Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Baataan Ri Phulwari was written by Vijaydan Detha.

Vijaydan Detha (Bijji) collected and rewrote the folk tales of Rajasthan in Rajasthani in the multi-volume Baatan Ri Phulwari (Garden of Tales). The tenth volume won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Rajasthani in 1974, and several of his stories were made into films, such as Paheli.

Laxmi Kumari Chundawat and Malchand Tiwari are other Rajasthani writers, and Shri Lal is not the author of this work.

Answer: B

The kind of poetry work is Rupak.

In Rajasthani literature a rupak is a poem that sets out the achievements of a dynasty or of an individual; Gajgun Rupak and Rupak Gogadeji Ro are named examples. That is exactly the description in the stem.

A vigat is a prose work giving detailed accounts of rulers, their families, territories and notable people, with statistical detail, and Munhta Nainsi's Marwar Ra Pargana Ri Vigat is the standard example, so it is prose rather than poetry. A veli is a verse form that celebrates the bravery, loyalty and lineage of kings and nobles; Veli Kishan Rukmani Ri by Prithviraj Rathore is its famous example, but it is a specific verse form, while rupak is the general type the stem describes. A saakhi (sakhi) is a composition from personal experience, mostly by saint poets such as Kabir, usually in the soratha metre.

Answer: C

The rhyming prose-poetry form is Vachnika.

A vachnika is a Rajasthani literary form written in rhythmic, rhyming prose mixed with verse, usually to praise the deeds of a hero. The best-known example is Achaldas Khinchi ri Vachnika by Shivdas Gadan, about the siege of Gagron.

Vaat (baat) is prose storytelling, Prakas is a verse account of a dynasty's achievements, and Jhamaal is a verse form. None is defined as rhyming prose-poetry.

Answer: C

'Padmavat' was written by Malik Mohammad Jaysi (Malik Muhammad Jayasi).

Jayasi, a Sufi poet, composed the Padmavat in Awadhi around 1540. The epic tells the story of Rani Padmini (Padmavati) of Chittor, Rawal Ratan Singh and Alauddin Khalji's siege, and is also read as a Sufi allegory of the soul's search for God.

The three Maharajas named in the other options were rulers, not the author of this poem.

Answer: A

The Bhagavad Gita was first translated into English by Charles Wilkins.

Wilkins, a servant of the East India Company who had learnt Sanskrit in Benares, published The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon in London in 1785, with a preface by Governor-General Warren Hastings. He also prepared the first Bengali printing type, used for Halhed's Bengali grammar of 1778.

William Jones founded the Asiatic Society in 1784 and translated Kalidasa's Shakuntala and the law code of Manu, but not the Gita. Macaulay is known for his 1835 Minute on English education, and Lord Bentinck (spelt Bentington in the paper) was the Governor-General who abolished sati in 1829.

Answer: A

The Remains of the Day was written by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Ishiguro, the British novelist born in Japan, won the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day (1989), the story of an English butler looking back on his life of service, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. The novel is not in fact dystopian, as the question calls it; Ishiguro's dystopian novel is Never Let Me Go. But of the four authors, only Ishiguro wrote either book.

Samuel Beckett (Nobel 1969), Orhan Pamuk (2006) and V. S. Naipaul (2001) are also Nobel laureates, but none of them wrote this novel.

Answer: B

The book was written by M. Visvesvaraya.

Sir M. Visvesvaraya, the engineer and former Diwan of Mysore, published Planned Economy for India (printed here as 'Planning Economy for India') in 1934. It proposed a ten-year plan to double India's national income and is regarded as one of the earliest blueprints for economic planning in India.

V.K.R.V. Rao is known for his pioneering estimates of India's national income, and Manmohan Singh's early book was on India's export trends. The book in question is Visvesvaraya's.

Answer: A

Drishtipat was written by Jajabor.

Jajabor (meaning 'wanderer') was the pen name of Binoy Mukhopadhyay. Drishtipat, a novel in the form of letters from Delhi during the Second World War and the Cripps Mission period, made his name in Bengali literature.

Banaphul was the pen name of Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay, a doctor and prolific writer of short stories, and Abodhut was the pen name of the author of Marutirtha Hinglaj. Neither wrote Drishtipat, so 'None of them' is also wrong.

Answer: C

Glimpses of World History was written by Jawaharlal Nehru.

Nehru wrote it as a series of nearly 200 letters to his daughter Indira from prison between 1930 and 1933, surveying world history from ancient times. It was published as a book in 1934.

Abul Kalam Azad wrote India Wins Freedom, Mahatma Gandhi wrote The Story of My Experiments with Truth and Hind Swaraj, and Winston Churchill wrote histories of the two world wars. None of them wrote this book.

Answer: A

Kapalkundala was written by Bankimchandra Chatterjee.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay published the Bengali novel Kapalkundala in 1866. It tells of a girl raised by a Kapalika ascetic in a forest by the sea. Bankim also wrote Durgeshnandini and Anandamath, which contains the song Vande Mataram.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote Gitanjali and Gora, Kalidasa was the classical Sanskrit poet of Abhijnanashakuntalam, and Abul Fazl was Akbar's historian, author of the Akbarnama.