Indian Writing in English — Mock Test 7

Sorabji's sketches Between the Twilights (1908); Satthianadhan's autobiographical Saguna (1895); Raj Lakshmi Debi's The Hindoo Wife (1876); Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve (1954).

'Bel Patra' (Hans, 1987) was her first published story. Mai, Hamara Shahar Us Baras and Khali Jagah are novels, as is Ret Samadhi (Tomb of Sand, 2022 International Booker).

Shanghvi (2009); Advaita Kala (2007); Amrit Shetty (2008); Anuja Chauhan (2008).

Note: Option 3 is misprinted in the source (a number repeated); normalised here.

Mukherjee's Jasmine and Wife dramatise the divided self, Mistry writes of Bombay Parsis, and Bhatt's poems (Brunizem) return to Gujarati memory. Dhondy writes of London and Bombay.

Srinivas wrote The Remembered Village (1976) from memory after his field notes were burnt in 1970; it charts Rampura's economic change. The key accepts II.

Ang Lee's Life of Pi (2012) and James Ivory's The Remains of the Day (1993). Milkman, The Sellout and The Inheritance of Loss have not been filmed.

Amoghavarsha was a Rashtrakuta king (Kavirajamarga), and the Rajatarangini (1148) is Kalhana's chronicle of Kashmir.

Bhavabhuti (8th c.) dramatises Rama's later life — Sita's banishment and the reunion with Lava and Kusha — and is famous for karuna rasa.

The twelfth-century Virashaiva vachanas of Basavanna, Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu rejected caste, ritual and Sanskrit hierarchy for devotion in the common tongue.

Chaudhuri wrote The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), A Passage to England (1959) and The Continent of Circe (1965). The Principal Upanishads (1953) is Radhakrishnan's.

Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989); Bhabha (ed., 1990); Said (1993); Meenakshi Mukherjee (1971).

Note: List II item I is misprinted as '1920' in the source.

Both document women's participation in national and political struggle.

Bhabha (Lacan, Derrida), Spivak (Derrida, Foucault), Said (Foucault) and JanMohamed (Lacanian Manichean allegory) belong to the poststructuralist moment. Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism (1950) predates it.

Rama's Banishment: A Centenary Tribute to the Fiji Indians, 1879–1979 (1979) marks a hundred years since the first indentured labourers reached Fiji on the Leonidas.

Note: The source key gives option 3 (150 years), which contradicts the book's subtitle; corrected to option 2.

Murugan's Madhorubagan (tr. 2013); Shekhar's Santhal stories (2015); Kamble's Jina Amucha (tr. 2008); Pawar's Aaydan (tr. 2008).

Toufann ('storm', 1991) is a Mauritian Kreol reworking of The Tempest.

Article 343 makes Hindi in Devanagari the official language of the Union. Clause (2) continued English for fifteen years (to 1965), extended by the Official Languages Act 1963.

Alexander wrote Stone Roots (1980), River and Bridge (1995) and Raw Silk (2004). Articulate Silences (1993) is King-Kok Cheung's critical study and A Time to Change (1952) is Ezekiel's.

The Ibis trilogy is Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015). The Calcutta Chromosome (1995) stands alone.

Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), The Circle of Reason (1986) and The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994). Miguel Street appeared in 1959, and The Siege of Babylon is Samuel Pordage's Restoration play (1677).

The Fiji-Indian writer Subramani's The Fantasy Eaters: Stories from Fiji (1988).

Salim Ali's autobiography (1985); Corbett's My India (1952); Sankhala, first director of Project Tiger, Wild Beauty (1973); M. Krishnan's Nights and Days (1985).

Per the key, A, C and D: Juliette Banerjee's The Boyfriend and Other Stories, Dina Mehta's The Other Woman and Other Stories (1981) and B. G. Sidharth's The Yankee and the Yogi (1981).

A House for Mr Biswas (1961) → An Area of Darkness (1964) → India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) → India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).

The Writer and the World: Essays (2002), edited by Pankaj Mishra, collects fifty years of Naipaul's essays and reportage on India, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.

Note: The source had five options, with the key on a fifth ('collection of essays and non-fiction'). Reduced to four.