The Bengali novel Devdas was written by:

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 D, Madurai. Tamil tradition holds that assemblies of poets, called Sangams, met under the patronage of the Pandya kings, and Madurai, the Pandya capital, is the seat remembered in the accounts that survive; the poems collected there form the oldest body of Tamil literature. Option A is wrong because Nagapattinam was a port on the Coromandel coast, known for trade and later for its Buddhist and Christian associations, not for a literary academy. Option B is wrong because Thiruvarur is famous as a temple town and as the birthplace of the great composers of Carnatic music, which belongs to a much later age. Option C is wrong because Thiruvallur lies near the northern edge of Tamil Nadu and has no connection with the Sangam assemblies. The safe pairing to memorise is Madurai with the Pandyas and with the Sangam, and the same city with the burning in the Silappadikaram.

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.