India - 2023 ACF Nationals

Question

The Sound of the Kiss, a 16th-century novel from this country, contains many passages that have different meanings in different languages depending on the direction they’re read in. For 10 points each:

[10h] Name this modern-day country where a lost “great narrative” written in the “language of ghouls” provided material for medieval prose works like The Five-and-Twenty Tales of the Genie and What Ten Young Men Did.

ANSWER: India [or Bhārat; or Republic of India; or Bhārat Gaṇarājya] (The Brihatkathā was supposedly written in a language called Paishachī.)

[10e] Two answers required. Early modern Indian experimental authors often showed off by writing palindrome-like texts that somehow summarize both of these two major epic poems. Both of these epics feature avatars of Vishnu.

ANSWER: Rāmāyaṇam AND Mahābhāratam

[10m] Nandin’s novel What Ten Young Men Did uses this type of constrained writing for a chapter whose narrator can’t pronounce labial consonants. Georges Perec’s A Void is one of these texts.

ANSWER: lipograms [accept word forms like lipogrammatic]

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Summary


2023 ACF Nationals	04/22/2023	Y	24	15.42	100%	42%	13%

Data


Toronto A	Harvard A	0	10	0	10
Penn A	Georgia Tech B	0	10	0	10
Rutgers B	NYU A	0	10	0	10
Texas A	Northwestern A	0	10	0	10
UC Berkeley B	Johns Hopkins A	0	10	0	10
Virginia A	WUSTL B	0	10	10	20
Rutgers A	Yale B	0	10	10	20
Illinois A	South Carolina A	0	10	10	20
MIT A	Indiana A	0	10	0	10
Penn State A	Iowa State A	10	10	10	30
UC Berkeley A	Chicago C	0	10	10	20
Stanford A	Yale A	0	10	10	20
Brown A	Maryland A	0	10	10	20
WUSTL A	Chicago A	0	10	0	10
Minnesota A	Cornell B	0	10	0	10
Imperial A	Florida B	0	10	10	20
Claremont A	McGill A	0	10	0	10
Michigan A	Columbia B	10	10	0	20
Minnesota B	Houston A	10	10	0	20
Columbia A	North Carolina A	0	10	0	10
Chicago B	Ohio State A	0	10	0	10
Purdue A	Vanderbilt A	0	10	0	10
Cornell A	Duke A	0	10	10	20
Georgia Tech A	Florida A	0	10	10	20