Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 16

The correct answer is C, Kumarasambhava. The name itself means the birth of Kumara, that is Kartikeya, the son of Shiva and Parvati, and the poem tells how Shiva and Parvati were married and how their son was born to kill the demon Taraka. Kalidasa, the Sanskrit poet usually placed in the Gupta age, left two long poems, Kumarasambhava and Raghuvamsa, two shorter poems, Meghaduta and Ritusamhara, and three plays, Abhijnanashakuntalam, Vikramorvashiyam and Malavikagnimitram. Option A is wrong because Meghaduta is a lyric in which a banished yaksha sends a message to his wife through a passing cloud. Option B is wrong because Raghuvamsa traces the line of King Raghu, the dynasty into which Rama was born. Option D is wrong because Ritusamhara describes the six seasons of the Indian year. Exam tip: Kumarasambhava is the birth of Kartikeya and Raghuvamsa the dynasty of Raghu, both by Kalidasa.

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, Bhagat Singh. He wrote Why am I an Atheist in October 1930 in the Lahore Central Jail, answering a fellow prisoner who told him his disbelief was only vanity. The piece argues that a revolutionary must be guided by reason rather than faith, and it appeared in print in 1931 in the paper The People. It is really an essay rather than an autobiography, and it is read beside his prison notebook and the statement he made in court with B. K. Dutt after the Assembly bomb case of 1929. A is wrong because Rash Behari Bose, who planned the conspiracy of 1915 and later helped raise the Indian National Army in Japan, did not write it. C is wrong because Ram Prasad Bismil, hanged in the Kakori case in 1927, wrote the autobiography Nij Jeevan Ki Ek Chhaya. D is wrong because Aurobindo Ghosh turned to spiritual writing, with The Life Divine and Essays on the Gita to his name. Exam tip: Why am I an Atheist is by Bhagat Singh, written in Lahore jail in 1930.

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 B, Abul Fazl, one of the nine jewels of Akbar’s court, who wrote the Akbarnama in three volumes; the Ain-i-Akbari is its third volume and is a gazetteer of the empire in five books, describing the departments, the provinces, the revenue, the coinage, the army and the customs of the people. Option A is wrong because Abdul Qadir Badauni wrote the Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh, also called the Tarikh-i-Badauni, which criticises Akbar’s religious policy and is read as a counterweight to Abul Fazl. Option C is wrong because Nizamuddin Ahmad wrote the Tabaqat-i-Akbari, another history of the same reign. Option D is wrong because Faizi, Abul Fazl’s brother, was the poet laureate of the court and wrote verse, not this administrative record. The safest way to hold this set is to remember that one reign produced three histories with three tempers: Abul Fazl writing as an admirer, Badauni as a critic, and Nizamuddin Ahmad as a plain annalist.

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 A, Hsuan Tsang. Hsuan Tsang, also written Hiuen Tsang or Xuanzang, reached India in the seventh century and spent years in the empire of Harshavardhana of Kannauj, who received him with honour; he studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Shilabhadra, attended the great religious assemblies at Kannauj and at Prayag, and recorded what he saw in the Si-Yu-Ki, or Records of the Western World. He is remembered as the prince of pilgrims. Option B is wrong because I-Tsing, spelt Etsing here, came later in the same century, after Harsha's death, and wrote chiefly on monastic discipline at Nalanda. Option C is wrong because Faxian, that is Fa-Hien, came far earlier, in the reign of Chandragupta the Second Vikramaditya of the Gupta dynasty. Option D is wrong because Ibn Battuta was not Chinese at all but a Moroccan judge of the fourteenth century who came in the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq.

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 A, Minhaj-us-Siraj, also known as Minhaj-i-Siraj Juzjani, who wrote the work in the reign of Nasiruddin Mahmud of the Slave dynasty and named it after that sultan. It traces history from the beginning of the world down to his own day and is the main source for the early sultans of Delhi, including Razia. Option B is wrong because Hasan Nizami wrote the Tajul-Maasir, taken as the first official history of the Sultanate, covering Qutbuddin Aibak and Iltutmish. Option C is wrong because Ziauddin Barani belongs to the Tughlaq period and wrote the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari. Option D is wrong because Amir Khusrau was the poet of the Khalji court and wrote the Khazain-ul-Futuh among many other works. Note too that Minhaj held judicial office under the sultans, so his account reflects what the court itself believed about the succession of rulers after Iltutmish.

