CDS (I) 2022 General Knowledge · Question 111 of 120

Correct — C, Both 1 and 2. The Jnanpith's own list of recipients gives the fifty-sixth award to Nilamani Phookan, writing in Assamese, and the fifty-seventh to Damodar Mauzo, writing in Konkani, so both statements stand as printed. Phookan is one of the major modern Assamese poets, honoured for a lifetime's work; Mauzo is a Konkani novelist and short-story writer from Goa, best known for the novel Karmelin. The pairing is what the question is really testing, because the two awards were declared close together and are easy to transpose — and if you can fix either name to its language you can usually recover the other, since Assamese and Konkani do not otherwise sit near each other in the Jnanpith list.

• (a)1 only — Accepts Phookan as the fifty-sixth but rejects Mauzo as the fifty-seventh, which the recipient list does not support — Mauzo is recorded at that number, for Konkani.
• (b)2 only — Rejects the Phookan half. He is listed at the fifty-sixth award, for Assamese, so the first statement holds as printed.
• (d)Neither 1 nor 2 — Rejects both, which would need the numbers or the names to be wrong. Both are as recorded.

The Jnanpith Award is India's oldest and most prestigious literary honour, instituted in 1961 and given by the Bharatiya Jnanpith for an outstanding contribution to literature in any of the languages listed in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, together with English. It carries a citation, a bronze replica of Vagdevi and a cash prize. The first award, for 1965, went to G. Sankara Kurup for the Malayalam poem Odakkuzhal. Satya Vrat Shastri received the forty-second, the first for Sanskrit, and Amitav Ghosh the fifty-fourth, the first for a work in English.

Award questions are safest when they are learned as pairs of name and language rather than as a running number, because the numbering slips easily in revision notes. Here the pairing is Phookan with Assamese and Mauzo with Konkani, and both statements are correct, so the answer is (c). The paper prints the poet's name as Nilamoni Phukan Jr., a transliteration variant of the more usual Nilamani Phookan; the spelling difference is incidental and does not change what is being asked. It is worth carrying the sequence forward as well, since these questions recur every year with a new number: the fifty-eighth award, announced in February 2024, was shared by Jagadguru Rambhadracharya for Sanskrit and Gulzar for Urdu, and the most recent entry in the list is the sixtieth, for 2025, to the Tamil poet Vairamuthu.

• The fifty-sixth Jnanpith Award went to Nilamani Phookan, for Assamese.
• The fifty-seventh went to Damodar Mauzo, for Konkani; his best-known novel is Karmelin.
• The Jnanpith Award was instituted in 1961 and is given by the Bharatiya Jnanpith for literature in an Eighth Schedule language or in English.
• The first award, for 1965, went to G. Sankara Kurup for the Malayalam work Odakkuzhal.
• The fifty-eighth award was shared by Jagadguru Rambhadracharya, for Sanskrit, and Gulzar, for Urdu.

• Transposing the two, giving Phookan the fifty-seventh and Mauzo the fifty-sixth.
• Attaching Mauzo to Marathi rather than Konkani because he writes from Goa.
• Treating a serial number as fixed. The list grows every year and the numbering must be revised with it.

As a two-statement correctness item on recent recipients, as a writer-to-language match, or as a which-award-did-this-person-receive question.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Damodar Mauzo, a recipient of the Jnanpith Award, writes principally in which one of the following languages?

  • (a)Marathi
  • (b)Konkani
  • (c)Kannada
  • (d)Malayalam

  Answer(b) Konkani — the Goan novelist and short-story writer whose best-known novel is Karmelin.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The first Jnanpith Award was conferred on

  • (a)G. Sankara Kurup
  • (b)Tarashankar Bandopadhyay
  • (c)K. V. Puttappa
  • (d)Umashankar Joshi

  Answer(a) G. Sankara Kurup — for the Malayalam work Odakkuzhal, for the year 1965.