Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 18

The Gommateshwara image of the Jain saint Bahubali at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, about fifty-seven feet high and cut from a single block of granite on the Vindhyagiri hill, was raised by Chavundaraya, a minister and general of the Western Ganga kingdom.

The twenty-nine Ajanta caves are cut into a horseshoe-shaped cliff above the Waghora stream in the Aurangabad district of Maharashtra and are a World Heritage Site.

The Gandhara school worked in the north-west, around Taxila and Peshawar, and used the bluish-grey schist of that region; its figures show Greco-Roman influence in the wavy hair, the heavy folds of the drapery and the muscular, realistic modelling.

The core of the Great Stupa at Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, also called Stupa Number One, was raised in the reign of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century before the common era; the Shungas later enlarged the dome and added the railing, and the four carved gateways or…

After attaining enlightenment the Buddha walked to the deer park at Sarnath, near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, and preached to his first five disciples; the event is called the Dhammachakkappavattana, the turning of the wheel of law.

The Paithani takes its name from Paithan on the Godavari, and it is also woven at Yeola in the Nashik district.

The date was chosen because the Swadeshi Movement was launched at the Calcutta Town Hall on 7 August 1905, calling on Indians to use cloth made in their own country, and the first National Handloom Day was observed at Chennai in 2015 to honour handloom weavers.

Kota Doria is woven at Kaithoon and the villages near Kota in Rajasthan, where cotton and silk yarns are alternated to make the small square checks called khat, giving a cloth so light and open that it suits the desert summer.

Phulkari, meaning flower work, is the embroidery of Punjab, in which bright untwisted silk thread is worked in darn stitch from the reverse of a coarse handspun khaddar cloth, so the pattern fills the surface with flowers.

Kalamkari is cloth decorated with vegetable dyes, and it has two schools, both in Andhra Pradesh. At Srikalahasti the work is drawn freehand with a pen like kalam and the subjects are taken from temple mythology, while at Machilipatnam the designs are printed with carved wooden blocks.

Bhoodan Pochampally in the Yadadri Bhuvanagiri district of Telangana weaves the ikat saree known as Pochampally, in which the yarn is tied and dyed to produce geometric diamonds and squares with softly blurred edges.

Chikankari is the hand embroidery of Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, worked in white untwisted thread on light cloth, with stitches that show the motif as a shadow through the fabric.

In Bandhani the cloth is pinched and tied with thread in thousands of tiny knots before it is dipped in dye, so the tied points resist the colour and appear as white or light dots in patterns of squares, waves and flowers.

The saree is named after the temple town of Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, where it is woven from thick mulberry silk.

Muga is reared from the Assam silkworm in the Brahmaputra valley and is the only naturally golden silk in the world, used for the mekhela chador and for sarees woven at Sualkuchi near Guwahati.

Baluchari weaving takes its name from the village of Baluchar in Murshidabad and moved to Bishnupur in the Bankura district, which is its centre today.

Patola sarees are woven at Patan in Gujarat, where both the warp and the weft yarns are tied and dyed before weaving.

Kalamandalam Kalyanikutty Amma is often described as the mother of Mohiniyattam, because she gathered and set in order the movements and repertoire of this graceful dance of Kerala, which is performed by women and belongs to the lasya or gentle style.

Uday Shankar was not a classical dancer in the strict sense; he created a new idiom by blending Indian movement with Western stagecraft, and he is regarded as the pioneer of modern or creative dance in India, having performed with the ballerina Anna Pavlova early in his career.

Sattriya grew in the sattras, the Vaishnava monasteries of Assam, and is traced to the saint and reformer Srimanta Sankardeva, who used dance and drama to carry his teaching to ordinary people; it is the most recent of the eight forms to be recognised as classical.