CDS (I) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 61 of 120

Correct — B, 4 3 2 1. Take the two Chaitanya biographies first, because they are the pair that decides the answer. Krishnadas Kaviraj, who settled at Vrindavan and wrote in old age with a trembling hand, produced the Chaitanyacharitamrita, so B goes to 3. That leaves Chaitanyamangal for Brindavan Das, and it fits for a reason worth remembering: his life of Chaitanya was first called Chaitanya Mangala, and the Vaishnava elders renamed it Chaitanya Bhagavata only after they found that Lochan Das had already published a book under that title. Mukundaram Chakravarti, the poet of Daminya in Bardhaman who wrote under the name Kabikankan, is the author of the Chandimangal, the great mangal-kavya of the goddess Chandi, so C goes to 2. Rameshwar Bhattacharya is left with Shivasankirttan, the early-eighteenth-century Bengali poem on Shiva. Reading down, A-4, B-3, C-2, D-1.

• (a)4 2 3 1 — Keeps A-4 and D-1 but swaps the middle pair, giving Krishnadas Kaviraj the Chandimangal and Mukundaram the Chaitanyacharitamrita. Mukundaram wrote about a goddess, not about Chaitanya, and Krishnadas Kaviraj wrote about nothing else.
• (c)1 3 2 4 — Starts by handing Brindavan Das the Shivasankirttan, which belongs to a poet writing nearly two centuries later, and ends by giving Rameshwar Bhattacharya a life of Chaitanya.
• (d)1 2 3 4 — The tempting straight-down sequence 1 2 3 4. Only the third pairing survives it — Mukundaram does get the Chandimangal in option (a), but here he is handed the Chaitanyacharitamrita and every other row is wrong as well.

Two streams of medieval Bengali verse meet in this list. The mangal-kavyas, composed roughly between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, tell how a local deity — Manasa the snake goddess, Chandi, Dharmathakur, Shiva — compels worship from a reluctant devotee; Mukundaram's Chandimangal and Rameshwar Bhattacharya's Shivasankirttan belong here. The Vaishnava biographies are a separate stream, written to record the life of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486-1534); Brindavan Das and Krishnadas Kaviraj are its two great names.

The examiner has picked four names that a candidate is likely to know only two of, and the code table is built so that knowing B alone gets you there — only option (b) puts 3 against B. That is the efficient route through any four-row match-list: find the row you are surest of and strike out every code that contradicts it. The one pairing hardest to verify from a standard reading list is D, and UPSC has since stated it in its own words — the stem of CDS 2025-I Q49 says the Shivsankirttan was written in the early eighteenth century by the Bengali poet Rameshwar Bhattacharya. The paper prints the names in their older anglicised forms, Brindavan Das for Vrindavana Dasa and Shivasankirttan for what is elsewhere spelt Shivsankirttan or Shivayan.

• Krishnadas Kaviraja (c. 1528 - c. 1615) wrote the Chaitanyacharitamrita at Vrindavan; it was commissioned because the earlier biography left Chaitanya's last eighteen years untold.
• Brindavan Das's life of Chaitanya was originally titled Chaitanya Mangala and was renamed Chaitanya Bhagavata to distinguish it from Lochan Das's book of the same name.
• Mukundaram Chakravarti (c. 1547 - early 1600s), called Kabikankan, wrote the Chandimangal, whose hunter Kalketu and merchant Dhanapati make it a source for the society of sixteenth-century Bengal.
• Mangal-kavya is a genre, not a single poem: Manasamangal, Chandimangal and Dharmamangal are its three main branches, with Shivayana among the smaller ones.
• Chaitanya Mahaprabhu lived from 1486 to 1534 and is the founding figure of Gaudiya Vaishnavism.

• Assuming Chaitanyamangal must belong to Krishnadas Kaviraj because he is the better-known biographer; the title he is famous for is the Chaitanyacharitamrita.
• Treating mangal-kavya as one poem rather than a whole genre of goddess narratives.
• Confusing Brindavan Das's renamed Chaitanya Bhagavata with Lochan Das's Chaitanya Mangala, which kept the old title.

Usually as a four-row author-to-work match-list on medieval Bengali literature, or as a single-line item asking who composed the Chandimangal or the Chaitanyacharitamrita.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Chandimangal, a sixteenth-century Bengali poem, was composed by which one of the following?

  • (a)Krittivas Ojha
  • (b)Mukundaram Chakravarti
  • (c)Lochan Das
  • (d)Maladhar Basu

  Answer(b) Mukundaram Chakravarti — the poet known as Kabikankan, whose Chandimangal follows the hunter Kalketu and the merchant Dhanapati.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following works is a biography of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu?

  • (a)Chandimangal
  • (b)Manasamangal
  • (c)Chaitanyacharitamrita
  • (d)Shivasankirttan

  Answer(c) Chaitanyacharitamrita — written by Krishnadas Kaviraj at Vrindavan; the other three are mangal-kavyas about deities.