Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 18

Dadabhai Naoroji published Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1901, and in it he set out his drain theory, the argument that British rule was steadily draining India’s wealth to England through salaries, pensions, home charges and the profits of trade.

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.

The tale of queen Maynamati and her son Gopichandra belongs to the Nath literature of eastern India, the body of songs and ballads around the Nathpanthi yogis.

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.

Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a Persian scholar from Khwarizm, came to India in the time of Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century, learnt Sanskrit, read Indian texts in the original and wrote the Kitab-ul-Hind, also called Tahqiq-i-Hind, a study of Indian religion, philosophy, astronomy, law and custom that is…

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.

The prize of 1913 made him the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any field.

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya popularised the slogan Satyameva Jayate, meaning truth alone triumphs, and it was later adopted as the national motto of India.

Kavirajamarga, written in the ninth century and attributed to the Rashtrakuta king Amoghavarsha the First, is a treatise on poetics and is the earliest surviving literary work in the Kannada language, which is why it is quoted in every question on the beginnings of regional literature.

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.

Rabindranath Tagore set it to music and sang it at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896, and after independence its first two stanzas were given the status of national song, declared to hold a place of honour equal to the national anthem.

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.

The Chinese Buddhist monk Hiuen Tsang, whose name is also written Xuanzang, travelled in India during the reign of Harshavardhana in the seventh century, studied at Nalanda and recorded what he saw in the Si-yu-ki, the Records of the Western World, which remains the fullest description of India in that…

James Mill did publish A History of British India in 1817 in three volumes, so the first statement is correct.

The Meghaduta, or Cloud Messenger, is his short lyric poem in which a yaksha banished from his home asks a passing monsoon cloud to carry a message to his wife in Alaka, and the cloud's route becomes a description of the Indian landscape.

The correct answer is A, Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet of Florence whose long poem carries the narrator through hell, purgatory and paradise in three parts, and which helped make the Tuscan dialect into modern Italian.

The Ashtadhyayi, which means eight chapters, is Panini's grammar of Sanskrit and the oldest surviving grammar of any Indian language; its roughly four thousand rules describe the language with a precision that modern linguists still study.

The poem is arranged in songs meant to be sung and danced, and it is the text on which the Odissi repertoire and the Ashtapadi singing of temples rest.

The Kathasaritsagara, whose name means the ocean of the streams of story, was composed in Sanskrit verse in the eleventh century by Somadeva of Kashmir for the queen Suryavati, and it is a vast frame narrative drawing on the lost Brihatkatha of Gunadhya; the Vetala Panchavimshati, known in Hindi as…

Kamayani takes the flood story of Manu from Indian tradition and turns it into a long allegory in which Manu stands for the mind, Shraddha for faith and Ida for reason.