MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 13 of 100

Correct — option (1), 'Only (a), (c) and (d)'. Harshavardhana, who ruled from about 606 to 647 CE from Thanesar and then Kanauj, was that rare thing among Indian kings, a working dramatist, and three Sanskrit plays are attributed to him: Priyadarshika and Ratnavali, both natikas built on the familiar plot of a princess in disguise at a royal court and her eventual recognition and marriage, and Nagananda, a play of a different order altogether, which dramatises the Buddhist legend of the Bodhisattva Jimutavahana offering his own body to save the serpents from Garuda. Statements (a), (c) and (d) are therefore his. Statement (b), the Harshacharita, is not — and the whole question turns on that one line, because every other option printed on the page includes it. The Harshacharita is a biography OF Harsha, not BY him: it was composed by Banabhatta, the poet at his court, in ornate Sanskrit prose, and it is celebrated as the first substantial historical biography in Sanskrit literature, the model for the courtly charita form that followed. Bana also wrote the prose romance Kadambari. The confusion the question exploits is entirely natural — a work called Harshacharita sounds like a royal composition, and it is the text most often cited in connection with Harsha's reign — but 'charita' means the deeds or life of the person named, so the title identifies the subject, not the author. Once statement (b) is struck out, only option (1) remains, and that is the answer.

• (2)Only (a), (b) and (c) — This option admits the Harshacharita, which was written by Banabhatta about Harsha rather than by Harsha himself, and it also drops Nagananda, which genuinely is Harsha's. It is the choice of a candidate who knows the two natikas, Priyadarshika and Ratnavali, and then completes the set with the most famous Harsha-related title without asking who wrote it — which is precisely the reading habit the question is designed to punish.
• (3)Only (a), (b) and (d) — This option makes the same error about the Harshacharita and compounds it by excluding Ratnavali, one of the two natikas most securely attributed to Harsha and the play most often quoted as his. Candidates arrive here when they remember Nagananda because of its unusual Buddhist subject, remember the Harshacharita because it is the standard source for the reign, and cannot recall which of the two court comedies belongs in the list.
• (4)All of the above — Accepting all four statements means accepting that Harsha wrote his own biography, which he did not — the Harshacharita is Banabhatta's work. This is the natural option for a candidate who recognises every title in the list as belonging to Harsha's reign and does not separate what the king composed from what was composed about him. Where three of four statements in a set are true, an omnibus option is only as good as the fourth, and here the fourth is a straightforward misattribution.

Harsha's reign is unusually well documented for early medieval India because three independent kinds of evidence survive for it: the king's own literary works, a court biography, and the account of a foreign observer. The plays — Priyadarshika, Ratnavali and Nagananda — show a Sanskrit courtly culture in which the ruler himself was expected to be a connoisseur and a patron; Nagananda's Buddhist subject also reflects Harsha's patronage of Buddhism and of Nalanda. The Harshacharita of Banabhatta is the first great Sanskrit prose biography and inaugurates a genre that later produced works such as Bilhana's Vikramankadevacharita and Kalhana's Rajatarangini in a related mode. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who spent years in India during Harsha's reign, supplies the outsider's description of the assemblies at Kanauj and Prayag and of the state of Buddhism. The three sources together are why Harsha is one of the few early Indian rulers whose personality is at all visible.

Author-and-work questions are a fixture of the ancient-history section in MPSC papers, and the commission's favourite trap is exactly the one used here: a title that names the patron rather than the writer. The same trap recurs across the syllabus — the Harshacharita by Bana, the Vikramankadevacharita by Bilhana, the Prithviraj Raso attributed to Chand Bardai, the Gaudavaho by Vakpati, the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas as against the Ramacharita of Sandhyakara Nandi — and in each case a candidate who reads the title as a signature will lose the mark. The way to be safe is to keep a two-column list of court poet against patron king alongside the list of works the kings themselves wrote. Harsha's reign is also examined through Xuanzang's travels and through the Chalukya check on the Narmada, so it is efficient to hold the reign as a cluster of four facts — the plays he wrote, the biography written about him, the Chinese pilgrim's account and Pulakeshin II's victory — because a commission that asks one of them will ask the others in another year.

• Harshavardhana of the Pushyabhuti or Vardhana dynasty ruled from about 606 to 647 CE, first from Thanesar and later from Kanauj.
• Three Sanskrit plays are attributed to Harsha: Priyadarshika, Ratnavali and Nagananda, the last dramatising the Buddhist story of the Bodhisattva Jimutavahana.
• The Harshacharita was written by Banabhatta, Harsha's court poet, and is regarded as the first major historical biography in Sanskrit; Bana also composed the prose romance Kadambari.
• The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang visited India during Harsha's reign and described the religious assemblies held at Kanauj and at Prayag.
• Harsha's southward expansion was checked by Pulakeshin II of the Chalukyas of Badami, a victory recorded in the Aihole inscription composed by Ravikirti.

• Reading a title of the form 'X-charita' as a work by X; it names the subject of the biography, not its author
• Dropping Nagananda from Harsha's works because its Buddhist subject seems unlike the two court comedies
• Choosing an omnibus option because most of the listed titles are associated with the reign, when one of them is by a different hand

MPSC tests literature in ancient and medieval history almost entirely through author-and-work matching, in statement sets like this one, in match-the-columns items, or as a straight one-line question. The recurring difficulty is manufactured by mixing a work written by the ruler with a work written about him, or by pairing a court poet with the wrong patron. Because the examinable list is short and stable, the reliable preparation is a compact table of work, author, patron and language, and the discipline of asking of every title in an option list who actually held the pen.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Harshacharita, the ornate Sanskrit prose biography of Harshavardhana, was composed by which writer ?

  • (a)Banabhatta
  • (b)Kalidasa
  • (c)Bhavabhuti
  • (d)Bilhana

  Answer(a) Banabhatta — Harsha's court poet, who also wrote the prose romance Kadambari, and whose Harshacharita is regarded as the first major historical biography in Sanskrit. Bilhana wrote the comparable Vikramankadevacharita for the later Chalukya ruler Vikramaditya VI, while Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti are dramatists of other periods.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Among the plays attributed to Harshavardhana, which one dramatises the Buddhist story of the Bodhisattva Jimutavahana ?

  • (a)Priyadarshika
  • (b)Ratnavali
  • (c)Nagananda
  • (d)Kadambari

  Answer(c) Nagananda — it dramatises the legend of the Bodhisattva Jimutavahana, who offers his own body to save the serpents, and stands apart from Priyadarshika and Ratnavali, the two court natikas of the same author. Kadambari is not a play at all but Banabhatta's Sanskrit prose romance.