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The Era of Independence 1. THE ERA OF INDEPENDENCE During this period the dimension of Indian English prose widened. Some of the writers of the previous era-Nehru, Dr. Radhakrishnan and many others continued to write vigorously. What distinguishes this period is the emergence of new writers - Nirad C. Chaudhari, Ved Mehta, A.P.J. Abdul kalam, Raghunathan, M. Chalapati Rao, Khushwant Singh etc. English is being used for various purposes and it has become a natural mode of expression for educated Indians. The rise of magazine literature, research journals on specialised disciplines and the need of international communication has immensely enlarged the possibilities of the multi-dimensional development of prose. i. N. Rangnathan N. Rangnathan, the brilliant journalist who regularly contributed to The Hindu under the pseudonym ìVighneswaraî, has acquired great popularity. His weekly essay reveal his discipline of expression conspicuous for flawless and effortless ease, radiant values. His Sotto Voce series of essays have been collected in the volumes Sotto Voce : The Coming of Freedom (1959), Our New Rulers (1961), The Avadi Socialists (1964) and Plannerís Paradise (1970). The extension lectures he delivered at Madras University have been published as Reason and Intuition in Indian Culture (1969). He is a distinguished essayist. His style is noticeable for flawless ease, vigour, clarity and refinement. He combines ìin his style the epigrammatic brevity of a Bacon with the whimsicality of a Lamb.î ii. M. Chalapati Rao M. Chalapati Rao, the editor of the National Herald, was known as a journalist of versatility and power. Fragments of A Revolution (1965) is a collection of 36 essays remarkable for precision, minute observation, candid and powerful style. Gandhi and Nehru is Raoís another famous book. iii. Sisir Kumar Ghose Sisir kumar Ghose, a professor of English at Shantiniketan, is a profound thinker and writer. His famous works are Aldoux Huxley The Later Poems of Tagore, The Poetry of Sri Aurobindo, Metaesthetics and Other Essays, Mystics and Society. Modern and Otherwise, Lost Dimensions, For The Time Being, Meditations n Matricide, Rabindranath Tagore and Crisis of Crisis. He contributed the core article on mysticism to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His articles have appeared in national and international journals. A thought provoking writer and spiritualist, a great scholar with encyclopaediac erudition, an ardent Aurobindonian and mystic, Ghose has written essays, criticism, biography and philosophical criticism. Crisis of Crisis is a collection of his essays on ìthe predicament of man today sometimes described as the crisis of civilization.î Ghoseís essays sparkle with wisdom, expressed in chaste, precise and lucid style. As an essayist his place is unrivalled in modern Indian English prose. No other writer has attempted the essay form. iv. Nirad C. Chaudhary NIRAD CHANDRA CHAUDHURI lived for a very long time and witnessed the decline of an empire completely, the whole run of the clockface, from imperial high noon to postcolonial midnight. When he died, in Oxford, England, in August 1999, he was three months away from his 102nd birthday. He had published his last book only two years before. I knew him during his last two decades, as many others knew him at that time, as a deeply mischievous and superbly entertaining egoist. It is impossible to exaggerate these aspects of his character, which are also fully present in his writing. The word ìegoî held no shame or fear for him. As he sometimes said, it was the brute power of his ego that had driven him onwards and upwards. Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 1

English (Sample Questions) Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 2 How else would he have lived so long and productively ? His physique had nothing to do with it. He was always frail, with the bustling energy of a small bird, and never stood much more than five feet tall or weighed more than ninety-five pounds. His early circumstances were not promising. Birth and childhood in an obscure deltaic town in Bengal usually guaranteed the opposite of Western standards of longevity, nor did they offer any obvious route to a literary career in the English language. ìI am a striking illustration of the survival of the unfittest,î Chaudhuri would say. ìIt comes from self-assertion through writing. Otherwise I should be dead, or living on a clerkís pension in some foul Calcutta slum.