BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 69 of 144

Correct — A, a b c d 2 1 4 3. Charaka goes to Medicine (2): the Charaka Samhita, his redaction of the older Agnivesha Tantra, is the foundational text of kayachikitsa or internal medicine in Ayurveda, arranged in eight sthanas and 120 chapters, and forms one third of the Brihat-trayi with the Sushruta Samhita and the Ashtanga Hridaya. Brahmagupta goes to Mathematics (1), and this is provable from the text rather than from reputation. Born c. 598 CE at Bhillamala — Al-Biruni, writing about 1030 CE, still knew him as “Brahmagupta, the son of Jishnu, from the town of Bhillamala between Multan and Anhilwara” — he composed the Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628 CE and the Khandakhadyaka in 665. In H. T. Colebrooke's 1817 translation, its Chapter XVIII, verses 31–36, lays out the first systematic algebra of sign and zero anywhere: “The sum of two affirmative quantities is affirmative; of two negative is negative; of an affirmative and a negative is their difference… The sum of cipher and negative is negative; of affirmative and nought is positive; of two ciphers is cipher”; in multiplication, “of two negative, is positive”; and in division, “Positive, or negative, divided by cipher, is a fraction with that for denominator” — together with the one famous slip, “Cipher, divided by cipher, is nought.” His Chapter XII, verse 21, gives the exact-area rule for a cyclic quadrilateral: “Half the sum of the sides set down four times, and severally lessened by the sides, being multiplied together, the square-root of the product is the exact area.” Bhaskara II later called him ganaka-chakra-chudamani, the gem of the circle of mathematicians. Varahamihira goes to Astrology (4). Living c. 505–587 CE in or around Ujjain, he wrote the Panchasiddhantika — which Al-Biruni describes as “an astronomical handbook of small compass… which name ought to mean that it contains the pith and marrow of the preceding five Siddhantas” — and, far more influentially, the Brihat Samhita, the Brihat Jataka and the Laghu Jataka. Al-Biruni again is exact about the genre: “Varahamihira has composed two Jatakas, a small and a large one… the former I have translated into Arabic”, and a samhita, he explains, is a book of “forewarnings relating to a journey derived from meteorological occurrences; prophecies regarding the fate of dynasties… prophesying from the lines of the hand; interpretation of dreams.” That is the divinatory column, which is slot 4. Vishakhadatta goes to Playwright (3): his Sanskrit drama Mudrarakshasa turns on Chanakya's patient manoeuvring to win Rakshasa, the last Nanda minister, over to Chandragupta Maurya, and a second, fragmentary play, the Devichandraguptam, is also ascribed to him. The pairing is therefore a-2, b-1, c-4, d-3.

• (b)a b c d 1 2 3 4 — This is the lazy “straight down the list” code, 1-2-3-4, and it makes Charaka a mathematician and Brahmagupta a physician — an exact exchange of the two least disputable identifications on the card. A serial code is almost never the answer in a BPSC match-list, because a setter who wanted the serial order would have had to write the two lists in the same order deliberately, and there is no reason to. Treat 1-2-3-4 as a planted option and test it against the single pairing you are surest of before spending any more time on it.
• (c)a b c d 3 2 4 1 — It makes Charaka a playwright and Brahmagupta a physician, while parking Vishakhadatta — the one man on the list who wrote no science at all — under Mathematics. Only its third pair, Varahamihira with Astrology, is right, which is exactly what lets the option survive a careless glance: a candidate who checks the pair he is most confident about last will find it correct and stop. The defence is to check the pair you are most confident about first, which here is Charaka, and (c) fails on it immediately.
• (d)a b c d 1 4 3 2 — It has Charaka doing mathematics and Brahmagupta astrology. The second half of that is the tempting part, and it is tempting for a real reason: Brahmagupta did write on planetary astronomy, and Al-Biruni's sharpest complaint against him is that on eclipses he preferred the Rahu story to the scientific explanation out of deference to the priests. But the list offers only one Astrology slot and Varahamihira has the stronger claim to it, and the option then has to leave Medicine to Vishakhadatta and make Varahamihira a playwright, both indefensible.

The four names span the whole spread of classical Indian learning and are almost always tested as a set. Charaka belongs to the medical tradition: the Charaka Samhita systematises diagnosis, diet, the ethics of the physician and the theory of the three doshas, and tradition places him as court physician to Kanishka. Brahmagupta and Varahamihira both belong to jyotisha, and the reason examiners like this pair is that jyotisha was not one subject but three. Its classical division is into ganita or siddhanta (mathematical astronomy and the computation behind it), samhita (mundane divination — omens, comets, earthquakes, rainfall, architecture, gemmology, the fate of kingdoms) and hora (horoscopy, the astrology of individual nativities). Brahmagupta is the ganita man: the Brahmasphutasiddhanta is a computational treatise whose lasting contribution is arithmetic, sign rules and algebra, and whose reach was long — it went to Baghdad as the Sindhind and entered Arabic mathematics from there. Varahamihira occupies the other two branches: the Brihat Samhita is the samhita encyclopaedia, and the Brihat Jataka and Laghu Jataka are the hora manuals. Al-Biruni, who read both men in Sanskrit and translated the Laghu Jataka into Arabic, catalogues them in exactly this way, which is a witness four centuries closer to them than any modern textbook. Vishakhadatta stands outside all of this as a dramatist, and his Mudrarakshasa is prized less as literature than as a political text — it is one of the very few Sanskrit plays about statecraft rather than love or myth, with no heroine at its centre and a minister as its subject.

