CDS (I) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 114 of 120

Correct — A, Narayan Surve. Majhe Vidyapeeth, published in 1966, is Narayan Gangaram Surve's best-known collection and the one that carried Marathi poetry into the world of Mumbai's mill hands and pavement dwellers. The title means 'my university', and it is meant literally: Surve was abandoned as an infant, grew up on the streets of the city sleeping on pavements and taking whatever work he could find, and studied only up to the seventh standard — the city and its working life were the education he had. The book won eleven prizes and brought him the Soviet Land Nehru Award in 1973; he later received the Padma Shri in 1998 and presided over the Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan in 1995. He worked with workers' unions in Mumbai and taught in a school, and his verse is celebrated for putting labour and poverty at the centre of a literature that had largely kept them out.

• (b)Amol Palekar — Palekar is known in Marathi and Hindi cinema and theatre as an actor and director, not as the poet of this collection.
• (c)Bhalchandra Nemade — Nemade is a major figure in Marathi letters, but as a novelist and critic. Majhe Vidyapeeth is not his.
• (d)Narendra Jadhav — Jadhav is an economist who has also written about family and social experience in Maharashtra. He is a plausible-sounding name for a book about working-class life, which is why he is here, but the poem is Surve's.

Surve belongs to the generation that broke Marathi poetry open in the 1960s. His subject is the industrial city — the mills, the chawls, the union meeting, the pavement — and his voice is that of someone inside it rather than a sympathetic observer. Aisa Ga Mi Brahma of 1962 was his first collection, Majhe Vidyapeeth of 1966 the one that made his name, and Jahirnama followed in 1978; a selection of his early poems appeared in English as On the Pavement of Life in 1973.

Questions on regional-language literature are usually decided by pairing an author with one title, so the efficient thing is to hold the pair rather than the biography. Here the title itself carries the clue — a poet who calls the city his university is telling you he had no other, which fits Surve's life and no one else's on the list. The three wrong names are all real and well known in Maharashtra, which is what gives the item its difficulty, and one of them writes about social experience too. Note that Surve died in 2010, so the collection belongs to the mid-twentieth-century industrial Bombay of textile mills, a city that has since been rebuilt over the mill land the poems describe.

• Narayan Gangaram Surve lived from 1926 to 2010 and wrote in Marathi.
• Majhe Vidyapeeth, published in 1966, is his best-known collection and won eleven prizes.
• He received the Soviet Land Nehru Award in 1973 for Majhe Vidyapeeth and the Padma Shri in 1998.
• Abandoned soon after birth, he grew up on the streets of Mumbai and studied only up to the seventh standard.
• He presided over the Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan in 1995 and convened the Sahitya Akademi's Marathi Advisory Board.

• Matching a book about workers to the best-known author of social non-fiction rather than to its poet.
• Confusing the novelist's canon with the poet's; Marathi fiction and Marathi poetry have different names at the top.
• Assuming an award year is the publication year — the collection is of 1966, the Soviet Land Nehru Award of 1973.

As a straight author-to-work match, or inside a list pairing regional writers with their most famous titles.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Aisa Ga Mi Brahma, Majhe Vidyapeeth and Jahirnama are collections by which Marathi writer?

  • (a)Vinda Karandikar
  • (b)Narayan Surve
  • (c)Kusumagraj
  • (d)Bhalchandra Nemade

  Answer(b) Narayan Surve — the three collections appeared in 1962, 1966 and 1978.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Narayan Surve received which of the following civilian honours in 1998?

  • (a)Bharat Ratna
  • (b)Padma Vibhushan
  • (c)Padma Shri
  • (d)Padma Bhushan

  Answer(c) Padma Shri — awarded in 1998 for literature and education.