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, Muhammad bin Tughlaq. Ibn Battuta, a qazi from Tangier in Morocco, reached Delhi in the 1330s, and the Sultan, impressed by his learning, appointed him qazi of the capital and later sent him as an envoy to the court of China. His book, the Rihla, written in Arabic, describes the Sultan's court, the postal relay system, the coconut and the betel leaf, and the movement of the capital, and it is a first hand source for the reign. Option A is wrong because Alauddin Khalji ruled at the turn of the fourteenth century, a generation before Ibn Battuta arrived, and is associated with market control regulations. Option B is wrong because Jalaluddin Khalji, the founder of that dynasty, ruled even earlier. Option D is wrong because Feroz Shah Tughlaq succeeded Muhammad bin Tughlaq; Ibn Battuta had left India before his reign began. Fix the pairing in memory as Ibn Battuta with Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Al-Biruni with Mahmud of Ghazni.

The correct answer is B, Ernest Hemingway. The short novel tells of an ageing Cuban fisherman who hooks a giant marlin far out at sea and fights to bring it home; Hemingway also wrote A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Option A is wrong because John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, about a farming family driven west by dust and debt. Option C is wrong because F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, the novel of wealth and illusion in the nineteen twenties. Option D is wrong for the reason that makes it tempting: Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick, also a novel of the sea and a hunt for a great fish, but a century earlier and about a whale and Captain Ahab.

The correct answer is B, Amir Khusrau, the poet called Tuti-i-Hind or the parrot of India, who served under several sultans of Delhi; the work is also known as the Tarikh-i-Alai after Alauddin’s title. His other works include the Qiran-us-Sadain on the meeting of Bughra Khan and Kaiqubad, the Miftah-ul-Futuh on Jalaluddin Khalji, the Nuh Sipihr in praise of India, and the Tughlaq Nama. Option A is wrong because Shams-i-Siraj Afif wrote a Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi on the reign of Firoz Shah Tughlaq. Option C is wrong because Abbas Khan Sarwani wrote the Tarikh-i-Sher Shahi on Sher Shah Suri. Option D is wrong because Yahya bin Ahmad Sirhindi wrote the Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi on the Sayyid dynasty. Khusrau also wrote in Hindavi besides Persian and is remembered for his contribution to Indian music, so when his name appears in a paper it is worth recalling the whole list of his works at once, because the examiner may pick any single title from it.

The correct answer is B, John Maynard Keynes. Written during the Great Depression and published in 1936, this book argued that an economy can settle at a level of high unemployment on its own, and that the remedy is to raise effective demand through government spending; it created macroeconomics as we know it and the whole school called Keynesian economics. Option A is wrong because Alfred Marshall wrote Principles of Economics in 1890 and shaped the earlier neo-classical approach to demand and supply. Option C is wrong because Paul Samuelson wrote the famous textbook Economics and was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Option D is wrong because Milton Friedman, author of Capitalism and Freedom, led the monetarist reply to Keynes rather than writing this book.

The correct answer is C, Al-Biruni. Abu Rayhan al-Biruni was born in Khwarezm, a region that lies in modern Uzbekistan, and came to India in the eleventh century in the train of Mahmud of Ghazni. He learned Sanskrit so that he could read Indian works himself and wrote in Arabic the study known as Kitab-ul-Hind or Tahqiq-i-Hind, covering religion, philosophy, astronomy, law and custom; his practice of stating a belief as its own believers hold it has earned him the title of founder of Indology. Option A is wrong because Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi, though he too came from Central Asia, arrived in the fifteenth century as the envoy of Shah Rukh to Vijayanagara. Option B is wrong because Ibn Battuta came from Morocco in the fourteenth century. Option D is wrong because Francois Bernier was a French physician of the seventeenth century, attached to the Mughal court. The century in the stem is the quickest way to eliminate three of the four.

