Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 12

The correct answer is B, Bodhidharma, remembered in tradition as a prince of the Pallava country in south India who travelled to China and taught a path resting on meditation rather than on scripture; the school he founded is Chan in Chinese and Zen in Japanese, and legend attaches him…

The kingdom of Champa held the central coast of what is now Vietnam for many centuries, used Sanskrit in its inscriptions and built brick temples to Shiva, of which the group at My Son is the largest and is a World Heritage site.

The two giant Buddhas were carved into a cliff in the Bamiyan valley, on the branch of the Silk Route that carried Buddhism from Gandhara into Central Asia, and they were destroyed in 2001; the valley remains on the World Heritage list for the surviving caves and paintings.

Ashoka sent his son Mahendra, known in the Pali chronicles as Mahinda, to Sri Lanka, where the king of the island received the teaching, and afterwards the nun Sanghamitra came with a branch of the Bodhi tree, which was planted at Anuradhapura.

The Ramakien is the Thai retelling of the Ramayana, painted along the galleries of the Emerald Buddha temple at Bangkok and performed in masked dance; the kings of the present Thai dynasty take the title Rama from it, and the old capital Ayutthaya is named after Ayodhya.

Borobudur was built in the eighth and ninth centuries by the Sailendra rulers of Java as a Buddhist monument in the form of a stepped pyramid whose galleries carry carved panels of the life and teaching of the Buddha, with seated Buddha images in open stupas on the upper terraces.

The Khmer king Suryavarman II raised Angkor Wat in the twelfth century in what is now Cambodia as a temple of Vishnu, and its scale makes it the largest Vishnu temple in the world; the building later came to be used as a Buddhist shrine and now appears on the…

The two manuscripts were inscribed on the International Register in April 2025 on a nomination made by the Ministry of Culture, and both are in the custody of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

The Rigveda manuscripts, preserved at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, were inscribed on the International Register in 2007 as a record of one of the oldest surviving bodies of religious poetry anywhere.

UNESCO set up the Memory of the World Programme in 1992, after recognising that war, neglect, damp, insects and illegal trade were destroying archives and manuscript collections across the world.

The Memory of the World Programme protects documentary heritage, which means manuscripts, archives, maps, printed material, photographs and sound and film recordings, and it keeps an International Register, regional registers and national registers.

Kozhikode in Kerala became India's first UNESCO City of Literature in 2023, recognised for a dense network of publishing houses, libraries and reading rooms, for Malayalam writing and for literary festivals held in the city.

Hyderabad was designated a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2019 for a cuisine that grew in the kitchens of the Deccan courts, with Hyderabadi biryani, haleem, qubani ka meetha and the Irani chai of the city's cafes as its best known dishes.

Mumbai was designated a UNESCO Creative City of Film in 2019, on the strength of the country's oldest and largest film industry, which grew from Dadasaheb Phalke's Raja Harishchandra of 1913 and now produces films in Hindi, Marathi and several other languages from one city.

Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh joined the network as a City of Music in 2023, recognised for the Gwalior gharana, the oldest surviving gharana of khayal singing, and for its association with Tansen, the musician of Akbar's court, whose tomb and annual Tansen Samaroh are in the city.

Jaipur joined the network in 2015 on the strength of its craft traditions, among them blue pottery, hand blockprinting, gem cutting, lac bangles, meenakari enamel and stone carving, and it was one of India's first two members along with Varanasi.

UNESCO created the Creative Cities Network in 2004 to link cities that place their creative industries at the centre of local development, and a city joins in one of seven fields: Crafts and Folk Art, Design, Film, Gastronomy, Literature, Media Arts or Music.

Man Kautuhal was compiled under the patronage of Raja Man Singh Tomar, who ruled Gwalior from 1486 to 1516. Man Singh Tomar was a great patron of music, and his court is closely linked with the growth of the Dhrupad style of Hindustani singing.

Both ragas use all seven natural (shuddha) notes, the same scale as the Western major scale. In Hindustani music, Bilawal is one of the ten thaats in Pandit V. N. Bhatkhande's system and is taken as the basic scale, with every note in its natural form.

Akbar raised the Buland Darwaza, the lofty southern gateway of the Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri, in 1601 to mark his conquest of Gujarat, and it ranks among the tallest gateways in the world, approached by a long flight of steps and faced in red sandstone inlaid with white marble.