SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 18 September 2025, Shift 2 · General Awareness · Question 10 of 100

We transcribed this text from the pictures on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; the answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 11 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. From 2025 the candidate response sheet prints every question and option as a picture, so the text here is transcribed from those pictures for this shift and checked against them independently; where the layout carries meaning, the picture is shown as well. Each answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. SSC released a tentative key for challenge and later its final one, both only to candidates behind a login, and the sheet does not say which of the two it carries. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

An Area of Darkness is a travelogue by which Indian author?

(a)Raja Rao
(b)V.S. Naipaul
(c)R.K. Narayan
(d)Vikram Seth

Answer

Why

Correct — B. An Area of Darkness (1964) is V.S. Naipaul's non-fiction account of his travels through India in the early 1960s.

It opens his India trilogy, followed by India: A Wounded Civilization (1977) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) → option (b).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Raja Rao — Raja Rao is a novelist, known for Kanthapura (1938) and The Serpent and the Rope (1960). This travelogue is not his.
(c)
R.K. Narayan — R.K. Narayan is the novelist of Malgudi, the fictional town of Swami and Friends (1935) and The Guide (1958). He did not write this book.
(d)
Vikram Seth — Vikram Seth did write a travel book, From Heaven Lake (1983), about Sinkiang and Tibet. An Area of Darkness is Naipaul's.

Concept

V.S. Naipaul was a Trinidad-born British writer of Indian descent. His grandfathers had gone from British India to Trinidad as indentured labourers.

He won the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. His three India books appeared in 1964, 1977 and 1990.

The stem calls Naipaul an 'Indian author'. He was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, and wrote as a British writer of Indian descent.

The label is loose, but none of the other three wrote the book.

Key facts

An Area of Darkness (1964) is V.S. Naipaul's travelogue of India.
Naipaul's India trilogy: An Area of Darkness (1964), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).
Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for In a Free State and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
Vikram Seth's travel book From Heaven Lake (1983) won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

Study next

Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas (1961)Travel writing by Indian authors: Vikram Seth's From Heaven LakeSahitya Akademi Award winners in English: Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan

Common traps

Rejecting Naipaul because he was not an Indian citizen: the stem's loose label still points to him.
Choosing Vikram Seth because he also wrote a travel book: his is From Heaven Lake, about Sinkiang and Tibet.

Here a book is matched to its author, and the genre word travelogue does the work: Vikram Seth is the near-miss because he wrote travel too.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: Culture — all 163 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.