Ramdhari Singh Dinkar received the Jnanpith Award for which of his works?
- A.Rashmirathi
- B.Urvashi
- C.Kurukshetra
- D.Sanskriti ke Char Adhyay
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is B, Urvashi. Dinkar, born at Simaria in Begusarai district and honoured as Rashtrakavi for his nationalist verse, received the Jnanpith Award for Urvashi, a long poem that treats the love of Pururava and the apsara Urvashi as a meeting of the earthly and the divine. It stands apart from his more political poetry and is the work examiners attach to the Jnanpith.
Option A, Rashmirathi, is his celebrated poem on Karna, widely quoted but not the Jnanpith work. Option C, Kurukshetra, uses the Mahabharata debate between Yudhishthira and Bhishma to argue about war and peace after the Second World War. Option D, Sanskriti ke Char Adhyay, is his prose study of four turning points in Indian culture, and it brought him the Sahitya Akademi Award, not the Jnanpith. Keep the two awards separate: Sahitya Akademi for the prose, Jnanpith for Urvashi.
Read the full article: Bihar Languages and Literature: Maithili, Bhojpuri, Magahi
Practice Questions
View allMaithili was included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution by which amendment?
- A.71st Amendment Act, 1992
- B.92nd Amendment Act, 2003
- C.21st Amendment Act, 1967
- D.96th Amendment Act, 2011
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This amendment added four languages to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, namely Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, and raised the total number of scheduled languages from eighteen to twenty-two.
Read the full explanation →By which title is the poet Vidyapati of Mithila remembered?
- A.Maithil Kokil
- B.Shakespeare of Bhojpuri
- C.Rashtrakavi
- D.Purvi Samrat
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Vidyapati was the poet of the Mithila court in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and his Maithili padavali of songs about Radha and Krishna is still sung in north Bihar.
Read the full explanation →Varna Ratnakara, regarded as the first prose work in Maithili, was written by whom?
- A.Vidyapati
- B.Chanda Jha
- C.Jyotirishwar Thakur
- D.Harimohan Jha
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His Varna Ratnakara, a fourteenth century work, is counted as the earliest prose composition in Maithili and indeed one of the earliest in any modern Indian language.
Read the full explanation →Which of these languages spoken in Bihar is NOT included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution?
- A.Hindi
- B.Urdu
- C.Bhojpuri
- D.Maithili
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Bhojpuri is spoken by crores of people in western Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Indian diaspora of Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname and Trinidad, and it has a rich folk theatre, yet it has not been added to the Eighth Schedule.
Read the full explanation →Which script was traditionally used for writing the Maithili language?
- A.Kaithi
- B.Tirhuta or Mithilakshar
- C.Sharada
- D.Brahmi
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This is the traditional script of the Mithila region, used for Maithili manuscripts, panjis of genealogy and ritual texts, and it is related to the eastern group of scripts that also produced Bengali and Assamese letters.
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