î Instead, and quite late in an average life span, he became Indiaís most majestic and pungent writer of English prose, possibly the finest Indian writer of English in the whole of the twentieth century (as one of his obituarists claimed), and certainly the finest in the first three quarters of it before the burst of Indian writing in English that followed the publication of Salman Rushdieís Midnightís Children. (This is setting aside the artfully simple fiction of R. K. Narayan, which Chaudhuri had no time for an antagonism which was gently reciprocated by the almost equally long-lived South Indian novelist.) The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian was Chaudhuriís first book and also his best. He wrote a dozen more: polemical histories and biographies, an account of his first visit to Britain (A Passage to England, 1959), and a second volume of autobiography (Thy Hand Great Anarch!, 1987). All of them have their brilliant rewards, but only in passages do they match the lively courage and descriptive strength of this book, in which many of his later themes are introduced. Chaudhuriís power as a describer speaks for itself in the pages that follow and needs no elaboration; he is a fascinating, ground level witness and expositor of a vanished Indian way of life and of what British imperialism, then at its height, meant to its humble and not-so-humble subjects. The word ìcourage,î however, deserves some context. In this book, Chaudhuri is courageous in two ways: in his literary ambition and in the open declaration of his political and historical beliefs. When he began to write The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, in 1947, he had no models. The autobiographical form had almost no tradition in India and tended to be the preserve of the famous; only two other Indians of his era, Nehru and Gandhi, had tried it with any success. Chaudhuri was then quite genuinely an unknown Indian, living modestly in Delhi and knocking out scripts for All India Radio during its transition from British to Indian control. He was also suffering the crisis of male middle age. He was nearly fifty years old. He had wanted to be a historian. He considered himself a failure. He would die quite soon, he thought without any achievement apart from his children. Forty years later, in Thy Hand Great Anarch!, Chaudhuri describes how the idea for the book came to him : It came in this manner. As I lay awake on in the night of May 4-5, 1947, an idea suddenly flashed into my mind. Why, instead of merely regretting the work of history you cannot write, I asked myself, do you not write the history you have passed through and seen enacted before your Seyes, and which would not call for research ? The answer too was instantaneous: I will. I also decided to give it the form of an autobiography. Quietened by this decision I fell asleep. Fortunately, this idea was not nullified by the deplorable lack of energy which was habitual with me. The very next morning I sat down to my typewriter and drafted a few paragraphs. The first pages took some time to write, but once Chaudhuri had fixed his ìkey and tonalityî he was producing 2,500 words a day before and after his short two-hour shifts at the radio station. By the spring of 1949, the book was finished; Chaudhuri reckoned that the total number of days spent writing it came to nine months. He later wrote that this ìexercise of willî was helped by the ìintoxicationî of recalling from half a century before his early life in East Bengal a place he hadnít seen for twenty years. But the book was also helped, or, more accurately, its mood somberly informed, by the large events that were shaking India while Chaudhuri sat before his typewriter and re-created his life from 1897 to 1921. The British Raj ended at midnight on August 14-15, 1947, when the Subcontinent was partitioned into an independent but shrunken India and a new state, Pakistan, the boundaries between them decided by the religious majority, Hindu or Muslim, within adjacent territories. East Bengal became the eastern wing of Pakistan (now

English (Sample Questions) Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 3 Bangladesh), so that the Hindu Chaudhuriís ancestral home suddenly lay in a foreign and predominantly Muslim country (he never went there again). With Partition there came waves of homeless refugees and savagery mass murder, rioting, and looting, some of it in the streets of Delhi outside the writerís window. Mahatma Gandhi, of whose followers Chaudhuri took a skeptical view, was assassinated in the city on January 30, 1948. And there sat Chaudhuri tapping away at his book as his country was convulsed and transformed, writing ìwith the consciousness of decay and destruction all around me.î The turmoil of India in 1947-48 doesnít wholly explain his theme of decay, however. Chaudhuri was an upper-caste Bengali, born the son of a lawyer in the town of Kishorganj in the district of Mymensingh in the year of Queen Victoriaís Diamond Jubilee, 1897. The British had a longer and deeper and more socially complicated impact on Bengal than on any other part of India. Their first Indian capital, Calcutta, was located there; since the early years of steam navigation, their steamboats had paddled up and down the great delta formed by the Ganges and the Brahmaputra; coal mines were sunk and tea plantations established in the higher ground; out of the lower came the cash crops of indigo, opium, jute, and rice. A new kind of Indian arose: urban, professional or entrepreneurial, newspaper-reading, Anglophile, and almost invariably high-caste Hindu the components of what has been called the first middle class in Asia. Out of this class, from the 1820s onwards, came religious and social reform movements and a cultural phenomenon known as the Bengali Renaissance, which