MPSC 2026 Prelims Paper-I · Question 7 of 100

Correct — option (2): (a)-(iv), (b)-(iii), (c)-(ii), (d)-(i). This item cannot be settled by one pair, and working out why is the useful part. Start with the two names most candidates can place. Kamalakara Bhatta, of the Bhatta family of learned Brahmins settled at Banaras, wrote the Nirnaya Sindhu in the early seventeenth century — a digest of dharmashastra that became one of the standard authorities on ritual and legal observance across much of India, so (c)-(ii). Krishnadasa Kaviraja wrote the Chaitanya Charitamrita, the great Gaudiya Vaishnava life of Chaitanya, composed in Bengali on a dense Sanskrit substrate and grouped with the learned literature of the Mughal period, so (d)-(i). Now look at what those two pairs actually eliminate: options (1) and (3) fall, but options (2) and (4) both contain (c)-(ii) and (d)-(i), so the two safest pairs leave the question undecided. It is settled by the third. Anantadeva, of the same Banaras milieu of dharmashastra scholarship, is the author of the Samskarakaustubha, the section on the life-cycle rites within his larger Smriti Kaustubha — so (a)-(iv), which option (4) contradicts by sending Anantadeva to the Manorama. That leaves option (2) alone, and Gangadhara falls to the Manorama by the arithmetic of a one-to-one mapping rather than by independent recall — which is exactly how a candidate should expect to place the least familiar name in any matching column. The lesson to carry is that anchors are only worth what they eliminate: two certain pairs that both options share buy you nothing, and the pair you must actually recall is the one on which the surviving options disagree. Find that pair first and you will often discover the item turns on a single name.

• (1)(a) - (i), (b) - (ii), (c) - (iii), (d) - (iv) — The straight-down mapping, and every pair in it is displaced. It gives Anantadeva the Chaitanya Charitamrita, Gangadhara the Nirnaya Sindhu, Kamalakara Bhatta the Manorama and Krishnadasa Kaviraja the Samskarakaustubha. Two errors are decisive on their own: the Chaitanya Charitamrita is inseparable from Krishnadasa Kaviraja, and the Nirnaya Sindhu from Kamalakara Bhatta, and both of those are the best-attested pairs on the list. Note also the shape of the trap — a matching option that runs (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) in order looks tidy and is often the first one a hurried candidate marks, which is precisely why setters use it as a distractor.
• (3)(a) - (ii), (b) - (i), (c) - (iv), (d) - (iii) — Wrong on all four pairs. Anantadeva is given the Nirnaya Sindhu, Gangadhara the Chaitanya Charitamrita, Kamalakara Bhatta the Samskarakaustubha and Krishnadasa Kaviraja the Manorama. The quickest kill is the second pair: the Chaitanya Charitamrita is a devotional biography of Chaitanya written within the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition, and its authorship by Krishnadasa Kaviraja is one of the few facts in this whole area that a candidate can rely on absolutely. Any option that moves that work away from him can be discarded on sight, without examining the remaining three pairs at all.
• (4)(a) - (iii), (b) - (iv), (c) - (ii), (d) - (i) — This is the option the question was built to catch, and a well-prepared candidate is more at risk from it than a weak one. It reproduces both of the pairs that are easiest to be certain about — Kamalakara Bhatta to the Nirnaya Sindhu and Krishnadasa Kaviraja to the Chaitanya Charitamrita — so it survives every check a candidate is likely to run. It then swaps the two remaining names, handing Anantadeva the Manorama and Gangadhara the Samskarakaustubha. Anantadeva's Samskarakaustubha, the treatise on the life-cycle rites that forms part of his Smriti Kaustubha, is what settles the item, and it is the one pair a candidate has to know rather than deduce.

Sanskrit learning did not stop under the Mughals; it reorganised itself around new centres and new patrons, and the syllabus treats that continuity as a topic in its own right. Banaras became the principal centre of dharmashastra scholarship, dominated by families of Maharashtrian Brahmin origin who had migrated north — the Bhattas and the Devas among them — and their characteristic product was the nibandha or digest, a work that gathered the scattered rulings of the older smriti literature and settled them into usable form. Kamalakara Bhatta's Nirnaya Sindhu and Anantadeva's Smriti Kaustubha, with its Samskarakaustubha on the life-cycle rites, belong to that project. Alongside it ran devotional writing produced by the Vaishnava movements, of which Krishnadasa Kaviraja's Chaitanya Charitamrita is the outstanding example from the Gaudiya tradition of Bengal. A third strand was translation and exchange: Akbar's maktab khana rendered the Mahabharata into Persian as the Razmnama and the Ramayana and other works besides, and Dara Shukoh later had the Upanishads translated as the Sirr-i-Akbar and wrote the Majma-ul-Bahrain on the meeting of the two traditions.

