The Aihole inscription, which records the defeat of Harshavardhana, was composed by the court poet of which ruler?

The correct answer is C, because Harshavardhana's court poet was Banabhatta, not Harishena. Harishena belonged to an earlier century altogether: he was the court poet of Samudragupta and composed the Prayag Prashasti, the Allahabad Pillar Inscription. The statement is therefore the one that is not correct, which is what the question asks for.

Option A is correct, because Harsha ruled from 606 CE to about 647 CE, which is roughly fourteen hundred years before our own time. Option B is correct, because the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang, written in older books as Hiuen Tsang, travelled in India between 629 and 645 CE and spent several years at Harsha's court, leaving his account in the Si-yu-ki. Option D is correct, because the Harshacharita is the biography of Harsha written by Banabhatta and is regarded as the first historical biography in Sanskrit.

The correct answer is D, Gauda. Shashanka was the king of Gauda, the region of Bengal with its centre at Karnasuvarna. He killed Harsha's elder brother Rajyavardhana, and it was to avenge that killing, and to recover his sister Rajyashri, that Harsha declared war and allied with Bhaskaravarman of Kamarupa.

Option A, Kanyakubja, is the old name of Kannauj, the Maukhari capital that Harsha himself took over and made his own seat, so it is not the kingdom Harsha attacked. Option B, Junagarh, is a place in Saurashtra in Gujarat known for the rock edicts of Ashoka and the Rudradaman and Skandagupta inscriptions, and had no connection with Shashanka. Option C, Magadha, is the south Bihar kingdom of the Haryankas, Nandas, Mauryas and Guptas; by Harsha's day it was part of his own empire and not the base of Shashanka.

The correct answer is C, Ratnavali. Harshavardhana was a dramatist as well as a king, and three Sanskrit plays are credited to him: Ratnavali, Priyadarshika and Nagananda. Ratnavali is a court comedy about the love of King Udayana for Ratnavali, and it is the work most often named in question papers.

Option A, the Harshacharita, is about Harsha but was not written by him; it is the biography composed by his court poet Banabhatta. Option B, Kadambari, is also by Banabhatta, a Sanskrit prose romance left unfinished at his death and completed by his son. Option D, the Gitagovinda, is much later: it was written by Jayadeva in the twelfth century at the court of the Sena king Lakshmanasena of Bengal, and it celebrates Radha and Krishna. Only Ratnavali is the king's own composition.

The correct answer is D, Harshavardhana. Banabhatta was the court poet of Harsha in the seventh century CE. He wrote the Harshacharita, the biography of his patron and the first historical biography in Sanskrit, and the prose romance Kadambari, which was completed by his son Bhushanabhatta.

Option A, Ashoka, ruled in the third century BCE, nine hundred years earlier, and left edicts in Prakrit rather than a body of Sanskrit court poetry. Option B, Bindusara, was Ashoka's father and an even earlier Mauryan king. Option C, Chandragupta II of the Guptas, ruled around 375 to 415 CE; the writers associated with his court in tradition are the nine gems, including Kalidasa, while the inscriptional poet of his father Samudragupta was Harishena. Banabhatta belongs to none of these courts, only to Harsha's.

The correct answer is B, Kannauj. Harsha inherited Thanesar in modern Haryana from the Pushyabhuti family. When his sister Rajyashri's husband Grahavarman, the Maukhari king of Kannauj, was killed, Harsha united the two realms and moved his seat to Kannauj on the Ganga, which then became the symbol of paramountcy in northern India for the next two centuries.

Option A, Pataliputra, had been the capital of the Mauryas and the Guptas but had lost its importance by Harsha's time. Option C, Ujjain, was the great city of Avanti and a Gupta provincial seat, but never Harsha's capital. Option D, Prayag, at the confluence of the Ganga and the Yamuna, is the place where Harsha held his quinquennial assembly and gave away his treasury, but it was a religious centre for him, not the seat of his government.