produced painters, musicians, writers, and scholars. The first Indian novel was a Bengali novel; the first Indian scientists were Bengali scientists; the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize (Rabindranath Tagore) wrote in Bengali. Calcutta, which had been little more than a stockade at the beginning of the eighteenth century, grew to become the largest city in Asia by the end of the nineteenth. Bengalis could look in the mirror and consider themselves the most educated, sophisticated people in India ìthe French of Indiaî as some of them still do. But with education and aspiration came nationalist agitation, and the British reaction to it. Bengal was divided by the British into eastern (mainly Muslim) and western (mainly Hindu) provinces in 1905. The division, which prefigured the later partition of India and Pakistan, turned out to be temporary: Bengal was united again in 1911. But in 1912 the British moved their administrative headquarters to Delhi and Calcutta ceased to be a capital. As British power waned in India, so did Bengali enterprise; not because Bengalis were imperial lackeys Bengal produced some of Indiaís fiercest and most violent nationalists but because the economic fortunes of Britain and Bengal were so intertwined and because they were both essentially Victorian societies, and past their peak. When the final partition came to Bengal in 1947, Calcutta lost its great riverine hinterland to the east, the home of so much jute and rice and of so many Hindu mansions, and never subsequently recovered. Bengalís decay, at least in Chaudhuriís view, became complete. It is in his analysis of this history and its connection to the wider history of India that Chaudhuri is politically brave. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian took some time to find a publisher in London: both Faber and Hamish Hamilton turned it down. When it was eventually published, by Macmillan in 1951, self-governing India was only four years old. Its new elite, in fact most of India, took the conventional nationalist and anticolonial view of history: India had been conquered by the British, ruthlessly exploited by them, cunningly ruled by them by the strategy of alienating its religious communities from each other (ìdivide and ruleî), until a bitterly fought struggle for freedom eventually drove them out. The undeveloped and poor condition of India could be blamed squarely on imperialism; now that epoch was over, India could look forward to a future of freedom, equality, and prosperity. Chaudhuri disagreed on almost every count. His arguments are provocative, and there is sometimes the underlying feeling of the scene in Monty Pythonís Life of Brian where a New Testament Palestinian asks rhetorically: ìWhat have the Romans ever done for us?î (ìRoads?î says a voice from the back of the crowd. ìSchools?î says another. ìAqueducts?î wonders a third). But time has proved at least some of his prognostications right. ìGandhismî was indeed rejected by the ìvery people for whom

English (Sample Questions) Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 4 it was intendedî; India became a large industrial and military power, no more pacifist or spiritually directed than any other nation-state, a democracy certainly (which should never be forgotten), but prone to intercommunal rivalry and cruelty and political assassination. Political independence did not put a stop to Western influence, or the thirst for non-Indian things. Almost fifty years before Bill Gates became a recognizable name, sometimes almost a household god, in the further reaches of rural India, Chaudhuri wrote: ìWhat Indians in the mass want is nationalism, which does not, however, preclude a wholesale and uncritical acceptance, or to be more accurate, crude imitation, of Western habits of living and economic technique.î The sentiment is unremarkable now, but it was an early denial of the new and different road that idealists in India thought their country could take. Few people in India then welcomed his suggestion that to put it much more crudely than he does the complex, underlying nature of India might ultimately bear more responsibility for the Indian condition than British imperialism. Or that the British quit out of their own weakness rather than Indian strength. The bookís dedication to the British Empire (to which its Indian subjects owed ìall that was good and livingî within them) brought outrage in India, as Chaudhuri almost certainly knew it would (and perhaps helped make it a favorite book of a great opponent of Indian independence, Winston Churchill). The shame of this was that it encouraged Chaudhuri in his later life to be a dedicated controversialist and tended to obscure his greatest gift, the intimate writing of his own history. In this book, a far corner of an old empire is made real, from the rare vantage point of the ruled rather than ruler. It pays testimony to the transforming power of a distant culture and, via Chaudhuriís abiding love of exactness, reveals the richness that lies in the everyday and the specific. In nonfiction, no other Indian writer had done this for twentieth-century India; the foreign writers who tried were hampered