दक्षिण में भक्ति, और उसके दार्शनिक

• Pair 1 is incorrectly matched. Aryadeva was a Buddhist, not a Jaina, scholar, the principal disciple of Nagarjuna and author of the Chatuhshataka, a foundational figure of the Madhyamaka school.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. Dignaga was a Buddhist scholar, the founder of the Buddhist school of logic and epistemology, whose Pramanasamuchchaya reshaped Indian philosophical debate and drew responses from Brahmanical logicians for centuries.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched. Nathamuni was a Vaishnava scholar, the first of the Sri Vaishnava acharyas, who recovered and organised the Tamil hymns of the Alvars into the Nalayira Divya Prabandham and established their liturgical use in temple worship. Exactly two pairs are correct, giving (c).
• Option (d) requires accepting Aryadeva as a Jaina, option (b) requires rejecting one of the two sound pairs, and option (a) rejects all three.

Ramanuja, the eleventh and twelfth century exponent of Vishishtadvaita or qualified non dualism, held that the individual self and the world are real and form the body of Brahman, and that liberation comes through bhakti, loving devotion to a personal God, supported by prapatti or complete surrender. Against Shankara's insistence on knowledge as the means, Ramanuja placed devotion, and it is this that made his system the philosophical foundation of the Sri Vaishnava tradition and connected it to the Alvar hymns.

• Option (a) states this and is correct.
• Option (b) states the Mimamsa position on the eternality and self existent authority of the Vedas; Ramanuja accepted scriptural authority but that proposition is not what distinguishes his teaching on salvation.
• Option (c) states the Nyaya emphasis on logical argument as the road to the highest good, which is not Ramanuja's.
• Option (d) points to meditation as the means, which belongs with the Yoga and Advaita emphases rather than with the devotional path Ramanuja taught.

Hence (a).

• Statement 1 is correct. The Siddhas or Sittars of the Tamil country were a heterodox ascetic and mystical tradition, numbered conventionally at eighteen, who held to a single formless divine principle, rejected image worship and temple ritual, criticised caste and the authority of the Brahmana priesthood, and expressed themselves in vernacular Tamil verse. Their monotheism and their hostility to idolatry are the two features most often cited to distinguish them from the temple-centred bhakti of the Alvars and Nayanars.
• Statement 2 is also correct. The Lingayats or Virasaivas, founded in the Kannada region in the twelfth century and associated above all with Basava, rejected the caste hierarchy, opposed Brahmanical ritual and the authority of the Vedas, permitted widow remarriage, and questioned the doctrine of rebirth, a position visible in their burial rather than cremation of the dead, which presupposes union with Shiva at death rather than transmigration. Both statements being correct, the answer is (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each require rejecting a true proposition. There is no elimination route, since the two traditions are independent and the specific doctrinal claims made about each go beyond the level at which the Siddhas in particular are usually taught. This is a difficult item honestly set.