Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 20

India After Gandhi, published in 2007, is Ramachandra Guha's history of the Indian republic from independence onwards, covering partition, the integration of the princely states, the making of the Constitution, the wars, the Emergency and the economic changes that followed.

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.

Ashvaghosha, a Sanskrit poet and Buddhist thinker, is placed at the court of the Kushana ruler Kanishka in the first and second centuries of the common era, and he also wrote the Saundarananda and is associated with the fourth Buddhist council held in Kashmir under Kanishka.

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.

Mrichchhakatika is a ten-act play about the love of a poor Brahmin merchant for a courtesan, set against a palace revolution, and its English title The Little Clay Cart comes from a toy cart that appears in the story.

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.

He wrote first in Urdu as Nawab Rai, and after the colonial administration seized his collection Soz-e-Watan he adopted the name Premchand, under which he wrote Godan, Nirmala, Gaban, Rangbhoomi and the story Kafan.

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.

Mudrarakshasa is a political drama whose plot turns on the statecraft of Chanakya as he brings down the Nandas and places Chandragupta Maurya on the throne, and historians use it as a literary source for that change of dynasty.

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

He is always written as Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, the pen name meaning the unique or the unlike-any-other, and he wrote Saroj Smriti, Ram ki Shakti Puja and the poem Bhikshuk.

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.

It tells the story of King Pururavas and the celestial nymph Urvashi.

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.

He took the name from the call of a Mississippi riverboat crew, where mark twain meant a sounding of two fathoms, that is water deep enough to be safe.

The correct answer is A, Jane Austen, whose novel of the Bennet sisters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy opens with one of the best known first lines in English; she also wrote Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion.

Swapnavasavadattam, the dream of Vasavadatta, turns on King Udayana and his queen and is regarded as his finest work; Urubhanga and Pratima Nataka are also his.

Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan first wrote under the takhallus Asad and later chose Ghalib, which means dominant or victorious, and he names himself in the closing couplet of many ghazals.

The Natyashastra lays down the rules of the stage, of acting, gesture, music and stagecraft, and gives the theory of rasa, the set of aesthetic moods a performance is meant to create in its audience; it is the foundation of all later Indian dramatic and dance theory.

She took a man's name so that her novels would be judged as serious literature rather than as light romances by a woman, and she wrote Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss under it.