Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The Mahabharata was originally called Jaya Samhita - the collection of victory.

It grew from about 8,800 verses as Jaya, to 24,000 as Bharata, to the roughly 100,000 of the Mahabharata, which makes it the longest epic poem in the world.

Answer: B

Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, was a Scotsman.

He was born in Edinburgh in 1850 and died in Samoa in 1894.

Answer: B

It was Mahatma Gandhi.

He wrote Hind Swaraj in Gujarati in 1909, on the voyage from London to South Africa, in ten days and with both hands when one tired. It sets out his critique of modern civilisation and his case for swaraj as self-rule in the moral sense.

Answer: C

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) was written by George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair.

The novel gave English "Big Brother", "doublethink" and "Newspeak". Orwell also wrote Animal Farm (1945).

Answer: C

Kamayani was written by Jaishankar Prasad, published in 1936.

It is an epic poem in Hindi retelling the story of Manu and the flood as an allegory of the human mind, and is regarded as the finest work of the Chhayavad movement.

Answer: A

Aladdin was the first English film dubbed into Hindi.

Disney's 1992 animated feature opened the way for the routine dubbing of Hollywood releases into Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, which now accounts for a substantial share of their Indian earnings.

Answer: B

It was Victor Hugo.

Les Miserables, published in 1862, follows Jean Valjean, imprisoned nineteen years for stealing bread, through the Paris of the 1832 uprising. One sentence in it runs to over 800 words.

Answer: A

Tamas was written by Bhisham Sahni, published in 1974.

It is set in a town in north-west India in the weeks before partition, and shows how communal violence is manufactured. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award and was filmed by Govind Nihalani in 1988.

Answer: B

It was Raja Harishchandra.

Dadasaheb Phalke's silent film of 1913 was India's first full-length feature. Alam Ara, of 1931, was the first Indian talkie, and Pundalik of 1912 was a filmed stage play shot by a British cameraman, which is why it is not counted.

Answer: A

Adi Shankaracharya was the first film made in Sanskrit.

G.V. Iyer directed it in 1983, and it won four National Film Awards including Best Feature Film. It was made in a language that had not been used for cinema in two thousand years of its literary life.