Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 35

In Cheraw, men sit facing each other and hold long bamboo staves horizontally, clapping them together in a steady beat, while women in the Mizo puan step in and out of the closing gaps without letting a foot be caught.

Chhau is a martial masked dance of eastern India with three recognised styles, and Seraikella Chhau takes its name from the former princely seat of Seraikella in Jharkhand, where the royal house trained and refined it.

Lavani combines song and dance and is performed mainly by women in a nine-yard saree to the sharp beat of the dholki.

Ghoomar is danced by women in a wide ghagra who move in a circle and turn on the spot, the swirl of the skirt giving the dance its name.

Bihu is danced chiefly at Rongali or Bohag Bihu, the Assamese new year festival that falls in April and opens the sowing season.

Gwalior is the oldest gharana of Hindustani classical vocal music, not of Kathak, and it is placed among these options precisely because a candidate who remembers the word gharana without remembering the art form will pick it.

The Assamese saint of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries founded the sattras, the Vaishnava monasteries that give the form its name, and created the Ankiya Naat plays staged in the namghar, in which the dance developed.

Its central theme is the Raas Leela of Radha and Krishna, the feet land softly, the face is held serene rather than expressive, and the dancer wears the stiff, barrel-shaped kumil skirt.

The word means knife, and the make-up is marked by an upturned knife-shaped line drawn on a green base, worn by characters who are brave and powerful but arrogant, of whom Ravana and Duryodhana are the standard examples.

She learned Bharatanatyam at a time when the form was losing its temple patronage, gave it a place on the public concert stage, and founded Kalakshetra in 1936 as a school where it could be taught systematically along with music and craft.

The form rests on two basic stances, the square chowk and the three-bent tribhanga, in which the head, the torso and the hips are deflected in opposite directions to produce the sculptural line seen in Odisha temple carving.

It began with the kathakars, the story-tellers who narrated the epics in north Indian temples, and under Mughal patronage it moved into the court, took on Persian costume and turned towards abstract rhythm.

In the tarangam the dancer balances on the raised rim of a brass plate and moves it in rhythm, often with a pot of water carried on the head, which demonstrates the control over balance for which the Andhra form is famous.

Sattriya of Assam was the eighth and last form to enter the Akademi list, and that single date is the fact papers ask most often about it.

The Natya Shastra is the Sanskrit treatise that lays down the grammar every classical form follows, dividing performance into nritta, nritya and natya, naming the four kinds of abhinaya, and describing the rasas.

The name means story-play, and the form stages episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Its characters are identified by make-up types, chiefly pacha for noble heroes, kathi for proud anti-heroes such as Ravana, thadi for fierce figures, kari for demonesses and minukku for gentle women and sages.

Bharatanatyam grew in the temples of Tamil Nadu, where it was performed by devadasis under the older name sadir or dasiattam, and it was brought to the concert stage in the twentieth century by E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale, who founded Kalakshetra at Madras in 1936.

India Gate was built as the All-India War Memorial to honour soldiers of the British Indian Army who died in the First World War and in the Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919.

Pandit Ram Narayan, born in Udaipur in 1927, lifted the sarangi from an instrument that only accompanied singers to a solo concert instrument, and he was honoured with the Padma Vibhushan.

Nihalchand was the master painter of Kishangarh in the 18th century under Raja Sawant Singh, the poet-king known as Nagaridas; his 'Bani Thani', with its long nose, arched eyebrows and lotus-shaped eyes, is often called the Mona Lisa of India.