by all the usual obstacles to the outsider: ignorance, language, the comedy of the little understood, the distortions of the downward glance. Fiction was different. Stories that gave insight into India were published in Indian languages Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, and so on but they remained largely unknown outside their separate linguistic audiences. A friend of Chaudhuriís, the Bengali writer Bibhuti Banerji, wrote one of the most famous, Pather Panchali, about a village childhood. A few years after The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian was published, another Bengali, Satyajit Ray, took Banerjiís story as the subject for his first film, the first great film to come out of India, the first to show what India was like. This book is of that filmís stature, and, at its best, of the same humanity. V. S. Naipaul called it ìthe one great book to have come out of the Indo-English encounter.î Chaudhuri knew very few English people and had never seen England when he wrote The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. He moved to Oxford from Delhi in 1970 at the age of seventy-three, and there, for the next twenty-nine years, cheerfully found evidence at the old empireís heart of a rich new seam of decay. Once he told me at his Oxford flat: ìI am what I am on account of British rule in India. And have I shown myself to be worthless ? My kind of human being was created. Doesnít that show the nobility of the project ?î We were having lunch roast beef prepared by his Bengali wife, Amiya. The Chaudhuris were far from rich, but a splendid effort had been made. Different glasses for the red and white wine, for the water, for the cognac. I gripped one of them by the bowl. A small Bengali hand, created far away in Kishorganj in 1897, reached across the table and slapped me on the wrist. Chaudhuri scowled. ìDonít you know that one always grips a hock glass by the stem? What a nation of illiterate and unmannerly creatures Britain has become.î v. Vidhyadhar Suraj Naipaul Vidhyadhar Suraj Prasad Naipaul was born in 1932. His father was Seepersad Naipaul and mother was Droapatic. He is known as a cosmopolitan writer. He was born in Trinidad, Venezuala. He took a simple degree in English at Oxford. Naipaul presents wide world of peoples in his novels, which are his travel books. His early novels are comic in stance depicting the life of people in Trimidad. Naipaul dedicated his novel A House for Mr Biswas to his wife Patrica Anu Hale. His first written work was Miguel

English (Sample Questions) Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 5 street, but was not published. In his travel books and documentary works he presents his impressions of the country of his ancestors. Naipaul received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. Works The Mystic Masseur in 1957 is a comic novel of Colonial politics. He received the Rhys Memorial, a prestigious prize for it. The Suffrage of Elvira in 1958. Miguel Street in 1960. A House for Mr Biswas in 1961. He became famous for this work. Mr Stone and the Knights Companion in 1963. The Middle Passage : Impressions of Five Societies - British, French, Dutch in the West Indies and South America in 1963. An Area of Darkness in 1964. A Flag on the Island in 1967. The Mimic Men in 1967 is About an Exiled Carribbean Politician. The Loss of EI Dorado : A History in 1970. In a Free State in 1971. The over Crowded Barracoon and Other Articles in 1972. Guerrillas in 1975. India : A Wounded Civilisation in 1977. The Perfect Tenants and the Mourners in 1977. Land in 6 AB the River in 1979. The Return of Eva Peron in 1980. Acongo Diary in 1980 A Congo Among the Believers : An Islamic Journey in 1981 Finding the Center in 1986. A Turn in the South in 1989. India : A Million Mutinies Now in 1990. Beyond Belief : Islamic Excursions Among the Converted People in 1998. 2. SOME CONTEMPORARY WRITERS Khushwant Singhís India : A Mirror For its Monsters and Monstrosities and Malicious Gossip (1987) are collections of essays on casual topics. He writes in his usual, crisp, light, gossipy, ironical and sarcastic style. He can write about anything or any person that comes to his mind in his typical humorous, impish and ironical style. Singhís autobiography entitled Truth, Love and Little Malice (2002) records his views on sex, wine and women; and on life, religion and country. The descriptions of sex, women and extra marital relationship are obscene and seem to be unmoral. His two books on Sikhs Who Is a Sikh and Guru Nanak and Sikh Religion (1968) also deserve mention. Amitav Kumarís Bombay London New York is an autobiographical narrative ìof a young man who uses his own life to bridge the abyss that separates the worlds, East and West.î Kumarís style is smooth and easy to read. Out of Godís Oven : Travels in A Fractured Land (2002) by Dom Morals and Sarayu Srivastava is a travelogue of substance and worth. It is a realistic presentation of Indiaís condition which the writers themselves observed in various parts of the country. What is valuable in the book are the opinions of some of Indiaís most talented creative people, whom the authors interviewed.

