Midnight's Children, the novel that won the Booker Prize in 1981, was written by:
- A.Amitav Ghosh
- B.Salman Rushdie
- C.Nisid Hajari
- D.Rohinton Mistry
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is B, Salman Rushdie. Midnight's Children takes its title from the children born at the midnight of independence, its narrator Saleem Sinai being born at the very hour, and it won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later voted the best of the Booker winners. Option A is wrong because Amitav Ghosh wrote The Shadow Lines, on borders and memory, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989. Option C is wrong because Nisid Hajari wrote Midnight's Furies, a history of the division whose similar title is the whole point of its inclusion here. Option D is wrong because Rohinton Mistry's novels, such as A Fine Balance, deal with later decades. Note that Freedom at Midnight and Midnight's Children both draw their titles from the same midnight but are a history and a novel respectively.
Read the full article: Books on Partition and Independence: Author-wise List
Practice Questions
View allThe novel Train to Pakistan was written by:
- A.Khushwant Singh
- B.Bhisham Sahni
- C.Manohar Malgonkar
- D.Chaman Nahal
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Train to Pakistan, published in 1956, is set in the imaginary border village of Mano Majra and follows what a trainload of bodies does to a village where Sikhs and Muslims had lived together; it is the best known English novel of Partition.
Read the full explanation →The novel Tamas, on the communal violence of 1947, was written in which language?
- A.Urdu
- B.Punjabi
- C.Hindi
- D.Bengali
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Tamas, meaning darkness, is Bhisham Sahni's Hindi novel on the days of killing in a town of western Punjab, and it won him the Sahitya Akademi Award; a well known television serial was made from it.
Read the full explanation →Pinjar, the Punjabi novel later filmed under the same name, was written by:
- A.Amrita Pritam
- B.Krishna Sobti
- C.Ismat Chughtai
- D.Attia Hosain
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Pinjar, in English The Skeleton, tells the story of Puro, a woman abducted at the time of the division, and is the central Punjabi novel of Partition; Amrita Pritam's poem addressed to Waris Shah is the other work of hers always cited on this theme.
Read the full explanation →The book Freedom at Midnight was written by:
- A.Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
- B.Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
- C.Henry Vincent Hodson
- D.Narendra Singh Sarila
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The two journalists, one American and one French, wrote Freedom at Midnight as a narrative account of the last year of British rule, the division of the country and the killing of Gandhi, drawing on interviews with Mountbatten.
Read the full explanation →India Wins Freedom is the autobiographical account of:
- A.Jawaharlal Nehru
- B.Rajendra Prasad
- C.Maulana Abul Kalam Azad
- D.Vallabhbhai Patel
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Azad, who was president of the Congress through the Quit India years, gave his account of the negotiations leading to Partition in India Wins Freedom, written in Urdu and rendered into English with the help of Humayun Kabir; a portion of it was withheld from publication for thirty years.
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