The correct answer is A, the Vinaya, Sutta and Abhidhamma Pitakas. Pitaka means basket, so the canon is called the three baskets. The Vinaya Pitaka contains the rules of discipline for monks and nuns, the Sutta Pitaka holds the discourses of the Buddha, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka deals with philosophy and the analysis of mind and matter.

Option B replaces the Sutta with the Jataka, which is the common error: the Jataka tales of the Buddha's earlier births are not a fourth basket but form part of the Sutta Pitaka. Option C mixes the Jataka with the Angas, and Option D uses Anga and Upanga, which are divisions of the Jain canon written in Prakrit, not of the Buddhist one. A further fact worth carrying is that the Milindapanho, the dialogue between the monk Nagasena and the Indo-Greek king Menander, is a Pali work outside the canon.

The correct answer is C, Gulbadan Begum, a daughter of Babur and a half-sister of Humayun, who wrote the Humayun-nama at Akbar’s request. Its value lies in what the official chronicles leave out: the life of the household, the journeys of the women of the family and the quarrels among the princes, described by someone who was present. Option A is wrong because Nur Jahan, Jahangir’s queen, wielded great political influence and had coins struck in her name but wrote no chronicle. Option B is wrong because Jahanara, Shah Jahan’s daughter, wrote on Sufism and built in Delhi and Agra, but not this book. Option D is wrong because Zeb-un-Nissa, Aurangzeb’s daughter, was a poet who wrote under the pen name Makhfi. Remember also that Gulbadan Begum wrote at Akbar’s own request, which is the reason the book survives at all, and that Abul Fazl drew on it while compiling the Akbarnama, so a chronicle by a woman of the household became a source for the official history itself.

The correct answer is D, Venice. Marco Polo belonged to a family of merchants of the Republic of Venice, then the leading trading city of the Mediterranean, and he travelled overland to the court of Kublai Khan in China, returning by sea at the end of the thirteenth century. On that return voyage he touched the Pandya country of southern India and wrote of its pearl fishery, its horses brought by sea and its temples, and his book of travels became Europe's chief source on Asia for two centuries. Option A is wrong because Zurich is a Swiss city with no part in this story. Option B is wrong because Paris was the capital of France, whose travellers to India, Tavernier, Bernier and Thevenot, came four centuries later. Option C is wrong because Istanbul, then Constantinople, was the Byzantine and later Ottoman capital, a city Marco Polo's trade passed through but not his home. Remember Venice for Marco Polo and Tangier in Morocco for Ibn Battuta.

The correct answer is C, Chagatai Turkish, which was Babur’s mother tongue; the memoirs are also called the Tuzuk-i-Baburi, and Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan translated them into Persian during Akbar’s reign, which is how they reached the wider Mughal court. Option A is wrong because Persian was the official language of the Mughal administration and of almost every other chronicle of the period, which is exactly why this question is asked. Option B is wrong because Arabic was used for religious and legal scholarship rather than for imperial memoirs. Option D is wrong because Urdu as a literary language developed much later, long after Babur’s time. Note the contrast with Jahangir, whose own memoirs, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, were written in Persian. The Baburnama is prized as much for its plain description of the fruits, birds, rivers and seasons of Hindustan as for its account of the battles of Panipat and Khanua, and that mixture of natural observation with campaign narrative is what makes it unlike the official chronicles that followed.

The correct answer is C, Francois Bernier. Bernier was a French physician who spent about twelve years in India in the middle of the seventeenth century and was attached to Prince Dara Shikoh as his physician, later serving the noble Danishmand Khan; he therefore watched the war of succession among Shah Jahan's sons from close quarters. His book, Travels in the Mogul Empire, compares Indian conditions with European ones page after page and argues that the crown's claim on all land discouraged improvement in agriculture, a view that shaped European writing on India for a long time. Option A is wrong because Hakim Afzal Khan is not the name recorded in this connection. Option B is wrong because Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan judge of the fourteenth century in the Delhi Sultanate, three centuries too early for a Mughal prince. Option D is wrong because Duarte Barbosa was a Portuguese writer on Vijayanagara and the western coast, not a court physician.