Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 20

The Kalbelia are a community of Rajasthan traditionally associated with snake catching, and their women dance in black swirling skirts while the men play the been and the khanjari; the tradition was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010.

In Burrakatha a main narrator holding a tambura tells a story in song, verse and prose, while two companions play the burra, a small drum shaped like a skull, and interrupt him with questions and jokes; the form was widely used to spread social and political messages in the twentieth…

The Mando is a slow song in Konkani, sung by couples at weddings and gatherings, whose melody carries the mark of three centuries of Portuguese presence; the quick Dulpod usually follows it, and Dekhni is the third well known Goan form.

In Villu Pattu a large bow is set over an earthen pot and struck as a percussion instrument while the lead singer narrates a story from mythology or local history and a chorus answers him; the form is strongest in the southern districts of Tamil Nadu and in the neighbouring…

Kajri is sung in the month of Shravan, when the clouds gather, and its verses speak of dark skies, the separation of lovers and the longing of a woman for a husband who is away; Mirzapur and Banaras are its best known homes.

Bihu songs are sung at Rongali or Bohag Bihu, the spring festival that marks the Assamese new year in April, and they are accompanied by the dhol, the pepa made from a buffalo horn and the jaw harp called gogona.

The name means one string, and the instrument is a single string stretched over a gourd with a bamboo neck that the player presses to change the pitch; the Baul holds it in one hand while singing and dancing, often with a small drum called duggi tied at the waist.

In Pandwani a single performer tells the story of the Pandavas in song and speech, holding a tambura and acting out the scenes, and Teejan Bai, who received the Padma Vibhushan, carried the form from her village to audiences across the world.

A powada is sung in a loud, declamatory style by a shahir, who narrates a battle or an act of courage, and the deeds of Chhatrapati Shivaji are its favourite subject; Lavani, Bharud, Gondhal and the devotional abhang also belong to Maharashtra.

The Bauls are wandering singers of Bengal who reject caste and ritual and sing of the man of the heart, accompanying themselves on the one-stringed ektara and the small drum called duggi; their songs were inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

Lotia takes its name from the lota, the small metal water pot that women carry on the head in the procession with which it is performed, and it belongs to the folk tradition of Rajasthan, alongside Maand, Panihari and the Banna-Banni wedding songs.

Popir is a folk dance of the Adi people of Arunachal Pradesh, danced by women at the Mopin harvest festival.

Ustad Sultan Khan of the Sikar gharana was the best known sarangi player of his time, accompanied Ravi Shankar on world tours and won the Padma Bhushan in 2010.

The institution stands at Teen Murti Bhavan in New Delhi, the house where Jawaharlal Nehru lived as Prime Minister for sixteen years, and it was opened to the public in 1964 after his death.

Roy Choudhury, a pupil of Abanindranath Tagore who became the first Indian principal of the Government School of Art at Madras, modelled Triumph of Labour, the group of four men straining at a rock that stands on the Marina beach at Chennai, and also the Martyrs' Memorial outside the Patna…

Maqbool Fida Husain, a founder member of the Progressive Artists' Group and often called the Picasso of India, made the short film Through the Eyes of a Painter, which took the Golden Bear for a short film at the Berlin festival in 1967; he later directed the feature Gaja Gamini.

Cholamandal Artists' Village was founded in 1966 on the coast south of Chennai by K. C. S. Paniker and other artists of the Madras art movement, and it is described as the first self-supporting artists' commune in India, where painters and sculptors lived together and sold batik and metalwork to…

The Lalit Kala Akademi, the national academy of art, was set up in 1954 at New Delhi, with the sculptor Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury as its first chairman; the National Gallery of Modern Art at Jaipur House in New Delhi dates from the same year.

Jamini Roy trained in the academic manner at the Government School of Art in Calcutta but abandoned it for the Kalighat pat, the cheap brush-drawn pictures sold to pilgrims near the Kalighat temple, and for Bengal scroll painting.

Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913 to a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother and trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where Young Girls brought her early recognition at the Salon.