Practice MCQs — Books and Authors (with Answers)

1. Who wrote the Arthashastra? Answer: Kautilya (Chanakya).

2. Who wrote the Ashtadhyayi? Answer: Panini.

3. Who is called the "Shakespeare of India"? Answer: Kalidasa.

4. Who wrote the Rajatarangini, a chronicle of Kashmir? Answer: Kalhana.

5. Who wrote the Baburnama? Answer: Babur.

6. Who wrote the Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari? Answer: Abul Fazl.

7. Whose biography is the Humayunnama, and who wrote it? Answer: A biography of Humayun, written by his sister Gulbadan Begum.

8. Which novel contains the song "Vande Mataram"? Answer: Anandamath, by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.

9. Who wrote Hind Swaraj? Answer: Mahatma Gandhi.

10. Who wrote The Discovery of India? Answer: Jawaharlal Nehru.

11. Who wrote India Wins Freedom? Answer: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

12. Who wrote Annihilation of Caste? Answer: B.R. Ambedkar.

13. For which work did Rabindranath Tagore win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913)? Answer: Gitanjali.

14. What is India's highest literary honour, and who was its first recipient? Answer: The Jnanpith Award; first recipient G. Sankara Kurup (1965).

15. Who wrote Godaan and Gaban? Answer: Munshi Premchand.

16. Which Indian English novel won the Booker Prize in 1981? Answer: Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie.

17. Who wrote The God of Small Things, winning the Booker Prize in 1997? Answer: Arundhati Roy.

18. Who created the fictional town of Malgudi? Answer: R.K. Narayan.

19. Which Hindi novel, translated as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022? Answer: Ret Samadhi, by Geetanjali Shree.

20. Who wrote The Indian War of Independence 1857? Answer: V.D. Savarkar.

(End of Books and Authors notes. Cross-reference with the Freedom Movement and Historical Timelines files for context.)