Choose the correct pairs.
(a) Harshcharitra
(b) Maalati Madhav
(c) Malvikagnimitra
(d) Mudrarakshas
(i) Kalidas
(ii) Vishakhadatta
(iii) Banbhatta
(iv) Bhavabhuti

Question

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) 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.  (c) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2026 Q2 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q2 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer