Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 21

In Waiting for Godot two tramps pass the time by a bare tree waiting for a man who never arrives, and the play became the defining work of the Theatre of the Absurd, the movement that refused ordinary plot and meaning in order to show life as it felt after…

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.

As a boy Tagore wrote poems in an archaic Vaishnava style and presented them as the work of a poet named Bhanusimha, and the collection is therefore called Bhanusimha Thakurer Padavali.

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.

Pygmalion, in which a professor of phonetics trains a flower girl to speak like a duchess, is his most widely known play, and his others include Arms and the Man, Man and Superman and Saint Joan.

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.

Vaidyanath Mishra wrote in Hindi as Nagarjun, a name taken from the Buddhist philosopher, and in Maithili as Yatri, meaning the traveller; he is known for Balchanama and for sharply political poems.

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.

A Doll's House ends with Nora leaving her husband and her children, a conclusion that scandalised audiences and made the play a landmark of realistic social theatre; Ghosts and An Enemy of the People belong to the same phase of his work.

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.

He was a leading figure of the Nayi Kavita movement, edited the Tar Saptak anthologies that introduced a generation of poets, and wrote the novels Shekhar Ek Jivani and Nadi ke Dweep.

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.

Tughlaq uses the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq to speak about idealism turning into failure, and Hayavadana draws on a tale from the Kathasaritsagara about exchanged heads; Nagamandala and Yayati are also his, and he received the Jnanpith Award.

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.

The takhallus is the pen name a poet adopts, such as Ghalib, Mir, Faiz or Firaq, and by convention the poet mentions it in the closing couplet of a ghazal.

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.

Ashadh ka Ek Din imagines the poet Kalidasa torn between his village love and the glory offered by the court at Ujjayini, and it is counted the first fully modern Hindi play; Aadhe Adhure and Lahron ke Rajhans are his other major works.

Netaji is a title of respect given to Subhas Chandra Bose by his followers, and he did not publish his writing under it.

Sampooran Singh Kalra took the pen name Gulzar, meaning a garden in bloom, and is known both for Urdu poetry and for film lyrics, and for the collection Raat Pashmine Ki.

Eric Arthur Blair chose the pen name George Orwell, taking the surname from the river Orwell in England, and under it wrote Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Burmese Days and the essay Shooting an Elephant.