Who was the first writer in the English language to be awarded the Jnanpith?

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. He was the sixth Malayalam writer to be honoured, the language whose G. Sankara Kurup had won the very first Jnanpith for 1965.

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 only in 2013. Option B, Raghuveer Chaudhari, is a Gujarati novelist and poet 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 genuine Jnanpith laureates from consecutive years, which is what makes the question testing, and the safe way to answer it is to anchor one pair in memory, such as Amitav Ghosh with 2018, and count forward or back from there.

The correct answer is C, 1961. The Jnanpith Award was instituted in 1961 by Bharatiya Jnanpith, and it is regarded as the highest literary honour given in India. It goes to an Indian citizen writing in one of the languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, and a writer may receive it only once.

Option A, 1944, is the year Bharatiya Jnanpith itself was founded as a literary and research trust by Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain and Rama Jain, seventeen years before the award was created. Option B, 1954, is the year the Government of India set up the Sahitya Akademi, which is a different institution altogether and gives its own annual awards. Option D, 1965, is the year for which the first Jnanpith was actually given, to G. Sankara Kurup, four years after the award was instituted. Keeping all four dates separate, 1944 the trust, 1954 the Akademi, 1961 the award and 1965 the first winner, disposes of a whole family of questions.

The correct answer is A, G. Sankara Kurup. The Malayalam poet received the first Jnanpith Award, for the year 1965, for his collection of poems Odakkuzhal, meaning the reed flute. In those early years the award was given for one outstanding work rather than for a lifetime of writing, a practice that changed in 1982.

Option B, Sumitranandan Pant, received the Jnanpith for 1968 for Chidambara and was the first Hindi writer to be honoured, not the first of all. Option C, Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, won for 1966 for the Bengali novel Ganadevata, making him the second recipient and the first in Bengali. Option D, Kuvempu, the pen name of K. V. Puttappa, won for 1967 for the Kannada epic Sri Ramayana Darshanam and was the first Kannada writer honoured. The four are the first four laureates in order, so learning the sequence Kurup, Bandopadhyay, Kuvempu, Pant covers several possible questions at once.

The correct answer is B, Ashapurna Devi. The Bengali novelist received the Jnanpith for the year 1976 for Pratham Pratishruti, the first book of a trilogy about three generations of women in a Bengali household, and she was the first woman to be honoured with the award.

Option A, Mahadevi Verma, the Hindi poet of the Chhayavaad movement, won the Jnanpith for 1982 for Yama and was the first Hindi woman writer honoured, but she came six years after Ashapurna Devi. Option C, Amrita Pritam, won for 1981 and was the first Punjabi writer honoured with the Jnanpith; she was also the first woman to win a Sahitya Akademi Award, back in 1956, and that earlier first is what tempts candidates towards her here. Option D, Mahashweta Devi, the Bengali writer and activist, won for 1996. All four are women laureates, so the question turns purely on the order of years.

The correct answer is A, Vagdevi, the goddess Saraswati. Along with a citation and a cash prize, every Jnanpith laureate receives a bronze replica of Vagdevi, Saraswati as the goddess of speech and learning, which is a fitting emblem for a literary honour and a detail asked directly in objective papers.

Option B, Nataraja, the dancing form of Shiva, is associated with the Sangeet Natak Akademi and with Indian classical dance, not with the Jnanpith. Option C, the goddess Lakshmi, stands for wealth and prosperity and appears on no major literary award. Option D, Gautama Buddha, appears on various peace and scholarship honours but not on this one, though the Jain family that founded Bharatiya Jnanpith gives the trust its strong link with Indian philosophy. Contrast the statue with the Sahitya Akademi Award, whose winner receives an engraved copper plaque and a shawl rather than any statue.