Questions

Onam is an annual Hindu festival with origins in the state of Kerala in India. It falls in the Malayalam calendar month of Chingam, which in Gregorian calendar overlaps with August–September. In this festival, boat races are famous.

According to al-Biruni, the sufi theories of the soul were similar to those in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. Like the Yoga Sutra, sufi works also stated that ‘the bodies are the snares of the souls for the purpose of acquiring recompense’. Al-Biruni also identifies the sufi doctrine of divine love as self-annihilation with parallel passages from the Bhagavad Gita. There was also much exchange of ideas between the Sufis and Indian yogis. In fact the hatha-yoga treatise Amrita Kunda was translated into Arabic and Persian, So C is right.

Hujwiri was known as Datta Ganj Baksh. Hujwiri comments that before he settled in Lahore some sufis believed in theories that he calls brahmanical. According to Hujwiri they wrongly believed that ‘annihilation (fand’) signifies loss of essence and destruction of the personality, and that subsistence (baqa) indicates the subsistence of God in man.