Regional Literature: Tamil, Bengali and Marathi Classics

The correct answer is A, Thiruvalluvar. He composed one thousand three hundred and thirty couplets arranged in one hundred and thirty-three chapters and grouped in three parts, on virtue, wealth and love; because the work preaches conduct without attaching itself to any one religion, people of every faith in the Tamil country honour it, and it is commonly called the Tamil Veda. Option B is wrong because Ilango Adigal wrote the epic Silappadikaram, the story of Kovalan and Kannagi. Option C is wrong because Kambar wrote the Kamba Ramayanam, the Tamil telling of the Ramayana, several centuries later. Option D is wrong because Tolkappiyar wrote the Tolkappiyam, the oldest surviving work on Tamil grammar and poetics, which belongs to the Sangam age itself. Carry the number of couplets and the names of the three parts with the author, since the question is often set on those details rather than on the name alone.

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 B, Ilango Adigal. The Silappadikaram, whose name means the tale of the anklet, follows the merchant Kovalan, his wife Kannagi and the dancer Madhavi, and ends with Kannagi proving her husband's innocence before the Pandya king and bringing fire upon Madurai; she is worshipped afterwards as a goddess of chastity. Option A is wrong because Sattanar composed the Manimekalai, the Buddhist sequel about the daughter of Kovalan and Madhavi, and the two works together are called the twin epics. Option C is wrong because Thiruvalluvar wrote the Tirukkural, a book of couplets and not a narrative epic. Option D is wrong because Subramania Bharati was a poet of the twentieth century whose patriotic verse made him the national poet of Tamil. Fix the heroine with the epic: Kannagi belongs to the Silappadikaram and Manimekalai gives her name to the other.

The correct answer is D, Madurai. 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. Option A is wrong because Nagapattinam was a port on the Coromandel coast, known for trade and later for its Buddhist and Christian associations, not for a literary academy. Option B is wrong because Thiruvarur is famous as a temple town and as the birthplace of the great composers of Carnatic music, which belongs to a much later age. Option C is wrong because Thiruvallur lies near the northern edge of Tamil Nadu and has no connection with the Sangam assemblies. The safe pairing to memorise is Madurai with the Pandyas and with the Sangam, and the same city with the burning in the Silappadikaram.

The correct answer is C, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. He published Anandamath in 1882, and the song Vande Mataram that appears in it became the rallying cry of the freedom movement and was adopted as the national song of India; his other well-known works are Durgeshnandini, Kapalkundala and Devi Chaudhurani. Option A is wrong because Rabindranath Tagore wrote Gitanjali, Gora and Ghare Baire, and it was he who composed Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem, which is why the two names are offered together in this question. Option B is wrong because Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Devdas, Parineeta and Srikanta, novels of social life rather than of patriotism. Option D is wrong because Michael Madhusudan Dutt wrote the Meghnad Badh Kavya, the first Bengali epic in blank verse. Keep national song and national anthem clearly apart, because that distinction is itself a standard question.

The correct answer is B, Gitanjali. 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. Option A is wrong because Gora is a novel about identity and orthodoxy in colonial Bengal, admired but not the work cited for the prize. Option C is wrong because Ghare Baire, translated as The Home and the World, is the novel of the Swadeshi years that Satyajit Ray later filmed. Option D is wrong because Chokher Bali is an earlier novel of domestic life. Three more facts travel with this one and are asked as often: Tagore wrote Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem of India, and Amar Shonar Bangla, the national anthem of Bangladesh, and he returned his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

The correct answer is C, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. 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. Option A is wrong because Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay wrote Pather Panchali, the novel of village childhood on which Satyajit Ray based his first film. Option B is wrong because Kazi Nazrul Islam is the rebel poet, author of Bidrohi and Agnibina, and the national poet of Bangladesh. Option D is wrong because Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay wrote Ganadevata, for which he became the first Bengali writer to receive the Jnanpith Award. Since the four names belong to the same language and the same century, learn them as a set with one title attached to each.

The correct answer is A, the Bhagavad Gita. Written in the thirteenth century and also called the Bhavartha Dipika, the Dnyaneshwari explains the Gita verse by verse in Marathi poetry, and its importance lies in taking scripture out of Sanskrit and placing it before ordinary readers, which laid the foundation of the Varkari devotional tradition. Option B is wrong because the Ramayana was retold in Marathi by later poets, and the famous regional retellings are Tulsidas in Awadhi, Kambar in Tamil and Krittibas in Bengali. Option C is wrong because the Rigveda was not the subject of any such vernacular commentary in this tradition. Option D is wrong because the Arthashastra of Kautilya is a treatise on statecraft and economy and has no devotional commentary. The same saint also wrote the philosophical work Amrutanubhav, which is the usual second half of a two-part question.

The correct answer is B, Tolkappiyam. Ascribed to Tolkappiyar, it belongs to the Sangam age and lays down the rules of Tamil letters, words and poetic composition, including the division of poetry into akam, the inner world of love, and puram, the outer world of war and public life. Option A is wrong because the Tirukkural of Thiruvalluvar is a book of moral couplets and not a grammar. Option C is wrong because the Manimekalai of Sattanar is a Buddhist narrative epic and the sequel to the Silappadikaram. Option D is wrong because the Nalayira Divya Prabandham is the collection of the hymns of the Alvars, the Vaishnava poet saints, and belongs to the age of bhakti that came later. The word akam and the word puram are worth memorising with this answer, since a question on the classification of Sangam poetry is drawn straight from the Tolkappiyam.

The correct answer is A, V. S. Khandekar. Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar retold the story of King Yayati from the Mahabharata as a novel about desire and its cost, and for it he became the first writer in Marathi to receive the Jnanpith Award. Option B is wrong because Kusumagraj, the pen name of Vishnu Vaman Shirwadkar and the author of the play Natsamrat, received the award after him, and Marathi Language Day is observed on his birthday, 27 February. Option C is wrong because Vinda Karandikar, a poet, received it later still. Option D is wrong because Bhalchandra Nemade, whose novel Kosala turned the modern Marathi novel in a new direction, is the most recent of the four to be honoured. Learning the order of these four names is enough for almost any question set on the Jnanpith Award in Marathi.