Who was the first recipient of the Saraswati Samman?

The correct answer is B, Hindi. The Vyas Samman was instituted in 1991 by the K. K. Birla Foundation and is given for an outstanding literary work in Hindi published in the previous ten years. Its first recipient was the critic and scholar Ram Vilas Sharma.

Option A, Rajasthani, is the language of the foundation's Bihari Puraskar, which is open to a writer from Rajasthan writing in either Hindi or Rajasthani, and that overlap is what makes this option tempting. Option C, Sanskrit, has no award of its own from this foundation, though a Sanskrit writer is eligible for the Saraswati Samman because Sanskrit is in the Eighth Schedule. Option D, Konkani, is likewise covered by the Saraswati Samman rather than by the Vyas Samman. The clean distinction to carry into the exam is that the Vyas Samman is for Hindi alone while the Saraswati Samman, instituted by the same foundation in the same year, is open to every Eighth Schedule language.

The correct answer is D, Akkitham Achuthan Namboothiri. The Malayalam poet, known simply as Akkitham, received the 55th Jnanpith Award, given for the year 2019. The Jnanpith is instituted by Bharatiya Jnanpith and is regarded as the highest literary award in India.

Option A, Amitav Ghosh, won the 54th Jnanpith, for 2018, and was the first writer in English to receive it, English having become an eligible language in 2013. Option B, Raghuveer Chaudhari, is the Gujarati novelist who won the 51st award, for 2015. Option C, Chandrashekhara Kambara, is the Kannada playwright and poet who won the 53rd award, for 2017. All four are real laureates from nearby years, so the safe method is to anchor one pair, such as Amitav Ghosh with 2018, and count from there. Note also that the numbered award and the year of the award go together, while the announcement usually falls in a later calendar year.

The correct answer is C, K. K. Birla Foundation. The foundation instituted the Saraswati Samman in 1991 for an outstanding literary work in any of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, published in the previous ten years, and the award carries the largest cash prize of any Indian literary honour.

Option A, the Sahitya Akademi, gives its own annual award in twenty-four languages, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship and the Bhasha Samman, but not this one. Option B, Bharatiya Jnanpith, gives the Jnanpith Award and the Moortidevi Award, and because both trusts honour writing across Indian languages the two are easily confused. Option D, the Ministry of Culture, funds the Sahitya Akademi but gives no literary award in its own name; the civilian honours it deals with are the Padma awards, which are not literary awards. The same foundation gives the Vyas Samman and the Bihari Puraskar, also from 1991.

The correct answer is B, Bharatiya Jnanpith. The trust that gives the Jnanpith Award instituted the Moortidevi Award in 1983 for a creative work that carries the spirit of Indian philosophy and culture, and the work may be in any of the languages of the Eighth Schedule or in English.

Option A, the Sahitya Akademi, gives its annual award, the Fellowship, the Bhasha Samman, the Translation Prize, the Bal Sahitya Puraskar and the Yuva Puraskar, a long list that does not include this one. Option C, the K. K. Birla Foundation, gives the Saraswati Samman, the Vyas Samman, the Bihari Puraskar and the Shankar Puraskar, and since the Shankar Puraskar is also for work on Indian philosophy and culture the two are easily interchanged; the difference is that the Shankar Puraskar is for Hindi only. Option D, the Government of Madhya Pradesh, gives the Kabir Samman for poetry. Remember Bharatiya Jnanpith as the trust behind two awards, the Jnanpith and the Moortidevi.

The correct answer is B, Rabindranath Tagore. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, largely on the strength of Gitanjali in his own English rendering, and he was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any field. He also wrote the national anthems of India and Bangladesh and renounced his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.

Option A, V. S. Naipaul, won the prize in 2001 but was born in Trinidad to a family of Indian descent and was a British citizen, so he is not counted as an Indian winner; his name is the usual trap in this question. Option C, Salman Rushdie, won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight's Children, not a Nobel. Option D, Sri Aurobindo, was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature but never received it. Papers sometimes phrase the question as the first Asian Nobel laureate, and the answer is the same.