Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 26

Channapatna, a town between Bengaluru and Mysuru, is called the toy town of India; its artisans turn soft ivory wood on a lathe and finish it with lac and vegetable colours, and the toys carry a GI.

Masulipatnam, the port town of coastal Andhra Pradesh, was the great centre of the painted and block printed cotton that European traders bought as chintz, and the same town is still one of the two homes of kalamkari.

In Patola weaving the yarn of both the warp and the weft is tied and dyed before weaving, so the motif is built up from the threads themselves and looks the same from either side; Patan in north Gujarat is its historic centre and the craft carries a GI.

Bidriware takes its name from Bidar, a town in northern Karnataka, where craftspersons cast an alloy of zinc and copper, engrave it, inlay pure silver wire and then rub the surface with a special soil that turns the alloy deep black while the silver stays bright.

Every GI application in India is filed at the Geographical Indications Registry in Chennai, which functions under the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks in the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade.

Parliament passed the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act in 1999 to meet India's obligation under the TRIPS Agreement of the World Trade Organization, and the Act was brought into force on 15 September 2003.

After the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act, 1999 came into force on 15 September 2003, the tea of the Darjeeling hills was the first Indian good entered in the register, and its logo is still the best known Indian GI abroad.

Tamil was declared a classical language in 2004, the first language to receive the status, on the strength of its ancient Sangam literature and an independent literary tradition.

Santali is an Austro-Asiatic language of the Munda group, spoken mainly in Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha, and Pandit Raghunath Murmu designed the Ol Chiki script for it so that it need not borrow a script from a neighbouring language.

Prinsep, an officer of the East India Company mint at Calcutta, deciphered the Brahmi script in 1837, which made the edicts of Ashoka readable and opened up the early history of India.

It states that the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script and that the form of numerals to be used shall be the international form of Indian numerals; it also allowed English to continue for fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, a period…

When the Constitution came into force in 1950 the Eighth Schedule listed 14 languages.

That amendment added four languages, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, to the Eighth Schedule and took the count from 18 to 22, where it stands.

Under Article 345 a State may adopt any language in use within it as its official language, and Uttar Pradesh has adopted Hindi as its official language and Urdu as its second official language.

The tribal languages of Jharkhand and the neighbouring belt of central and eastern India, namely Santali, Mundari, Ho and Kurukh's neighbours in the Munda group, belong to the Austro-Asiatic family, whose Indian branch is called Munda.

Kannada is one of the four major Dravidian languages, the others being Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam, and it is the official language of Karnataka.

There is no language family by that name in India. The Afro-Asiatic family, which the name echoes, covers Arabic, Hebrew and the Berber and Cushitic languages of West Asia and North Africa, and no Indian language belongs to it.

The Sun Temple at Konark in Odisha is called the Black Pagoda, a name European sailors gave it because its dark stone tower stood out as a landmark along the coast, in contrast to the whitewashed Jagannath temple at Puri, which they called the White Pagoda.

Yakshagana is the folk theatre of coastal Karnataka, performed mainly in the Dakshina Kannada, Udupi and Uttara Kannada districts.

Moatsu is a festival of the Ao tribe of Nagaland, kept in the first week of May once the fields have been cleared, the seed sown and the seedlings planted.