English (Sample Questions) Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 6 Lt Gen. Depinder Singh wrote a biography, entitled Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw : Soldiering With Dignity (2002), which vividly recreates the personality of Manekshaw as a brave soldier, his interest in marshalling the 1971 Bangladesh War, the surrender of Pakistani Army under the command of Gen. Niazi on Dec. 16, 1971. Arun Shourieís Governance and the Sclerosis That Has Set In (2004) exposes the tyranny of Indian bureaucracy, ìbloated and rustyî, that has hundred the stateís progress. Vasant Sathe, the seasoned politician of the old order, wrote his memoirs, entitled Memoirs of A Rationalist (2005). Satheís outspokenness on issues of critical concern to the country or his unconventional life style is admirable. Nobel Laureate Prof. Amartya Senís The Argumentative Indian (2005) makes us realised how scientific temper has been the hallmark of Indian though over the millennia. It is a collection of 16 erudite essays which help us realised the ethos of India. Its style is terse, precise but lucid and erudite. Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam A scientist, a secular Indian, an intellectual and rationalist, a humanist and spiritualist, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, the President of India, is one of the foremost thinkers and writers of the world. He is primarily a scientist, commonly called ìthe Missile Man.î He has to his credit new inventions, viz., Prithvi, Akash, Agni, Nag and experiments like Pokharan II and many other scientific achievements. He embodies humility, simplicity, creativity, discipline, devotion and dedication, and the highest degree of scientific and spiritual knowledge. Here we are concerned with Dr. Kalamís memorable contribution to Indian English prose. Dr. Kalam is a versatile writer in his own right. He combines vision and reality idealism and practical wisdom, creativity and rationality, and scientific temper and spirituality in his writings. His famous autobiography Wings of Fire : An Autobiography (1999), written with Arun Tiwari, who impressed upon him to write his memoirs, ranks with the greatest autobiographies of the world. It is a story of the struggles and sufferings of Dr. Kalam, a boat ownerís son, who by dint of determination, dedication and discipline, has become Indiaís most distinguished living technocrat. B. Sharma, editor, Philosophy and Social Action calls it ìthe first authentic volume on our (Indian) Space Odyssey,î and, we may add of missile programme. Written is simple, clear and lucid English, it is studded with gem like quotations fro the Vedas, the Gita, the Koran, T.S. Eliot, Emerson and many other writers. In India 2020 : A vision for the New Millennium (1998) Dr. Kalam examines Indiaís strengths and weaknesses. He offers a vision of how India can be among the worldís five economic power in 2020. The main thrust of the book is to make India rid of her poverty and how to make her strong in trade and commerce and also in science and technology. In Ignited Minds, an inspiring book, written mainly for youngsters, Kalam underlines his sources of inspiration since childhood, but also presents a vision of India, which is scientifically as well as spiritually progressive. He talks about the negative attitudes that have beset the countrymen. We have abundant resources. What we require is a chance of attitude from negation to affirmation and creativity. Besides, he has also written many articles and essays. His speeches are countless. All his writings and speeches are inspiring. His style is remarkable for simplicity lucidity, precision, exactness and correctness. His words are full of inspiration. He persuades and inspires. He can be poetical and imaginative when the occasion demands, for example in his essay The Joy of Human Life he writes : ìOneís life should be just like a flower that gives fragrance and beauty in the morning and falls to the ground in the evening where it was born.î Novel Novel is a vital medium for the expression of the spirit of the age. It can never grow and develop in isolation. It is related with life and society. It is a late development in Indian English literature. Indian English novel dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

