Question:
Which Indian personality is the recipient of the Oxford University's Bodley Medal 2019?
Which Indian personality is the recipient of the Oxford University's Bodley Medal 2019?
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Amartya Sen’s work combines economics with moral philosophy, influencing both policy and academic thinking globally.
Updated On: Jul 15, 2026
- Raghuram Rajan
- Amartya Sen
- Manmohan Singh
- Shashi Tharoor
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The Correct Option is B
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The Bodley Medal is awarded by the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to literature, culture, science, or communication. In 2019, Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen received the medal for his path-breaking work in welfare economics, social choice theory, and his contributions to the understanding of poverty, famine, and human development.
Other eminent personalities such as Nobel Prize winners, authors, and statesmen have been past recipients, but Amartya Sen was the honoree in 2019.
Other eminent personalities such as Nobel Prize winners, authors, and statesmen have been past recipients, but Amartya Sen was the honoree in 2019.
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The question asks which Indian personality received Oxford's Bodley Medal in 2019. Let's check each name.
- Raghuram Rajan: Raghuram Rajan is a respected economist and former RBI governor, but he was not the Bodley Medal recipient in 2019. This option does not fit.
- Amartya Sen: Nobel laureate Amartya Sen received the Bodley Medal in 2019 for his contributions to welfare economics, social choice theory and his work on poverty and human development. This matches the question.
- Manmohan Singh: Dr. Manmohan Singh is a distinguished economist and former Prime Minister, but he did not receive this particular medal in 2019. This option can be ruled out.
- Shashi Tharoor: Shashi Tharoor is a well known author and parliamentarian, but he was not awarded the Bodley Medal that year. This option is incorrect.
Among the four Indian personalities, only Amartya Sen was honoured with the Bodley Medal in 2019.
Therefore, the correct answer is Amartya Sen.
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This question is about identifying which Indian public figure received Oxford's Bodley Medal in 2019, an honour Oxford's Bodleian Libraries give for lasting contribution to knowledge, culture or communication.
- Raghuram Rajan: Rajan built his reputation on central banking and financial sector reform as RBI Governor and IMF chief economist, and he is widely read as a commentator on global finance. That profile is closer to policy practice than to the kind of sustained scholarly body of work the Bodley Medal recognises, and 2019's medal was not his.
- Amartya Sen: Sen has spent decades in academic economics, developing social choice theory and reshaping how the world measures poverty, famine and human development, work that won him the Nobel Prize in 1998. That long, publicly influential body of scholarship is exactly the kind of contribution the Bodley Medal was created to honour, and it was awarded to him in 2019.
- Manmohan Singh: Singh is an economist by training and his reforms as Finance Minister and later Prime Minister reshaped India's economy, but his public identity rests on having held political office rather than an ongoing academic or literary output, so he was not the 2019 honouree.
- Shashi Tharoor: Tharoor is a prolific author and former UN diplomat known for his command of English prose and public commentary, but his recognition in 2019 was not this particular Oxford honour.
Three of the four names are tied to economics and public office in some way, but only Amartya Sen's decades of academic and literary contribution match what the Bodley Medal specifically rewards.
Therefore, the correct answer is Amartya Sen.
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Top CLAT General Awareness Questions
- On the evening of the 10th, General Dyer arrived at Amritsar, and the Deputy-Commissioner handed over the civil power to him. He issued a proclamation by word of mouth that no meetings should be held. Two days later, after there had been no sort of riot, nor murder, General Dyer heard that a meeting was to be held at the Jallianwala Bagh. He proceeded there with about fifty troops, half British, half Indian, and a certain number of Ghurkas, armed with their kukris. The Jallianwala Bagh is an open space, half a mile square, which has one entry wide enough for three persons. The troops got in and lined up on a mound of debris. The walls, seven feet high, and the surrounding houses enclosed the people. There were, too, three alleys through which the people might have been able to pass. Within thirty seconds of the troops getting in, General Dyer gave orders to fire, and the crowd of people, estimated at anything from 5,000 to 20,000, who were sitting on the ground peacefully listening to the mob oratory, were fired on. The result of the troops’ fire into the mass of people we do not know. But we do know that Dyer’s own estimate of the casualties resulting from ten minutes continual individual firing, was 400 to 500 killed and 1,500 wounded. The people were not able to escape. They were people who had not offered any violence and who had not been warned. These people were shot down. After ten minutes, the ammunition was exhausted and the troops marched off, and they left 1,500 wounded there. There were men lying there for two days, dying of thirst, eating the ground, bleeding to death and nobody to look after them. Those who lived nearby came and carried away some of the wounded from the heap of dead and dying, but the unfortunate country people died there miserably of their wounds. This is what is done in 1919 in British India…
Centuries hence you will find Indian children brought up to this spot, just as they visit now the Cawnpore Well, and you can imagine the feelings of these Indians for generations over this terrible business.
