Who was the first woman to be awarded the Jnanpith Award?
- A.Amrita Pritam
- B.Mahadevi Verma
- C.Ashapurna Devi
- D.Mahasweta Devi
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is C, Ashapurna Devi. She received the Jnanpith Award in 1976 for the Bengali novel Pratham Pratishruti, the first part of a trilogy that follows three generations of women in a Bengali household, and she was the first woman to receive the award in its history. Option A is wrong because Amrita Pritam did win the Jnanpith, but in 1981 for the Punjabi collection Kagaz Te Canvas, five years after Ashapurna Devi. Option B is wrong because Mahadevi Verma received the award in 1982 for Yama, which makes her the first Hindi woman writer to win it but not the first woman overall. Option D is wrong because Mahasweta Devi's Jnanpith came much later, in 1996. The trap in this question is that all four names are genuine women laureates, so only the order of the years separates them.
Read the full article: Famous Indian Women Writers and Their Works: Exam Notes
Practice Questions
View allThe poetry collection The Golden Threshold was written by which Indian writer?
- A.Toru Dutt
- B.Sarojini Naidu
- C.Kamala Das
- D.Pandita Ramabai
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The Golden Threshold, published in 1905, was her first collection of poems in English, and it was followed by The Bird of Time in 1912 and The Broken Wing in 1917.
Read the full explanation →Which novel won Arundhati Roy the Booker Prize in 1997?
- A.The Inheritance of Loss
- B.Tomb of Sand
- C.The God of Small Things
- D.A Suitable Boy
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Arundhati Roy's first novel, set in Ayemenem in Kerala and built around the twins Rahel and Estha, won the Booker Prize in 1997, the fiftieth year of Indian independence.
Read the full explanation →Interpreter of Maladies, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, was written by whom?
- A.Jhumpa Lahiri
- B.Kiran Desai
- C.Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- D.Anita Desai
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Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine short stories about Indian and Indian-American lives, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, making Lahiri the first writer of Indian origin to win that prize for fiction.
Read the full explanation →The first book originally written in Hindi to win the International Booker Prize was:
- A.Zindaginama
- B.Ret Samadhi
- C.Pratham Pratishruti
- D.Aag Ka Darya
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Geetanjali Shree's novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and became the first book written in Hindi, and the first from any Indian language, to take that prize.
Read the full explanation →Amrita Pritam, who received the Jnanpith Award in 1981, wrote mainly in which language?
- A.Urdu
- B.Bengali
- C.Punjabi
- D.Assamese
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Amrita Pritam is the best known woman writer of modern Punjabi, and the Jnanpith Award of 1981 was given to her for the Punjabi poetry collection Kagaz Te Canvas.
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