Which one of the following works was written in early eighteenth century by the Bengali poet Rameshwar Bhattacharya?

Correct — B, Shivsankirttan. The poem is Rameshwar Bhattacharya's Shivayan, which circulates under the alternative title Shivsankirttan and is the best-known of the Bengali Shivayan poems. Its subject is Shiva's household. Rameshwar takes the god out of the Puranas and sets him down in rural Bengal as a poor cultivator with an unmanageable domestic life — indifferent to work, fond of his food, in trouble with Parvati — and the poem is valued today as much for its picture of eighteenth-century Bengali village agriculture as for its devotion. The other three titles are real Bengali works, which is what makes the item work, but each belongs to a different poet. UPSC has in fact keyed this same pairing before: the official answer to a match-the-pairs question in CDS (I) 2021 sets Rameshwar Bhattacharya against Shivasankirttan, alongside Mukundaram Chakravarti with Chandimangal and Krishnadas Kaviraj with Chaitanyacharitamrita. One honest caveat on the date in the stem. The attribution is not in doubt; the century is looser than the question implies, since some accounts place the poem near the beginning of the eighteenth century and others, following Dinesh Chandra Sen, put its composition around 1750.

• (a)Dharmamangal — The cycle in honour of Dharma Thakur, and the trap here is that its best-known version really is early eighteenth century — Ghanaram Chakrabarti's, dated 1711. But the Dharmamangal poets are Rupram, Manikram Ganguly, Sitaram Das and Ghanaram, not Rameshwar.
• (c)Mansimha — The third section of Bharatchandra Ray's Annadamangal of 1752, which tells how Man Singh defeated and imprisoned Pratapaditya. Bharatchandra, not Rameshwar, and a generation later.
• (d)Vidyasundar — The Vidya and Sundar romance, told under the protection of the goddess Kalika, which forms the second section of the same Annadamangal. Several poets handled the story; none of the versions is Rameshwar's.

Medieval Bengali narrative verse is dominated by the mangal-kavyas, long poems that establish the worship of a particular deity by telling how the god or goddess forced a reluctant human to honour them. The three great cycles are Manasamangal for the snake goddess, Chandimangal for Chandi and Dharmamangal for Dharma Thakur. Alongside these run the Shivayan poems, which take Shiva as their subject but treat him domestically rather than as an object of terror, and the Vaishnava biographies of Chaitanya. Rameshwar Bhattacharya belongs to the Shivayan group and is its leading name.

This is an author-to-work item, and the fastest route is to sort by cycle rather than to recall dates. Dharmamangal is a named cycle with its own roster of poets; Vidyasundar and Mansimha are both parts of one famous poem, Bharatchandra's Annadamangal, so neither can belong to a different author. That leaves Shivsankirttan, which is the odd one out in genre and is the Shivayan title. The eighteenth century is when Bengali narrative verse turns worldly — Bharatchandra writes for the court of Krishnachandra of Nadia, and Rameshwar writes a Shiva who worries about his crop — so the two names in this question mark the same shift from different directions.

• Rameshwar Bhattacharya's Shivayan, also known as Shivsankirttan, is the most popular of the Bengali Shivayan poems.
• It portrays Shiva as a poor Bengali cultivator and is used as evidence for agrarian practice in eighteenth-century Bengal.
• Accounts differ on its date: some place it towards the beginning of the eighteenth century, while Dinesh Chandra Sen dated the composition to about 1750.
• Ghanaram Chakrabarti's Dharmamangal, dated 1711, is the best-known version of that cycle; Rupram, Manikram Ganguly and Sitaram Das also composed Dharmamangals.
• Vidyasundar and Mansimha are the second and third sections of Bharatchandra Ray's Annadamangal, composed in 1752.
• Mukundaram Chakravarti's Chandimangal, of the sixteenth century, is the classic of the mangal-kavya form.

• Picking Dharmamangal because a famous Dharmamangal really is dated 1711 — right century, wrong poet.
• Not noticing that Vidyasundar and Mansimha are two parts of a single poem and so stand or fall together.
• Treating Shivayan as a mangal-kavya; it is a related but separate group of poems about Shiva's domestic life.

As a straight author-to-work item, or in the harder match-the-pairs form UPSC used in CDS 2021, where four Bengali poets have to be set against four titles at once.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Annadamangal, which contains the Vidyasundar and Mansimha sections, was composed by which poet?

  • (a)Rameshwar Bhattacharya
  • (b)Bharatchandra Ray
  • (c)Ghanaram Chakrabarti
  • (d)Krishnadas Kaviraj

  Answer(b) Bharatchandra Ray — he composed it in 1752 under the patronage of Krishnachandra of Nadia.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Rameshwar Bhattacharya's Shivayan, Shiva is chiefly portrayed as which of the following?

  • (a)A world-conquering emperor
  • (b)A poor Bengali cultivator with a troubled household
  • (c)An ascetic who never leaves Kailasa
  • (d)A merchant trading down the Ganga

  Answer(b) A poor Bengali cultivator with a troubled household — which is why the poem is read as evidence for rural life in eighteenth-century Bengal.