Two things make this item harder than the usual matching question, and both are instructive. The first is that the safest pairs do not discriminate. A candidate who confidently places Kamalakara Bhatta and Krishnadasa Kaviraja still has two options standing, because both of the survivors contain those pairs. The efficient move in a matching item is therefore not to start from what you know best, but to find the pair on which the surviving options actually disagree — here, what Anantadeva wrote — and spend your recall effort there. The second is that one name in the column, Gangadhara, is genuinely obscure at this level, and the honest way to handle an obscure entry is to let the one-to-one structure place it: in a bijection, the last pair is fixed by the other three and needs no independent memory at all. That is a general property of the seventeen matching items in this booklet and it is worth rehearsing deliberately, because it converts a question that appears to demand four facts into one that demands three.

• Kamalakara Bhatta, of the Banaras family of dharmashastra scholars, composed the Nirnaya Sindhu in the early seventeenth century; it is a nibandha or digest of ritual and legal observance and became one of the standard authorities of its kind in northern and western India.
• Anantadeva, of the same Banaras milieu, wrote the Samskarakaustubha on the life-cycle rites, which forms part of his larger Smriti Kaustubha — a work of the same digest tradition that produced the Nirnaya Sindhu.
• Krishnadasa Kaviraja wrote the Chaitanya Charitamrita, the principal Gaudiya Vaishnava biography of Chaitanya, composed in Bengali carrying a heavy substrate of Sanskrit verse and treated in the syllabus alongside the Sanskrit learning of the Mughal period.
• Banaras was the leading centre of dharmashastra scholarship under the Mughals, and much of its learned population descended from Maharashtrian Brahmin families who had migrated north — a detail that gives this apparently all-India topic a direct Maharashtra connection.
• Sanskrit-Persian exchange formed a third strand of the period's learning: Akbar's translation bureau produced the Razmnama, a Persian Mahabharata, while Dara Shukoh had the Upanishads translated as the Sirr-i-Akbar and wrote the Majma-ul-Bahrain on the confluence of the two traditions.

• Starting from the pairs you are surest of without checking whether they discriminate: here the two safest pairs appear in both surviving options and settle nothing, and the item actually turns on the least familiar name
• Marking the tidy straight-down permutation (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) because it looks orderly — it is a standard distractor shape and is wrong on every pair here
• Assuming the Chaitanya Charitamrita belongs to the Sanskrit corpus in the strict sense; it is a Gaudiya Vaishnava biography in Bengali with a heavy Sanskrit substrate, grouped with the learning of the period
• Panicking at an unfamiliar name in a matching column, when the one-to-one structure means the last pair is always fixed by the other three and needs no independent recall

MPSC uses this topic to test breadth of reading rather than depth, and it does so by putting one obscure name into a column of three recognisable ones — the item is then decided by whether the candidate can place the third-easiest pair, not the easiest. Expect the Mughal-period Sanskrit and devotional writers, the Persian chronicles and the translation projects to appear in this matching form. UPSC approaches the same century through the translation movement and through what the texts reveal about the state and its religious policy — the Razmnama and the Sirr-i-Akbar are far likelier there than a dharmashastra digest, and they are usually asked as statement pairs about who commissioned what. Preparing the period as a table of patron, translator, work and language answers both formats from a single sheet.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Nirnaya Sindhu, a widely used digest of ritual and legal observance composed in the early seventeenth century at Banaras, is the work of which of the following authors ?

  • (a)Anantadeva
  • (b)Kamalakara Bhatta
  • (c)Gangadhara
  • (d)Krishnadasa Kaviraja

  Answer(b) Kamalakara Bhatta — of the Banaras family of dharmashastra scholars, whose Nirnaya Sindhu became one of the standard authorities on ritual observance in northern and western India. Anantadeva of the same milieu wrote the Samskarakaustubha on the life-cycle rites, while Krishnadasa Kaviraja belongs to the Gaudiya Vaishnava devotional tradition of Bengal.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Persian translation of the Mahabharata prepared in Akbar's translation bureau, and the Persian rendering of the Upanishads commissioned by Dara Shukoh, are known respectively as :

  • (a)Razmnama and Sirr-i-Akbar
  • (b)Sirr-i-Akbar and Majma-ul-Bahrain
  • (c)Razmnama and Majma-ul-Bahrain
  • (d)Akbarnama and Sirr-i-Akbar

  Answer(a) Razmnama and Sirr-i-Akbar — the Razmnama is the Persian Mahabharata produced in Akbar's maktab khana, and the Sirr-i-Akbar is the Upanishad translation made under Dara Shukoh. The Majma-ul-Bahrain is Dara Shukoh's own composition on the confluence of the two religious traditions, and the Akbarnama is Abul Fazl's history of Akbar's reign.