Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 22

Ugadi is the new year festival of Andhra Pradesh, and it is also kept in Telangana and Karnataka. The name comes from yuga and adi, meaning the beginning of an age, and it falls on the first day of the month of Chaitra, in March or April.

In the Gupta age a workshop at Sarnath, near Varanasi, carved in cream Chunar sandstone and produced the seated preaching Buddha whose hands form the dharmachakra mudra, the gesture of teaching, and whose robe clings so closely that art historians describe it as wet drapery.

Bamiyan, in the highlands of what is now Afghanistan, lay on the trade route through the Hindu Kush and was part of the wide Gandhara cultural region, along with Hadda, Begram, Jalalabad, Swat and Taxila.

The best known of them is the standing figure of Kanishka in spotted red sandstone, broken at the neck, whose inscription names him Maharaja Rajatiraja Devaputra Kanishka, and it is now in the Government Museum at Mathura.

The correct answer is C, the wheel, the dharmachakra, which stands for the first sermon delivered in the deer park at Sarnath, an event called the dharmachakra pravartana, the turning of the wheel of law.

Amaravati lies in the lower Krishna valley in Andhra Pradesh, and the other sites of the same school, Nagarjunakonda, Jaggayyapeta, Ghantasala and Bhattiprolu, are in the same stretch of country.

Besides Buddhist figures it carved the earliest known images of the Jain tirthankaras, found at the Kankali Tila mound, and the earliest images of Brahmanical deities including Vishnu, Shiva, Surya, Balarama and Kubera, along with a long line of yakshi figures.

Kanishka, the greatest Kushana ruler, is linked with both, and the Kushanas also set up royal portrait statues at Mat near Mathura.

The Gandhara sculptor treated cloth as a Roman sculptor did, with deep, heavy, naturalistic folds falling over both shoulders, and the halo behind the head is left plain.

Its sculptors worked mainly in relief on the drum slabs and railings of the great stupa, filling each panel with figures that tell a story from the Buddha's life or from the Jataka tales, and their bodies are slender and elongated, bent in the triple flexion called tribhanga, so that…

The correct answer is B, the Satavahanas, who ruled the Deccan from the first century before the common era, with the school continuing later under the Ikshvakus of the Krishna valley.

The correct answer is B, spotted red sandstone, quarried near Sikri in the Mathura region, a deep red stone flecked with cream and black spots that makes a Mathura piece recognisable at a glance.

Its Buddhas have wavy hair, sharp features, muscular bodies and robes with thick naturalistic folds.

The Ministry of AYUSH was created on 9 November 2014 by upgrading the existing department, so that the traditional systems of medicine would have a ministry and a minister of their own.

These three are the Brihat Trayi, the great triad of Ayurvedic literature: Charaka on internal medicine, Sushruta on surgery and Vagbhata summarising both in the Ashtanga Hridaya.

Ibn Sina, called Avicenna in Europe, compiled Al-Qanun fi al-Tibb, the Canon of Medicine, which organised the medical knowledge of his age into a single system and was taught in Asian and European schools for centuries; it remains a basic text of Unani medicine.

Hahnemann was a German physician who set out the principles of homoeopathy in the Organon of Medicine, chief among them the maxim similia similibus curentur, let like be cured by like, together with the law of the minimum dose and the method of potentisation.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on 11 December 2014 declaring 21 June the International Day of Yoga, and the day was observed for the first time in 2015.

Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras, the foundational text of the yoga school of Indian philosophy, and in it he lays out Ashtanga Yoga, the eight limbs: Yama, Niyama, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi.

The Sushruta Samhita is the classical Indian treatise on Shalya Tantra, surgery, and it describes operations for cataract and for bladder stone, the repair of a severed nose that later writers called rhinoplasty, the eight kinds of surgical procedure and a long list of surgical instruments, which is why Sushruta…