Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 11

Dekho Apna Desh was launched by the Ministry of Tourism in January 2020 to persuade Indian travellers to see their own country first, and it became better known through a long series of webinars on Indian destinations, crafts and cuisines that were held when travel was restricted.

Seva Bhoj Yojana was begun in 2018 by the Ministry of Culture to lighten the burden on temples, gurudwaras, dargahs, churches, monasteries and other charitable religious institutions that distribute free food, known as prasad, langar or bhandara, by reimbursing the central share of the goods and services tax paid on…

National Tourism Day is observed in India on 25 January every year to spread awareness of the importance of tourism for the economy and for employment, and the Ministry of Tourism marks it with a theme and with events at destinations.

The original Swadesh Darshan spread its money along fifteen themed circuits, each linking several places and often several states, and experience showed that the spending became thin and scattered.

Incredible India was launched by the Ministry of Tourism in 2002 as an international marketing campaign, and its advertisements in foreign magazines and on television turned Indian tourism into a recognised brand, with the exclamation mark in the logo forming the letter I. The campaign has since had further editions.

Adopt a Heritage was announced on World Tourism Day in 2017 by the Ministry of Tourism along with the Ministry of Culture and the Archaeological Survey of India, and it allows a company, trust or individual to take up a monument and pay for its drinking water, toilets, signage, lighting…

HRIDAY covered twelve heritage cities with an outlay of five hundred crore rupees, namely Ajmer, Amaravati, Amritsar, Badami, Dwarka, Gaya, Kanchipuram, Mathura, Puri, Varanasi, Velankanni and Warangal.

The scheme began in 2014-15 as PRASAD, the Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual Augmentation Drive, and was renamed in 2017 as the National Mission on Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual, Heritage Augmentation Drive.

HRIDAY, the Heritage City Development and Augmentation Yojana, was launched on 21 January 2015 to develop the old core of twelve heritage cities, dealing with water supply, sanitation, drainage, roads, street furniture and the conservation of heritage buildings in the same area.

Swadesh Darshan was launched in 2014-15 as a central sector scheme of the Ministry of Tourism, which means the entire expenditure is borne by the central government, and its purpose is the integrated development of tourist circuits built around a theme such as Buddhism, the Ramayana or the coast.

Erok Sim is a sowing festival of the Santhals, and Sangken is the Buddhist new-year water festival of Arunachal Pradesh.

Sankirtana combines singing, drumming and dance to tell the life and deeds of Krishna, but cymbals are not its only instruments.

In early Buddhist art the Buddha was not shown in human form, and an empty seat stood for him seated in meditation.

The shalabhanjika, a woman holding the branch of a tree, comes from popular fertility beliefs, not from Buddhist teaching. The gateways of the Great Stupa at Sanchi carry rich carvings.

These are the five great elements, the Pancha Mahabhuta, that Indian philosophy saw as the building blocks of the physical world.

Hallisaka was a circular group dance, and the Bagh painting shows women dancing in a ring around a central figure to the music of drums and cymbals.

The correct answer is B, Xuanzang, who travelled overland through Central Asia in the seventh century, spent years in India in the reign of Harshavardhana, studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Silabhadra, and carried manuscripts back to China, where he translated them and left the fullest foreign account of…

The name is the Thai form of Ayodhya, the city of Rama in the Ramayana, and it fits a court whose epic was the Ramakien and whose kings bore the title Rama.

It was translated into Pahlavi in the Persian empire and from that version into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, the two names being those of the jackals of the stories, and from Arabic it passed into Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and then into the languages of Europe.

The correct answer is C, Kanishka, the Kushan ruler who called the fourth Buddhist council in Kashmir and under whose empire, stretching from the Gangetic plain into Central Asia, Mahayana Buddhism and the Gandhara and Mathura styles of sculpture travelled up the trade routes to Khotan, Kucha and Dunhuang.