Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: D

A Passage to India was written by E.M. Forster, published in 1924.

It turns on what did or did not happen in the Marabar Caves, and on whether an Englishman and an Indian can be friends under empire. Forster wrote no further novel in the remaining 46 years of his life.

Answer: C

A Secular Agenda was written by Arun Shourie, published in 1993.

He was a journalist, editor of the Indian Express and later a minister, and the book argues for a secularism founded on a uniform civil code rather than on group rights.

Answer: D

Anna Karenina was written by Leo Tolstoy, published in instalments from 1875.

It opens with one of the most quoted sentences in fiction, on happy and unhappy families. Tolstoy himself later considered it and War and Peace to be trivial beside his religious writing.

Answer: B

The Man Who Knew Infinity is a biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, by Robert Kanigel, published in 1991.

Ramanujan, a clerk in Madras with no formal training, sent his results to G.H. Hardy at Cambridge in 1913 and produced nearly 4,000 identities before dying at 32.

Answer: D

Jeremy Bentham held that the general happiness is the end of the state.

His utilitarianism judges every action and institution by whether it produces the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and it shaped nineteenth-century legal and administrative reform in Britain and India alike.

Answer: B

Worshipping False Gods was written by Arun Shourie, published in 1997.

It questions the received account of Ambedkar's role in the freedom struggle, and provoked a sustained controversy and demands for its ban.

Answer: B

My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir was written by Jagmohan, published in 1991.

He was twice governor of Jammu and Kashmir, including during the outbreak of militancy in 1990, and the book is his account of those years and their causes.

Answer: B

The Kama Sutra was written by Vatsyayana, probably in the third century.

Only about a fifth of it concerns sexual technique; the rest is a treatise on courtship, marriage, household management and the conduct of a cultivated life.

Answer: B

Tandoori Nights was directed by Jon Amiel.

The Channel 4 comedy of 1985, set in rival Indian restaurants in London, was written by Farrukh Dhondy and starred Saeed Jaffrey and Zohra Sehgal.

Answer: D

George Bernard Shaw was an Irishman, born in Dublin in 1856.

He moved to London at twenty and wrote more than sixty plays. He is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1925, and an Academy Award, for the screenplay of Pygmalion.