NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 133 of 150

Correct — A, 1 only. Three of the four titles end in charita or vijaya and are court biographies of named kings, while the first is a chronicle of a country. The Dipavamsa is a Pali vamsa, or chronicle, compiled in Sri Lanka around the third or fourth century CE; it is the oldest historical record of the island and it narrates the coming of Buddhism, the arrival of Prince Vijaya, the Buddha's legendary visits and the fortunes of the Buddhist order. Its subject is an island and a religion over centuries, not one ruler's life. The Harshacharita is Banabhatta's account of Emperor Harshavardhana, written in the seventh century; the Vikramankadevacharita is Bilhana's panegyric on the Chalukya king Vikramaditya VI, completed about 1087 at Kalyana; and the Prithvirajavijaya, composed around 1191-92 and attributed to the Kashmiri poet Jayanaka, celebrates the ancestry and reign of Prithviraja III, the Prithviraj Chauhan of later legend. So only item 1 fails the description.

• (b)2 and 3 only — Both the Harshacharita and the Vikramankadevacharita are biographies of individual kings, written by poets attached to a court. Excluding them while admitting the Dipavamsa reverses the actual position.
• (c)2, 3 and 4 only — This picks out the three that are biographies and leaves in the one that is not — the exact opposite of what the stem asks for. It is the answer of a candidate who read the question as 'which are historical biographies'.
• (d)1, 2, 3 and 4 — This would make all four non-biographies, which is only defensible if one argues that a court panegyric is too flattering to count as history at all. The tests these works are being put to here are what they set out to narrate, and three of them set out to narrate one man's life.

Early Indian historical writing runs in two distinct streams and the titles usually announce which one a work belongs to. The charita or vijaya is a Sanskrit court biography of a single ruler, written by a poet in his patron's service — Bana on Harsha, Bilhana on Vikramaditya VI, Jayanaka on Prithviraja III, and, in the same family, Sandhyakara Nandi on the Pala king Ramapala. The vamsa is a chronicle of a lineage, an institution or a land written in Pali — the Dipavamsa and the later Mahavamsa in Sri Lanka. Kalhana's Rajatarangini sits somewhat apart as a chronicle of the kings of Kashmir with a stronger critical sense than either group.

The suffix is the shortcut. If a title ends in charita it is somebody's life, and if it ends in vamsa it is a lineage or a chronicle — dipa means island, so Dipavamsa is literally the chronicle of the island. That reading alone answers the item without knowing a line of any of the four texts. Two cautions are worth carrying. First, these court biographies are eulogies and historians treat them with care: Bana wrote under Harsha's patronage and shows him in a consistently favourable light, and the Prithvirajavijaya presents its hero as an incarnation of Vishnu. They are historical biographies in form, and the item is asking about form. Second, the printed instruction here reads 'Select the correct answer from the code given below', where most items in this paper print 'using the code'; it is a house-style slip in the booklet and it changes nothing about the task.

• The Dipavamsa is a Pali chronicle of Sri Lanka, compiled around the third to fourth century CE, and the island's oldest historical record.
• The Harshacharita was written by Banabhatta, court poet of Harshavardhana, in the seventh century.
• The Vikramankadevacharita was composed by Bilhana around 1087 CE on the Chalukya king Vikramaditya VI; its eighteenth canto is the poet's own autobiography.
• The Prithvirajavijaya, of about 1191-92 CE, is the only surviving literary text from Prithviraja III's reign and is attributed to Jayanaka.
• A charita is the life of a king; a vamsa is the chronicle of a lineage, an island or an institution.

• Reading past the word NOT and selecting the three biographies instead of the one exception.
• Assuming any old Indian text is religious and therefore not historical — the charita literature is explicitly about kings.
• Confusing Vikramankadevacharita, on Vikramaditya VI, with the legends of the Vikramaditya of Ujjain.

NDA gives four texts and asks which is the odd one out, or pairs texts against authors or against the rulers they describe.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Vikramankadevacharita was composed by

  • (a)Banabhatta
  • (b)Bilhana
  • (c)Jayanaka
  • (d)Kalhana

  Answer(b) Bilhana — the Kashmiri poet who wrote it at the Chalukya court of Vikramaditya VI.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following is a Pali chronicle of Sri Lanka?

  • (a)Harshacharita
  • (b)Rajatarangini
  • (c)Dipavamsa
  • (d)Ramacharita

  Answer(c) Dipavamsa — literally the chronicle of the island, and the oldest historical record of Sri Lanka.