There is a shortcut here that costs no knowledge at all. Charaka and Medicine is the pairing nobody gets wrong, and of the four codes offered only option (a) begins with 2. Confirming a single certain pair therefore closes the question outright — the standard way to attack a four-item code match is to find the one pairing you are sure of, run it against every code, and answer the moment only one survives. On this item that takes about five seconds and never touches the other three names. If you do work the whole list, the live decision is Brahmagupta versus Varahamihira, because both worked on the heavens and either could plausibly be tagged with them. Three things resolve it. First, the list has exactly one Mathematics slot and one Astrology slot, so the two men must be separated, not both filed under the sky. Second, what survives of each is different in kind: Brahmagupta's fame rests on rules for zero, negatives and quadratics, Varahamihira's on the Brihat Jataka and the Brihat Samhita — nativities and omens. Third, and most usefully, a contemporary-ish witness sorts them for you: Al-Biruni lists Varahamihira's output as two Jatakas plus a samhita of dream-reading, palmistry and dynastic prophecy, while treating Brahmagupta as a siddhanta computist he argues with on technical grounds. One caution about wording. BPSC wrote “Astrology” here, and the softer word does point at Varahamihira — but do not over-learn it, because UPSC set the identical four names in 1996 with the column labelled “Astronomy”, and the answer was still Varahamihira. The label moves; the man does not.

• Brahmagupta (c. 598 – c. 668 CE), son of Jishnu, of Bhillamala (modern Bhinmal, Rajasthan), wrote the Brahmasphutasiddhanta in 628 CE and the Khandakhadyaka in 665; Al-Biruni still identified him by that birthplace around 1030 CE
• Brahmasphutasiddhanta ch. XVIII, vv. 31–36 (Colebrooke's 1817 translation) gives the earliest systematic rules for zero and negative quantities — “of two negative, is positive” in multiplication; “Positive, or negative, divided by cipher, is a fraction with that for denominator” — along with the celebrated error “Cipher, divided by cipher, is nought”
• Brahmagupta's ch. XII, v. 21 states the exact area of a cyclic quadrilateral: half the sum of the sides written four times, each reduced by one side, the four multiplied, and the square root taken — √((s−a)(s−b)(s−c)(s−d))
• Varahamihira (c. 505 – c. 587 CE), of Avanti and associated with Ujjain, wrote the Panchasiddhantika — a digest of five earlier siddhantas — along with the Brihat Samhita, the Brihat Jataka and the Laghu Jataka, the last of which Al-Biruni translated into Arabic
• The Charaka Samhita is organised into 8 sthanas and 120 chapters and is one of the Brihat-trayi, the three great Ayurvedic compendia, with the Sushruta Samhita and the Ashtanga Hridaya
• Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa dramatises Chanakya's campaign to win over Rakshasa, minister of the Nandas, for Chandragupta Maurya; the fragmentary Devichandraguptam is also attributed to him
• Elimination shortcut: of the four codes, only option (a) assigns 2 (Medicine) to Charaka, so one secure pairing settles the whole item without touching the other three names

• Giving Mathematics to Varahamihira because he was an astronomer; the list needs one occupant each, and Brahmagupta is the mathematician of the pair
• Confusing Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa with Shudraka's Mrichchhakatika — both are Sanskrit plays, but only the Mudrarakshasa is about Mauryan statecraft
• Reading the code left to right as though it were serial (1-2-3-4); in a BPSC match-list the serial option is planted, not offered in good faith

BPSC asks this set as a four-way code match and expects the code to be cracked from one secure pair rather than from four independent recalls. UPSC has asked the identical four names as a match-list in 1996 — with the column headed “Astronomy” instead of “Astrology”, and the same man in it — and has then broken them up into single-fact questions: the subject of the Mudrarakshasa in 2002, and who among the ancients anticipated the idea of gravitation in 1995. Either way the examiner is testing one thing: whether you can separate the mathematician from the astrologer, given that both sat inside the same jyotisha tradition and both wrote about the sky.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Brahmasphutasiddhanta, the earliest known work to treat zero as a number in its own right and to set out rules for computing with negative numbers, was composed in 628 CE by

  • (a)Aryabhata
  • (b)Varahamihira
  • (c)Brahmagupta
  • (d)Bhaskara II

  Answer(c) Brahmagupta — he wrote it at Bhillamala at the age of thirty; Aryabhata's Aryabhatiya is earlier (499 CE) and Bhaskara II's Siddhanta Shiromani is much later (1150 CE).

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Panchasiddhantika, a digest of five earlier astronomical siddhantas, was written by

  • (a)Charaka
  • (b)Varahamihira
  • (c)Brahmagupta
  • (d)Vishakhadatta

  Answer(b) Varahamihira — he compiled the five siddhantas into the Panchasiddhantika in the sixth century and is better known still for the Brihat Samhita and the Brihat Jataka.