Banking GK Questions 2026

Gwalior is the oldest gharana of Hindustani classical vocal music, not of Kathak, and it is placed among these options precisely because a candidate who remembers the word gharana without remembering the art form will pick it.

The Assamese saint of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries founded the sattras, the Vaishnava monasteries that give the form its name, and created the Ankiya Naat plays staged in the namghar, in which the dance developed.

Its central theme is the Raas Leela of Radha and Krishna, the feet land softly, the face is held serene rather than expressive, and the dancer wears the stiff, barrel-shaped kumil skirt.

The word means knife, and the make-up is marked by an upturned knife-shaped line drawn on a green base, worn by characters who are brave and powerful but arrogant, of whom Ravana and Duryodhana are the standard examples.

She learned Bharatanatyam at a time when the form was losing its temple patronage, gave it a place on the public concert stage, and founded Kalakshetra in 1936 as a school where it could be taught systematically along with music and craft.

The form rests on two basic stances, the square chowk and the three-bent tribhanga, in which the head, the torso and the hips are deflected in opposite directions to produce the sculptural line seen in Odisha temple carving.

It began with the kathakars, the story-tellers who narrated the epics in north Indian temples, and under Mughal patronage it moved into the court, took on Persian costume and turned towards abstract rhythm.

In the tarangam the dancer balances on the raised rim of a brass plate and moves it in rhythm, often with a pot of water carried on the head, which demonstrates the control over balance for which the Andhra form is famous.

Sattriya of Assam was the eighth and last form to enter the Akademi list, and that single date is the fact papers ask most often about it.

The Natya Shastra is the Sanskrit treatise that lays down the grammar every classical form follows, dividing performance into nritta, nritya and natya, naming the four kinds of abhinaya, and describing the rasas.

The name means story-play, and the form stages episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Its characters are identified by make-up types, chiefly pacha for noble heroes, kathi for proud anti-heroes such as Ravana, thadi for fierce figures, kari for demonesses and minukku for gentle women and sages.

Bharatanatyam grew in the temples of Tamil Nadu, where it was performed by devadasis under the older name sadir or dasiattam, and it was brought to the concert stage in the twentieth century by E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale, who founded Kalakshetra at Madras in 1936.

The flame itself had been lit at earlier Games, but the relay in which runners carry the torch from Olympia in Greece all the way to the host city began at Berlin, and it has been part of every Olympics since.

Abhinav Bindra won that event at the Beijing Games of 2008, giving India its first individual Olympic gold medal in any sport and its first gold of any kind since the hockey team's win in 1980.

She won a bronze medal in weightlifting at the Sydney Games of 2000, the first Olympic medal won by an Indian woman, and the achievement is the standard one-line fact set from this chapter.

The Indian men's hockey team won the gold medal at the Amsterdam Games of 1928 and then kept winning, taking eight Olympic golds in all, in 1928, 1932, 1936, 1948, 1952, 1956, 1964 and 1980.

Khashaba Dadasaheb Jadhav won a bronze medal in wrestling at the Helsinki Games of 1952, the first individual Olympic medal won by an Indian after independence, at a time when India's Olympic reputation rested entirely on the hockey team.

The event held there in 1924 was recognised afterwards as the first Winter Olympic Games, and it created a separate cycle for sports played on snow and ice.

Pierre de Coubertin designed the symbol in 1913, and the rings are interlaced to show the meeting of athletes from every part of the world at the Games.

The three Latin words were suggested to Pierre de Coubertin by his friend Henri Didon, a French priest and educator who used them for the pupils at his school, and Coubertin adopted them for the Olympic movement.