Literature, Languages and Texts

• Option (a) is correct on the position when the paper was set. Odia was declared a classical language in February 2014, becoming the sixth after Tamil in 2004, Sanskrit in 2005, Kannada and Telugu in 2008 and Malayalam in 2013, and the first from the Indo-Aryan family. The criteria applied at the time required high antiquity of early texts over a period of fifteen hundred to two thousand years, a body of ancient literature regarded as a valuable heritage by generations of speakers, an original literary tradition not borrowed from another speech community, and a discontinuity between the classical language and its modern form.
• Option (b) is wrong: Konkani is a scheduled language and the official language of Goa but held no classical status.
• Option (c) is wrong: Bhojpuri was not then even in the Eighth Schedule, and its inclusion has been a standing demand.
• Option (d) is wrong on the position in 2015. The elimination route is that the recognition was granted to a language with a documented literary corpus running back to the medieval period, which excludes Bhojpuri at once.

The Sunga dynasty was founded by Pushyamitra Sunga, who displaced the last Mauryan ruler Brihadratha around 185 BCE. His son was Agnimitra, and Kalidasa's play Malavikagnimitra dramatises the love of Agnimitra, then viceroy at Vidisha, for Malavika, a princess of Vidarbha serving in the harem as an attendant. Hence (b).

• Option (a), Swapnavasavadatta, is by Bhasa and concerns Udayana of Vatsa and Vasavadatta, a much earlier and different legendary cycle.
• Option (c), Meghadoota, is Kalidasa's lyric poem in which an exiled yaksha sends a message to his beloved through a cloud; it is not a drama and has no historical protagonist.
• Option (d), Ratnavali, is attributed to Harshavardhana and again concerns Udayana, this time with Ratnavali of Ceylon. The elimination route runs through authorship and protagonist: Swapnavasavadatta and Ratnavali both belong to the Udayana cycle and can be discarded together, and Meghadoota is not a love story with a named dynastic prince, leaving only the play whose title itself couples Agnimitra with Malavika.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Panini, author of the Ashtadhyayi, belongs to about the fifth or fourth century before the common era, several centuries before the Shungas. The grammarian associated with Pushyamitra Shunga is Patanjali, author of the Mahabhashya, who is traditionally said to have officiated at his ashvamedha.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. Amarasimha, author of the Amarakosha, is counted among the navaratna at the court of Chandragupta II, not of Harshavardhana. Harsha's court is associated with Banabhatta and Mayura.
• Statement 3 is correct, Kalidasa being the best known of the same nine gems. Only statement 3 stands, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (d) carry the Panini error and (a), (b) and (d) carry the Amarasimha error, so recognising either misattribution isolates the answer.

Nizamuddin Panipati rendered the Yogavasistha, the Sanskrit work of Advaita philosophy cast as Vasistha's instruction to Rama, into Persian during Akbar's reign, the translation being made for Prince Salim, later Jahangir. It belongs to the wider programme of translation from Sanskrit into Persian that Akbar sponsored through his maktab khana, which produced Persian versions of the Mahabharata as the Razmnama, the Ramayana, the Atharva Veda and the Lilavati, and which formed part of his broader effort to make the intellectual traditions of his Hindu subjects accessible at court.

• Option (a) is therefore correct.
• Option (b) is wrong because Humayun's reign was consumed by war and exile and supported no such programme.
• Options (c) and (d) are wrong on chronology; the Sanskrit to Persian translation associated with Shahjahan's reign is Dara Shukoh's version of the Upanishads, the Sirr i Akbar, a distinct undertaking, while Aurangzeb withdrew patronage from work of this kind altogether.

• Pair 1 is incorrect. Devichandraguptam is a Sanskrit play attributed to Vishakhadatta, who also wrote Mudrarakshasa. Bilhana wrote the Vikramankadevacharita in praise of the Chalukya Vikramaditya the Sixth.
• Pair 2 is correct. Hammira Mahakavya was composed by the Jaina scholar Nayachandra Suri in the fifteenth century on Hammira of Ranthambhor.
• Pair 3 is incorrect. Milindapanha is a Pali dialogue between the Indo Greek king Menander and the monk Nagasena, and it is Nagasena rather than Nagarjuna who is the interlocutor. Nagarjuna was the Madhyamaka philosopher of a later period, and the similarity of the two names is the trap.
• Pair 4 is correct. Nitivakyamrita is a work on polity by Somadeva Suri, author also of Yashastilaka. Two pairs match, giving (b).

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Upanishads are rich in parable, dialogue and analogy, which is their characteristic method of teaching. The Chandogya Upanishad contains the instruction of Svetaketu by Uddalaka Aruni with the salt in water and the seed of the banyan, the Katha Upanishad frames its teaching as the dialogue of Nachiketa with Yama, and the Brihadaranyaka contains the parable of the gods, humans and demons receiving the syllable da.
• Statement 2 is correct. The principal Upanishads belong to the late Vedic period, roughly the eighth to fifth centuries BCE, forming the concluding portion of the Vedic corpus and hence the name Vedanta. The Puranas in their extant form are far later, compiled and expanded largely in the Gupta and post Gupta centuries. Hence 2 only, which is (b).
• Options (a) and (c) require accepting the false claim about parables, and (d) wrongly rejects the chronology.

Madhyama vyayoga, a one act play drawn from the Mahabharata episode of Bhima and Ghatotkacha, is among the thirteen plays attributed to Bhasa, recovered in the Trivandrum manuscripts by T. Ganapati Sastri in 1912. Bhasa predates Kalidasa and is named respectfully by him in the prologue to Malavikagnimitram.

• Option (a) is wrong because Kavyalankara is a work of poetics by Bhamaha, a treatise on figures of speech rather than a play.
• Option (b) is wrong because the Natyashastra is Bharata's foundational treatise on dramaturgy, dance and music, again a theoretical text and not a drama.
• Option (d) is wrong because the Mahabhashya is Patanjali's grammatical commentary on Panini's Ashtadhyayi. The question separates a dramatist's composition from three works about literature, grammar and dramatic theory.

Sanghabhuti reached Chang'an in about 381 CE and worked there on the translation and exposition of Sarvastivada texts, being credited with a commentary on the Sarvastivada Vinaya, the monastic disciplinary code of that school. The Sarvastivada was the dominant school in the northwest and in Central Asia, precisely the corridor through which monks travelled to China, which makes the attribution coherent.

• Option (a) is wrong because the Prajnaparamita literature belongs to the Mahayana perfection of wisdom corpus and is associated with commentators such as Nagarjuna rather than with Sanghabhuti.
• Option (b) is wrong because the Visuddhimagga is Buddhaghosa's fifth century Theravada compendium composed in Sri Lanka in Pali, a different school, language and geography.
• Option (d) is wrong because the Lalitavistara is a Sanskrit biographical account of the Buddha's life, not a work Sanghabhuti is associated with. This is a difficult item resting on a single obscure name.