MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 2 of 100

Correct — option (1): (a)-(iii), (b)-(iv), (c)-(i), (d)-(ii). All four pairs are among the most stable facts in the classical Sanskrit literature section of the syllabus, and each can be fixed independently. Harshacharita is the work of Banabhatta, the court poet of Harshavardhana of Kanauj in the seventh century; it is a prose biography of his own patron, written in the ornate kavya style, and it is usually taught as the first historical biography in Sanskrit — Bana's other celebrated work is the romance Kadambari, so a candidate who knows one of the two knows the author of both. Malatimadhava is by Bhavabhuti, the eighth-century dramatist associated with the court of Yashovarman of Kanauj; it is a prakarana, a love-drama with invented characters rather than a legendary plot, and it sits beside his two Rama plays, Mahaviracharita and Uttararamacharita. Malavikagnimitra is Kalidasa's, the earliest of his three plays, built around the love of the Shunga prince Agnimitra for the maid Malavika, and its companions in the Kalidasa corpus are Vikramorvashiyam and Abhijnanashakuntalam among the plays and Raghuvamsha, Kumarasambhava, Meghaduta and Ritusamhara among the poems. Mudrarakshasa is by Vishakhadatta, a political drama about Chanakya's manoeuvring to win over Rakshasa, the loyal minister of the fallen Nanda house, to Chandragupta Maurya's service — the 'mudra' of the title being the signet ring that drives the intrigue. Two independent routes reach option (1). The direct one is to place all four pairs. The faster one is to use the elimination that a matching item always allows: the four choices are four different bijections, so a single certain pair usually kills two or three of them at once. Fix Harshacharita to Banabhatta, that is (a)-(iii), and only options (1) and (3) survive; then fix Malavikagnimitra to Kalidasa, that is (c)-(i), and option (3) — which sends Malavikagnimitra to Bhavabhuti — falls, leaving option (1) alone. Two remembered pairs, not four.

• (2)(a) - (i), (b) - (iii), (c) - (ii), (d) - (iv) — Every pair here is wrong. It hands Harshacharita to Kalidasa, which puts a seventh-century biography of Harshavardhana in the hands of a poet of the Gupta age who died centuries before Harsha was born; it gives Malatimadhava to Banabhatta, though Bana wrote prose kavya and not drama; it makes Malavikagnimitra the work of Vishakhadatta; and it credits Mudrarakshasa to Bhavabhuti. The chronological absurdity of the first pair alone is enough to discard the option without checking the other three, and that is the habit worth carrying: in a four-pair matching item, test the pair you are surest of first, because one certain mismatch retires an entire option.
• (3)(a) - (iii), (b) - (ii), (c) - (iv), (d) - (i) — This is the serious distractor, and it is designed to catch a candidate who stops after the first pair. Harshacharita to Banabhatta is right, which makes the option look sound at a glance; the remaining three are then rotated. Malatimadhava is given to Vishakhadatta rather than to Bhavabhuti, Malavikagnimitra to Bhavabhuti rather than to Kalidasa, and Mudrarakshasa to Kalidasa rather than to Vishakhadatta. The pair that exposes it fastest is Malavikagnimitra, which is Kalidasa's earliest play and one of the most securely attributed works in the whole corpus — no Sanskrit-literature list in any standard textbook attaches it to Bhavabhuti.
• (4)(a) - (iv), (b) - (i), (c) - (iii), (d) - (ii) — Only the last pair survives. Mudrarakshasa to Vishakhadatta is correct, but the first three are all displaced: Harshacharita goes to Bhavabhuti, Malatimadhava to Kalidasa and Malavikagnimitra to Banabhatta. The last of these is the clearest failure, since Banabhatta is not known as a dramatist at all — his reputation rests on the prose works Harshacharita and Kadambari. An option that gets one pair right and three wrong scores nothing in a matching item, which is why partial recognition is dangerous here: seeing a familiar pair is not the same as verifying the mapping.

Classical Sanskrit literature is examined almost entirely as author-and-work recall, so the productive way to store it is by author cluster rather than by individual title. Kalidasa, conventionally placed in the Gupta age, wrote three plays — Malavikagnimitra, Vikramorvashiyam and Abhijnanashakuntalam — two mahakavyas, Raghuvamsha and Kumarasambhava, and the lyric poems Meghaduta and Ritusamhara. Banabhatta, court poet of Harshavardhana in the seventh century, wrote the prose biography Harshacharita and the prose romance Kadambari; he is a prose writer, not a dramatist, and that single fact eliminates a great many wrong pairings. Bhavabhuti, of the eighth century and associated with Yashovarman of Kanauj, wrote three plays: Mahaviracharita and Uttararamacharita on the Rama story, and Malatimadhava, a drama of invented lovers. Vishakhadatta wrote Mudrarakshasa, the political drama of Chanakya and Rakshasa, and is also credited with the fragmentary Devichandraguptam. Grouped this way, four authors carry roughly a dozen titles, and the matching questions built on them become exercises in recall of clusters rather than of isolated pairs.

