Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: A

It is Hawthan.

Mahabaleshwar Sail's Konkani novel, on the potters of Goa and the decline of their craft, won the Saraswati Samman for 2016 - the first Konkani work to receive it.

Answer: C

It is the Gita Govinda.

Jayadeva's Sanskrit poem of the twelfth century sings of Radha and Krishna in twenty-four ashtapadis, each set to a raga and tala. It is sung daily before the deity at the Jagannath temple in Puri.

Answer: B

The White Tiger was written by Aravind Adiga and won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.

Narrated as a series of letters from Balram Halwai, a driver turned entrepreneur, to the Chinese Premier, it is a satire on class mobility in contemporary India. It was Adiga's debut novel.

Answer: B

The Story of My Experiments with Truth was written by Mahatma Gandhi.

He wrote it in Gujarati in weekly instalments for Navjivan between 1925 and 1929, covering his life to 1921. It is unusually candid about his own failings.

Answer: A

A China Passage was written by J.K. Galbraith, published in 1973.

It records his visit to China with a delegation of American economists just after Nixon's opening, at a time when very few Western observers had seen the country for two decades.

Answer: C

Maila Anchal was written by Phanishwar Nath 'Renu', published in 1954.

Set in a Bihar village around independence, it is the founding work of anchalik or regional fiction in Hindi, in which the region itself is the protagonist.

Answer: A

It is the first Sanskrit film.

G. V. Iyer's 1983 film was the first feature made in Sanskrit and won four National Awards, including Best Feature Film. It was not his first film, and it does have women in the cast.

Answer: A

The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience was written by Christophe Jaffrelot.

The French political scientist argues that Pakistan's contradictions - between centralisation and provincial autonomy, between Islam and secularism, between civil and military rule - both destabilise it and keep it going.

Answer: D

The Future of Freedom (2003) was written by Fareed Zakaria.

Subtitled Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, it argues that elections alone do not make a free society without constitutional liberalism to constrain the majority.

Answer: B

Aristotle said man is a political animal.

The phrase is from the Politics: zoon politikon, an animal of the polis. He meant that human beings realise their nature only in the life of a city-state, and that one who could live outside it would be either a beast or a god.