1. Consider the following statements Rabindranath Tagore 1. was called Gurudev by Mahatma Gandhi. 2. founded the Viswabharati University. 3. rejected the title of knighthood in protest against Quit India Movement. Which of the statements given above are correct ? (A) 1 and 2 (B) 1 and 4 (C) 3 and 2 (D) 3 and 4 2. Consider the following statements about Sarojini Naidu 1. was called the Nightingale of India. 2. was not a poet, who wrote on different aspects of Indian life. 3. was not in touch with Symons and Edmund Gosse while in England. 4. was a poet and a great lyric writer, who emoted through her poem. Which of the statements given above are correct? (A) 1 and 2 (B) 1 and 4 (C) 3 and 2 (D) 3 and 4 3. ìIn Madurai city of temples and poets who sang of water and temples every summer a river dries to trickleî. (A) This is AK Ramanujan in ëA Riverí (B) This is Sarojini Naidu in Bangle sellers (C) This is Arun Kolatkar in ëJeijureí (D) This is Jayanta Mahapatra in ëA Fatherís Hoursí 4. Khushwant Singh earned reputation as a _________ and __________ (A) essayist and writer (B) writer and journalist (C) journalist and essayist (D) journalist and composer 5. ìBangle Sellers are we, who bear our shining load to the temple fair, who will buy these delicate, bright rainbow tinted circles of light ? Lustrous token of radiant livesî. (A) This is Nissim Ezekiel in Night of the scorpion (B) This is Sarojini Naidu in Bangle Sellers (C) This is Jayanta Mahapatra in ëDispossessed Nestsí (D) This is Arun Kolatkar in ëJejurií 6. ìWhere the mind is without fear And the head in held high where knowledge is free Where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic wallsî. Sample Questions With Solutions Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 7

English (Sample Questions) Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 8 (A) This is Amrita Pritam in ëKat canvasí (B) This is Rabindranath Tagore in ëGitanjalií (C) This is Vikram Seth in ëThe Golden Gateí (D) This is Jayanta Mahapatra in ëLife Signsí 7. What is common in the following writers ? Identify to correct description below. 1. Ruskin Bond 2. RK Narayan 3. Mulk Raj Anand 4. Shashi Deshpande Codes : (A) They were all awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award (B) They have all written in Orriya a language (C) They are all author of Duality literature (D) They have all written under pseudonyms 8. ëThe Mimic Mení by V S Naipaul is all about ___________ (A) an expatriate (B) an exiled Roman King (C) an Indian living in Trinidad (D) an exiled Caribbean politician 9. Identify the verse novel from the following (A) Ulysses (B) Golden Gate (C) Music for Mohini (D) None of these 10. In ëThe Guideí, we come across a dancer. The name of the dancer is (A) Rosie (B) Bharti (C) Savitri (D) None of these ANSWER KEYS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 A B A B B B A D B A

English (Sample Questions) Contact Us : Website : www.eduncle.com | Email : [email protected] | Call Toll Free : 1800-120-1021 9 SOLUTIONS 1. (A) In 1915, Tagore was knighted by George V. Tagore repudiated his knighthood in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. 2. (B) Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949) the gifted artist, whose poetry is appreciated, for its bird like quality, painted beautiful picture of various occupations that were prevalent during her time and which are even now an important aspect of Indian life such as the weavers, fishermen, bangle sellers etc. 3. (A) These are the opening lines of the poem ìA Riverî by A.K. Ramanujan. This poem is an ironic reference to Madurai as a seat of Tamilian culture, which according to him is in a state of decadence. He observes that the poets, past and present only speak of the river during the rains and floods. A description follows, of the river in summer. 4. (B) Khushwant Singh (1915-2014) is a versatile genius who ranks among the top of the Indiaís men of letters who earned international reputation as a creative writers. His achievements as a novelists short-story writer, historian, essayist, journalist and editor of various reputed newspapers and magazines 5. (B) The poem "Bangle Sellers" was first published in the year 1912 by Sarojini Naidu in her collection of poems called "The Bird of Time." 6. (B) Gitanjali is a collection of poems by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. The original Bengali collection of 157 poems was published on August 14, 1910. 7. (A) Ruskin Bond received the Sahitya Akademi Award for English writing in India in 1993. R.K. Narayan won Sahitya Akademi Award for ìThe Guideî in 1958. In 1950 Anand embarked on a project to write a seven-part autobiography, beginning in 1951 with ìSeven Summersî. One part, ìMorning Faceî (1968), won Mulk Raj Anand the Sahitya Akademi Award. Shashi Deshpandeís best known work like ìThe Dark Holds No Terrorî, ìThat Long Silenceî, won the Sahitya Akademi award. 8. (D) "The Mimic Men" (1967) presents and examines a newly independent country in the Caribbean, the island of Isabella, with a pessimistic view. It is about an exiled Caribbean politician. 9. (B) ìThe Golden Gateî (1986) is the first novel by poet and novelist Vikram Seth. The work is a novel in verse composed of 590 Onegin stanzas. 10. (A) Rosie is one of the main characters of the novel ìThe Guideî by R.K. Narayan. R.K. Narayan portrays the character Rosie as a typical Indian woman who loves her husband despite his entire fault and always feels proud of her husband.