Question

Which of the following sentences is totally correct in terms of the literary heritage of India?
A) Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Bengali are languages of the Dravidian group.
B) Kautilya’s ‘Arthashastra’ is a book on Management.
C) The use of the Hindi language began during the rule of Turks and Mughals in India.
D) Humayun himself composed his autobiography ‘Humayunama’.

Answer 1

Hint: India has a long literary history. Our literary heritage is rich and varied. India has provided the world with some magnificent works of literary heritage and universal worth. India has a huge number of languages and dialects, each of which has generated high-quality literature, both written and oral.

Complete answer:
Dravidian is a language family spoken by 220 million people, primarily in southern India and northern Sri Lanka, but also in other parts of South Asia. Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam are the Dravidian languages with the most speakers, all of which have long literary history. Bengali, on the other hand, is a member of the Indo-Aryan language family.

The ‘Arthashastra’ by Kautilya is a management book. The Arthashastra reveals the roots of management in organizations, which can provide guidance to current managers and leaders of enterprises. Kautilya takes an inside-out approach to management in his Arthashastra, putting self-management first before everything else. The ‘Arthashastra’ of Kautilya is essentially a text about state management.

Hindustani is one of the most widely used languages in South Asia, with standardized variants of Hindi and Urdu having federal status in both India and Pakistan. The Persian language had a strong influence on the Western Hindi languages of central India during the Mughal Empire, and this contact between Hindu and Muslim cultures resulted in the core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the Indian dialect of Hindi spoken in Delhi, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi, being enriched with Persian loanwords.

Gulbadan Begum, Emperor Babur’s daughter, was a Mughal princess and the Mughal Empire’s founder. Humayun-Nama, a biography of her half-brother, Emperor Humayun, which she wrote at the request of her nephew, Emperor Akbar, is her most famous work.

Therefore the correct answer is option ‘B’.

Note: In order to enhance their influence, the British authorities issued an order prohibiting the use of Persian in 1837. As a result, Persian began to lose its status as the majority of the subcontinent’s official governmental language, a position that was eventually taken by the new language of the British Raj, English. Many modern Indian languages, most notably Urdu and Hindi, are still heavily influenced by Persian.