Uttar Pradesh Quiz: Language, Literature and Writers of Uttar Pradesh

Hindi in the Devanagari script is the official language of Uttar Pradesh under the Uttar Pradesh Official Language Act, 1951, and an amendment passed in 1989 added Urdu as the second official language of the state.

Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, the Eastern Hindi speech of the Awadh region around Ayodhya, and began the work at Ayodhya in 1574.

Jayasi belonged to Jais in the present Amethi district and completed the Padmavat in 1540.

Braj Bhasha is the speech of the Braj tract, which covers Mathura, Agra, Aligarh, Hathras and Etah, and it belongs to the Western Hindi group that descends from Shauraseni Apabhramsha.

Bhojpuri descends from Magadhi Apabhramsha and is grouped with Magahi and Maithili in the Bihari group of the Eastern Indo-Aryan family, a classification made by George Abraham Grierson in the Linguistic Survey of India.

Premchand, whose real name was Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, was born at Lamhi village near Varanasi in 1880 and died in 1936.

Prasad, who lived at Varanasi from 1889 to 1937, published Kamayani in 1936; it retells the story of Manu, Shraddha and Ida as an allegory of feeling and intellect and is treated as the chief long poem of Chhayavad.

Mahadevi Verma, born at Farrukhabad in 1907, was given the Jnanpith Award in 1982 for Yama, a collection that brings together her lyric poetry.

The Nagari Pracharini Sabha was founded at Varanasi in 1893 by students of the Queens College to press for the use of Devanagari and Hindi in the courts and offices, and it went on to publish dictionaries, manuscripts and the Hindi Shabdasagar.

Firaq Gorakhpuri, whose real name was Raghupati Sahay, was born at Gorakhpur in 1896 and received the Jnanpith Award in 1969 for the Urdu collection Gul-e-Naghma, becoming the first Urdu writer to win the prize.

Bhushan belonged to Tikwapur in the present Kanpur district and wrote the Shivraj Bhushan, Shivabavani and Chhatrasal Dashak in Braj Bhasha, praising Shivaji and Chhatrasal Bundela in the veer rasa at a time when most Riti poets wrote love poetry for courts.