The examinable skill in a four-pair matching item is not memory but economy of memory. Each of the four printed options is a different one-to-one mapping of (a)-(d) onto (i)-(iv), so the options are not independent claims — they are rival permutations, and every pair you can fix with certainty removes at least one of them. In this item, fixing Harshacharita to Banabhatta leaves only two options standing, and fixing Malavikagnimitra to Kalidasa settles it. That is a general working rule for MPSC's seventeen matching questions in this paper: read the (a)-(d) column, find the entry you are surest about, and scan the four options for that one pair before reading any of them in full. It also protects you against the specific trap used in option (3), where a correct first pair is used as cover for three wrong ones. On marks, a matching item is all-or-nothing — there is no credit for three right pairs out of four — so with −25 per cent for a wrong answer, one confidently fixed pair that leaves two options alive is a coin toss worth taking, while a pure guess among four is not.

• Banabhatta, court poet of Harshavardhana of Kanauj in the seventh century, wrote the Harshacharita — a prose biography of his own patron in ornate kavya style, usually taught as the first historical biography in Sanskrit — and the prose romance Kadambari; he is not a dramatist.
• Bhavabhuti, of the eighth century and associated with the court of Yashovarman of Kanauj, wrote Malatimadhava, a prakarana or love-drama with invented characters, along with the two Rama plays Mahaviracharita and Uttararamacharita.
• Kalidasa's Malavikagnimitra is the earliest of his three plays and turns on the love of the Shunga prince Agnimitra for Malavika; his other plays are Vikramorvashiyam and Abhijnanashakuntalam, and his poems Raghuvamsha, Kumarasambhava, Meghaduta and Ritusamhara.
• Vishakhadatta's Mudrarakshasa is a political drama in which Chanakya works to win Rakshasa, the loyal minister of the Nandas, over to Chandragupta Maurya's service; the signet ring, mudra, of the title is the device that drives the plot. Vishakhadatta is also credited with the fragmentary Devichandraguptam.
• This booklet carries seventeen matching questions with a second (i)-(iv) column, so the elimination technique that solves them — fix your surest pair, discard every option that contradicts it, repeat — is worth more marks on this paper than any single remembered fact.

• Accepting an option because its first pair is correct — option (3) here begins with the right pair and then rotates the other three, which is the commonest design of a matching distractor
• Treating Banabhatta as a dramatist; his surviving works, Harshacharita and Kadambari, are prose, and remembering that alone kills several wrong pairings across many papers
• Confusing Malatimadhava (Bhavabhuti's drama of invented lovers) with Malavikagnimitra (Kalidasa's first play), whose similar-sounding names are exactly what the question is exploiting
• Reading all four options in full before checking any single pair, which costs time on a paper carrying seventeen matching items in two hours

MPSC asks classical literature almost exclusively as a four-pair matching item with a second (i)-(iv) column, and it draws from a small, stable pool of author-work pairs that recurs across editions — Kalidasa, Banabhatta, Bhavabhuti, Vishakhadatta, Kautilya, Varahamihira and the medical writers. UPSC asks the same material differently: it prefers a single-work question tied to context ('the Mudrarakshasa deals with which of the following?') or a statement pair about what a text can be used as evidence for, which rewards knowing what a book is about rather than only who wrote it. The practical implication for revision is that a bare two-column list of names and titles is enough for MPSC's format but not for UPSC's, so learn the pair together with one sentence on the content — that sentence is what a UPSC stem tests and what makes an MPSC pair stick.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Sanskrit political drama Mudrarakshasa, which turns on Chanakya's efforts to win over the Nanda minister Rakshasa, was composed by which of the following authors ?

  • (a)Bhavabhuti
  • (b)Vishakhadatta
  • (c)Banabhatta
  • (d)Shudraka

  Answer(b) Vishakhadatta — the play dramatises Chanakya's campaign to bring Rakshasa, the loyal minister of the fallen Nanda house, into Chandragupta Maurya's service, and the signet ring of the title is the device that drives the intrigue. Bhavabhuti wrote Malatimadhava and the two Rama plays, Banabhatta wrote prose rather than drama, and Shudraka is credited with the Mrichchhakatika.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following works is NOT attributed to Kalidasa in the standard classical Sanskrit canon studied for the Prelims ?

  • (a)Vikramorvashiyam
  • (b)Kumarasambhava
  • (c)Uttararamacharita
  • (d)Meghaduta

  Answer(c) Uttararamacharita — this is Bhavabhuti's play on the later life of Rama, and it stands with his Mahaviracharita and Malatimadhava. Vikramorvashiyam is one of Kalidasa's three plays, Kumarasambhava one of his two mahakavyas, and Meghaduta his best-known lyric poem, so all three of those belong to the Kalidasa corpus.