Gita Rahasya was written by which leader?

The correct answer is B, Mahatma Gandhi. He wrote the book in Gujarati under the title Satya Na Prayogo, publishing it in parts in his journal, and Mahadev Desai translated it into English. It covers his childhood, his years in England and South Africa and the beginning of his work in India.

Option A, Jawaharlal Nehru, also wrote an autobiography, which appeared under the title Toward Freedom, so he is the closest distractor here. Option C, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, wrote India Wins Freedom, an account of the years leading to Independence rather than a full life story. Option D, Rajendra Prasad, wrote an Atmakatha and the book India Divided. Note also that Gandhi's Hind Swaraj is often placed in such options, but it is a political tract of 1909 and not an autobiography.

The correct answer is A, Jawaharlal Nehru. He wrote The Discovery of India during his imprisonment at Ahmednagar Fort, and the book traces Indian history, thought and civilisation from the earliest times to the national movement of his own day.

Option B, Subhas Chandra Bose, wrote The Indian Struggle, his own account of the freedom movement, which is the title most often placed beside Nehru's in these questions. Option C, Sarojini Naidu, is remembered for her poetry, The Golden Threshold, The Bird of Time and The Broken Wing, rather than for prose on history. Option D, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, wrote Gita Rahasya and The Arctic Home in the Vedas. Since Nehru wrote several well-known books, it helps to hold the three together: The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and his autobiography.

The correct answer is A, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. India Wins Freedom is his account of the national movement and of the negotiations in the years around Independence, written from the position of a Congress president of that period. Azad is also remembered for editing the journals Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh.

Option B, Rajendra Prasad, wrote India Divided, a title so close in sound that it is placed here deliberately. Option C, Lala Lajpat Rai, wrote Unhappy India, the third member of this confusing group of titles. Option D, Vallabhbhai Patel, is not associated with a famous book of his own, although his letters and speeches have been published in collected volumes. Learn the three India titles as a single line: Unhappy India by Lajpat Rai, India Divided by Rajendra Prasad, India Wins Freedom by Azad.

The correct answer is B, Dadabhai Naoroji. In this book he argued that British rule was steadily transferring India's wealth to England through salaries, pensions, home charges and the profits of trade, an argument known as the drain of wealth theory. He is also called the Grand Old Man of India.

Option A, Romesh Chandra Dutt, wrote The Economic History of India and belongs to the same school of economic criticism, which makes him the strongest distractor. Option C, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, was a moderate leader and Gandhi's political mentor, known for his work in the Imperial Legislative Council and for the Servants of India Society rather than for this book. Option D, Mahadev Govind Ranade, was a social reformer and economist of the earlier generation. Naoroji goes with the drain theory, Dutt with the economic history.

The correct answer is C, Bhagat Singh. He wrote the essay in Lahore jail in 1930, answering a fellow prisoner who had suggested that his disbelief came from vanity. The piece is a reasoned statement of his rationalist position and is the best known of his prison writings.

Option A, Chandrashekhar Azad, was his close associate in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, but he left no comparable writing. Option B, Ram Prasad Bismil, was a revolutionary of the Kakori case and a poet, and his autobiography written before his execution is a separate item. Option D, Surya Sen, led the Chittagong armoury raid and is remembered for that action rather than for any book. All four names come from the same revolutionary stream, so the question tests whether the candidate has attached the essay to the right one.