Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 14

Swamimalai is a temple town in the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, in the old Chola heartland near Kumbakonam, and its stapathi families have cast panchaloha images by the solid lost-wax method in an unbroken line from the Chola workshops.

Dhokra takes its name from the Dhokra Damar metal workers and is the hollow lost-wax craft of this eastern and central belt, with Bikna village in the Bankura district of West Bengal and the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh as its best known centres; Bastar Dhokra carries a geographical indication tag.

Daimabad lies on the Pravara river in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra and is the southernmost late Harappan site known.

Under the Pala rulers of Bengal and Bihar, from about the ninth century onwards, the monastery workshops of Nalanda and the village of Kurkihar near Gaya cast hundreds of small metal images of the Buddha, Tara, Avalokiteshvara and other Bodhisattvas in ashtadhatu, the eight-metal alloy.

The image was dug up in 1861 at Sultanganj in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar during railway work, stands over two metres high, and was cast in copper in the transition between the Gupta and Pala periods.

The upper right hand of Nataraja holds the damaru, the small hour-glass shaped drum whose beat stands for the sound from which creation begins.

The dwarf is Apasmara, also called Muyalakan in Tamil, and he personifies ignorance and forgetfulness; by pressing him down with the right foot while dancing the ananda tandava, Shiva shows that knowledge subdues the darkness of the mind.

The workshops of the Kaveri delta produced their finest images under Chola rule, and the term Chola bronze is used for the whole class of processional icons cast in that period at centres connected with Thanjavur, Chidambaram, Tiruvarur and Tiruvenkadu.

Panchaloha means five metals, and the Shilpa texts of the south prescribe this mixture for an icon that is to be consecrated and worshipped, with copper as the dominant metal and only a token quantity of gold and silver.

The craftsman models the image in beeswax, covers it with fine clay, heats the mould until the wax runs out through a vent, and fills the cavity with molten alloy; when the metal sets the clay is broken away, so each cast is a single original.

The Dancing Girl is a small bronze figure about ten and a half centimetres high, found at Mohenjo-daro in the Larkana district of Sindh and now displayed in the National Museum, New Delhi.

The Rajabai Clock Tower in the University of Mumbai campus, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and completed in 1878, is a Victorian Gothic tower modelled on the Big Ben clock tower in London, with pointed arches, stained glass and carved figures.

The Amba Vilas Palace, the Mysore Palace of the Wadiyar rulers, was rebuilt in grey granite and pink marble to the design of Henry Irwin after the old wooden palace burned down in 1897, and the work was finished in 1912.

George V and Queen Mary came to India in December 1911 and at the Delhi Durbar announced both the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi and the reversal of the partition of Bengal of 1905.

The India Gate, originally the All India War Memorial Arch, was designed by Edwin Lutyens as a memorial to the Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army who died in the First World War between 1914 and 1921 and in the Third Anglo-Afghan War.

Fort Dansborg was built in 1620 at Tranquebar, now Tharangambadi in the Mayiladuthurai district of Tamil Nadu, after the Danish East India Company obtained the site from the Nayak ruler of Thanjavur.

The Basilica of Bom Jesus at Old Goa was completed in 1605 by the Portuguese, who had taken Goa in 1510 and made it the capital of their eastern empire.

Sir Herbert Baker designed the old Parliament House, then called the Council House, which was begun in 1921 and opened in January 1927 by the Viceroy Lord Irwin.

Sir Edwin Lutyens designed the Viceroy House on Raisina Hill, renamed Rashtrapati Bhavan after independence, and it was completed in 1929.

The station, built as Victoria Terminus and designed by Frederick William Stevens, is the finest Victorian Gothic Revival building in India, with pointed arches, a ribbed central dome, turrets, stained glass, gargoyles and a stone figure of Progress on the dome.