[Col. Wedgwood, MP, speaking in the British Parliament, 22 December 1919] - On 26th January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics, we will have equality and in social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of democracy, which this Constituent Assembly has so laboriously built up.
I feel that the constitution is workable, it is flexible and it is strong enough to hold the country together both in peacetime and in wartime. Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution. What we will have to say is that man was vile?
The third thing we must do is not be content with mere political democracy. We must note that our political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of social democracy. What does social democracy mean? It means a way of life, which recognizes liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life.
… however, good a constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However, bad a constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot. The working of a Constitution does not depend wholly upon the nature of the Constitution.
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It comes across fairly clearly on how the higher education ecosystem will be by 2040. By this time — if the policy has its way — the Indian higher education ecosystem will be populated with higher education institutions (HEI). These will comprise Universities and Colleges and the public and private sectors, all of which will be 'multi-disciplinary‘, with each populated by more than 3,000 students, with at least one “in or near every district”. Universities will conduct research and post-graduate and under-graduate teaching, some research-intensive and others teaching-intensive. Colleges will largely teach at the under-graduate level, with a number of them having their medium of instruction in either bilingual or local / Indian languages. The colleges can manifest in clusters around universities as constituent colleges or may be standalone autonomous ones. Ideally, all HEIs will eventually become “independent self-governing institutions” with considerable “faculty and institutional autonomy”. They will have complied with a series of regulatory exercises that are “light-but-tight” and will be operated by a large number of private accreditors, overseen by a new set of regulatory institutions at the national level.
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- In the realm of contemporary literature, the interplay between character and setting is a nuanced dance that shapes the narrative’s essence. The setting, often described with painstaking detail, becomes more than a backdrop; it becomes a character, influencing the plot and character development.
Consider, for instance, the barren expanse of the desert in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. The arid landscape mirrors the sense of isolation felt by the protagonist, Gogol, as he navigates his identity crisis in a foreign land. The relentless sun and vast sands are not mere descriptions; they are the silent witnesses to his inner turmoil.
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Their main concern, therefore, is to escape the attention of the justice system, criminal and civil. A landless Dalit person in the interior of Madhya Pradesh once gave me an insightful definition of a court from the perspective of the masses: “A court is a place where you are forcibly taken by the police to be punished; no one goes to a court.” In contrast, many lawyers and judges colloquially define a court as “a temple of justice where rights are protected”.
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What pleased and satisfied her so, here at Carignano, was its barrenness. This was the chief virtue of all Kasauli of course-its starkness. It had rocks, it had pines, it had light and air. In every direction there was a sweeping view - to the north, of the mountains, to the south, of the plains. Occasionally an eagle swam through this clear unobstructed mass of light and air, that was all. And Carignano, her home on the ridge, had no more than that. Why should it? The sun shone on its white walls. Its windows were open the ones facing north opened on to the blue waves of the Himalayas flowing out and up to the line of ice and snow sketched upon the sky, while those that faced south looked down the plunging cliff to the plain stretching out, flat and sere to the blurred horizon.
Yes, there were some apricot trees close to the house. There were clumps of iris that had finished blooming. There was the kitchen with a wing of smoke lifting out of its chimney and a stack of wood outside its door. But these were incidental, almost unimportant.
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The 19th century ushered in a new era of literary giants. Jane Austen’s novels, such as Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, provide incisive social commentary through the lens of wit and romance. Austen’s heroines, like Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood, remain beloved literary figures known for their intelligence and resilience. The Romantic era brought forth poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who celebrated * 8 UG the beauty of nature and the emotional intensity of the individual. Wordsworth’s ‘‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’’ and Coleridge’s ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’ are testament to the power of the written words to evoke profound emotions and imagery. Moving towards 20th century, English literature continued to evolve. Virginia Woolf’s ground-breaking novel Mrs. Dalloway explored the inner thoughts and lives of its characters with a modernist narrative style. Dystopian visions, as seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four provided stark warnings about the dangers of totalitarianism and the erosion of individual freedom.
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Centuries hence you will find Indian children brought up to this spot, just as they visit now the Cawnpore Well, and you can imagine the feelings of these Indians for generations over this terrible business.
[Col. Wedgwood, MP, speaking in the British Parliament, 22 December 1919]
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