Tulsidas was the author of 1. Ramcharitmanas 2. Padavali 3. Kavitavali Select the correct answer using the code given below:

Correct — D, 1 and 3 only. Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas and the Kavitavali, but not the Padavali. The Ramcharitmanas is his retelling of the Rama story in Awadhi, begun at Ayodhya in 1574, and it is the work that carried the Rama devotion of the north into everyday recitation. The Kavitavali is also his and also on the Rama story, composed in Braj Bhasha in the kavitta and savaiya metres rather than the chaupai-doha of the Manas. Padavali is not his. The word simply means a collection of padas, and the famous ones belong to other poets — Vidyapati's Maithili Padavali above all, and the collections associated with Chandidas. Since statement 2 fails and the other two hold, the code that takes 1 and 3 is the answer.

• (a)1 only — It drops the Kavitavali, which is one of Tulsidas's securely attributed works and stands beside the Gitavali and the Vinaya Patrika in every standard list.
• (b)2 and 3 only — It keeps the one work that is not his and drops the one that is most famously his. The Ramcharitmanas cannot be excluded from a list of Tulsidas's writing.
• (c)1, 2 and 3 — This accepts the Padavali. That title belongs to the Maithili tradition of Vidyapati and to the Bengali padas of Chandidas, not to the Awadhi and Braj poet of the Rama story.

Tulsidas, who died in 1623, belongs to the saguna stream of the Bhakti movement — devotion to God with attributes, in his case Rama. His accepted works include the Ramcharitmanas, the Kavitavali, the Gitavali, the Vinaya Patrika and the Dohavali. Set against him in the same period stand Surdas, the Krishna poet of Braj whose works are the Sursagar, the Sur Saravali and the Sahitya Lahari, and Kabir, of the nirguna stream, who worshipped a God without attributes.

Every question of this type is decided by knowing which title belongs to which poet, and the safest way to hold them is by language and deity. Awadhi and Braj on the Rama story is Tulsidas; Braj on Krishna is Surdas; Maithili padas on Radha and Krishna are Vidyapati. The Padavali is placed here because the word looks like a generic title and invites a guess. Note also that the store tags this question Indian Economy, which is the dataset's catch-all label and simply wrong — it is a literature item.

• Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, begun at Ayodhya in 1574.
• The Kavitavali is his, in Braj Bhasha, using the kavitta and savaiya metres.
• His other standard works are the Gitavali, the Vinaya Patrika and the Dohavali.
• Padavali is a collection of padas; the celebrated one is Vidyapati's, in Maithili.
• Surdas is credited with the Sursagar, the Sur Saravali and the Sahitya Lahari, which are the usual distractors against Tulsidas.

• Assuming a generic-sounding title such as Padavali must belong to the best-known poet in the option set.
• Swapping Tulsidas's works with Surdas's — the Sahitya Lahari is a standard bait.
• Forgetting that the Kavitavali is Tulsidas's, since the Ramcharitmanas overshadows everything else he wrote.

Asked as a select-the-works item where one plausible title is inserted from a different poet's tradition, which is the most common shape for medieval literature.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Maithili Padavali, a celebrated collection of padas on Radha and Krishna, was composed by

  • (a)Tulsidas
  • (b)Vidyapati
  • (c)Surdas
  • (d)Kabir

  Answer(b) Vidyapati — the Maithili poet whose padas gave the title its fame.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following works is NOT attributed to Tulsidas?

  • (a)Vinaya Patrika
  • (b)Gitavali
  • (c)Sursagar
  • (d)Dohavali

  Answer(c) Sursagar — that is Surdas's, the Krishna poet of the Braj region.