option D is wrong because Bhalchandra Nemade, whose novel Kosala turned the modern Marathi novel in a new direction, is the most recent of the four to be honoured. Learning the order of these four names is enough for almost any question set on the Jnanpith Award in Marathi.

The correct answer is A, Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah. The ruler of Golconda who founded the city of Hyderabad wrote verse in Dakhani, the southern form of the language, and the collection that survives under his name is counted as the first complete diwan in it, which is why the earliest chapter of Urdu literature belongs to the Deccan and not to Delhi. Option B is wrong because Mirza Ghalib belongs to the nineteenth century Delhi of Bahadur Shah Zafar. Option C is wrong because Mir Taqi Mir, honoured as Khuda-e-Sukhan, wrote in the eighteenth century, long after the Deccan beginnings. Option D is wrong because Altaf Hussain Hali, the author of the Musaddas, is a poet of the reform movement of the late nineteenth century.

The correct answer is A, Muhammad Iqbal. He wrote the poem in Urdu early in the twentieth century as a song in praise of the land, and it was later set to music and became one of the best loved patriotic songs of the country. Iqbal also wrote Bang-e-Dara in Urdu and Asrar-e-Khudi in Persian, and he is one of the few poets of the subcontinent to have written major work in both languages. Option B is wrong because Faiz Ahmed Faiz is a later poet, known for poems such as Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat. Option C is wrong because Josh Malihabadi is remembered as the poet of revolution. Option D is wrong because Firaq Gorakhpuri, who received the Jnanpith award in 1969, is known for the ghazal and for Gul-e-Naghma.

The correct answer is A, Premchand. The Progressive Writers' Association held its first conference at Lucknow in 1936 and Premchand, who had begun his career writing in Urdu under the name Nawab Rai before turning to Hindi, presided over it and delivered its opening address. The movement turned writers in Urdu and in other Indian languages towards poverty, caste, freedom and social reform. Option B is wrong because Manto, though the greatest short story writer to come out of that circle, was a young man in 1936 and did not preside over it. Option C is wrong because Ismat Chughtai, the author of Lihaaf, also belonged to the generation that followed. Option D is wrong because Qurratulain Hyder, who received the Jnanpith award in 1989, began writing later still.