Indian Writing in English — Mock Test 2

N. K. Bose, Gandhi's secretary in Noakhali, wrote My Days with Gandhi (1953); D. K. Roy's Among the Great records conversations with Gandhi, Tagore, Aurobindo and others; A. B. Purani wrote Life of Sri Aurobindo; Kripalani's Tagore biography appeared in 1962.

Markandaya's Possession (1963); Sivakami's Dalit-feminist The Grip of Change (Tamil 1989; tr. 2006); Desai's first novel Cry, the Peacock (1963); Raj Lakshmi Debi's The Hindoo Wife, or The Enchanted Fruit (1876), among the earliest Indian English novels by a woman.

Dalit writing in translation: Basudev Sunani's Odia poems Cast Out; Valmiki's Hindi autobiography Joothan (1997); Bama's Tamil autobiography Karukku (1992); Urmila Pawar's Marathi memoir The Weave of My Life (Aaydan, 2003).

Joothan (1997; 'leftovers') is an autobiography, not a novel, and its English translator (2003) is Arun Prabha Mukherjee. It records caste humiliation in post-Independence India and indicts upper-caste society.

Men and Rivers (1945) → The Vermilion Boat (1953) → The House at Adampur (1956) → The Wound of Spring (1960) → Delinquent Chacha (1967).

Ramanujan's first collection, The Striders, appeared in 1966. His poems mine family and Hindu tradition, and as translator of Tamil Sangam poetry (The Interior Landscape, 1967) he uses the akam (inner, love) landscape conventions skilfully.

Arun Kolatkar's Jejuri (1976), a sequence on a pilgrimage town near Pune, won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1977) for its wry, secular gaze on faith.

Govindagraj was the pen name of the Marathi poet Ram Ganesh Gadkari; Tilottama Rajan is a scholar of Romantic theory. The other three are attributed to Indian women poets writing in English.

Note: Key accepted; options 1–3 could not each be independently confirmed.

Gandhi writes this in Hind Swaraj (1909, ch. 10), arguing that India has always absorbed newcomers and that 'a country is one nation only when such a condition obtains'.

Spivak translated 'Stanadayini' as 'Breast-Giver' (In Other Worlds, 1987) and wrote 'The Politics of Translation' (1992), arguing the translator must surrender to the text's 'rhetoricity'.

V. K. Gokak, later the first director of CIEFL, Hyderabad, wrote this study of English in post-Independence India (1964).

The Twice Born Fiction (1971) → A History of Indian English Literature (1982) → Masks of Conquest (1989) → After Amnesia (1992) → Colonial Transactions (1993).

From 'What the Thunder Said', Part V of The Waste Land (1922). Eliot then retells the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad's 'Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata'.

Rajmohan's Wife, serialised in The Indian Field (1864), is Bankim's only English novel.

The Bachelor of Arts (1937) → The English Teacher (1945) → The Financial Expert (1952) → The Guide (1958) → The Vendor of Sweets (1967).

Derozio (1809) → Madhusudan Dutt (1824) → Toru Dutt (1856) → Manmohan Ghose (1869) → Sarojini Naidu (1879).

Note: Source option 4 printed 'A, E, B, D, E'; corrected to 'A, E, B, D, C'.

Exile and the Kingdom (1957) → Dream on Monkey Mountain (staged 1967) → Death and the King's Horseman (1975) → 'Breast-Giver' (Bengali 'Stanadayini', c. 1980; English 1987/1997) → Diamond Dust (2000).

Ezekiel (1924) → Currimbhoy (1928) → Gurcharan Das (1943) → Cyrus Mistry (1956) → Dattani (1958).

Per the key: Ezekiel (The Exact Name, 1965); de Souza; Kamala Das (The Descendants, 1967); Ramanujan.

Grimus (1975) → Midnight's Children (1981) → The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) → The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) → Fury (2001).

Dattani's play (1998); Seth's verse novel (1986); Raj Rao (2003); Chandra (1997).

Mehta (1967); Mistry (1987); Advani (1994); Hariharan (1992).

Meena Kandasamy translated the Kamattuppal of the Tirukkural as The Book of Desire (2023). Poonachi, One Part Woman and Pyre are Murugan's novels about caste and gender.

Note: The source calls these 'Dalit narratives'; Murugan writes about caste but is not himself Dalit.

Shantabai Kamble's Majya Jalmachi Chittarkatha (Marathi, 1983), later televised as Nazuka.

Limbale (Marathi, 1984): 'akkarmashi' means half-caste, the son of an upper-caste father and a Dalit mother.