In which of the following cities was the Sangam assemblies held?

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 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.