Match the following Sanskrit authors of the Mughal India and their works.
(a) Anantadeva
(b) Gangadhara
(c) Kamlakara Bhatta
(d) Krishna Das Kaviraja
(i) Chaitanya Charitamritam
(ii) Nirnaya Sindhu
(i

Question

Match the following Sanskrit authors of the Mughal India and their works.
(a) Anantadeva
(b) Gangadhara
(c) Kamlakara Bhatta
(d) Krishna Das Kaviraja
(i) Chaitanya Charitamritam
(ii) Nirnaya Sindhu
(iii) Manorama
(iv) Samskarakaustubha

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

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

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2026 Q7 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q7 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer