Art & Culture GK Questions with Answers – Page 6

Purandara Dasa belonged to the Haridasa movement of Karnataka and composed devaranamas, devotional songs in Kannada, and he is credited with organising the graded exercises with which Carnatic music is still taught.

The qawwali repertoire follows a fixed order of forms, and the naat is the song in praise of the Prophet Muhammad, usually sung early in a performance after the opening praise of God.

The Sankirtana of Manipur is the Vaishnava ritual music of the Meitei people, in which singers and drummers perform in the temple courtyard, the mandap, with the barrel drum called pung and with cymbals; the drum dance is the Pung Cholom.

Sant Tukaram was a Varkari poet of the seventeenth century who composed abhangs for Vithoba of Pandharpur and lived in Dehu near Pune, in the years when Shivaji was building the Maratha state.

The Bauls are wandering mystic minstrels of Bengal, on both sides of the border, whose songs blend Vaishnava Sahajiya and Sufi ideas and reject caste and ritual.

Abhang is Marathi devotional verse, and the word means unbroken. Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath, Chokhamela and Tukaram composed abhangs for Vithoba of Pandharpur, and pilgrims still sing them on the wari to Pandharpur with the taal and the ektari.

Khusrau lived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was the disciple of the Chishti saint Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi.

The tomb in Mehrauli, Delhi, built in the late 13th century, has the earliest surviving true arch in India. A true arch is built from wedge-shaped stones (voussoirs) held in place by a keystone at the top, so it spreads weight sideways.

Dhanyakataka is the ancient Dharanikota, beside Amaravati on the Krishna river in present-day Andhra Pradesh. Dhanyakataka was a capital of the Satavahanas, who ruled the Deccan around the beginning of the Common Era, and the great Amaravati stupa stood close by.

The gardens behind Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi were designed by Edwin Lutyens, who combined the Mughal charbagh plan of water channels and terraces with English flower beds and lawns, and they were long called the Mughal Gardens.

Nek Chand Saini, a roads inspector in Chandigarh, began building figures and courtyards out of broken tiles, bangles, sockets and other waste in a gorge near the Sukhna Lake, and the work he did largely alone became the Rock Garden, now one of the best known sights of the city.

Hyder Ali of Mysore began the Lalbagh garden at Bengaluru in the eighteenth century in the Mughal manner, and his son Tipu Sultan extended it and added trees and plants collected from many countries.

The garden at Shibpur in Howrah, across the Hooghly from Kolkata, was founded in 1787 by Colonel Robert Kyd of the East India Company and renamed after Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose.

Charbagh means four gardens, and the plan is a walled square or rectangle cut into four equal quarters by two axes that meet at the centre, where a tank, a platform or a tomb is placed.

Humayun's Tomb was begun in 1565 by his widow Bega Begum, also called Haji Begum, with the Persian architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, and it is the first tomb in the subcontinent set at the centre of a charbagh crossed by water channels.

The Pinjore garden lies at Pinjore in Panchkula district of Haryana, on the road from Chandigarh to Shimla, and is a seven terraced Mughal garden laid out by Fidai Khan, the foster brother of Aurangzeb.

Nishat Bagh was laid out about 1633 by Abul Hasan Asaf Khan, Nur Jahan's brother and the father of Mumtaz Mahal.

Jahangir built Shalimar Bagh above the Dal Lake in 1619 for his queen Nur Jahan, and it is the largest of the Mughal gardens of Kashmir, laid out in terraces with the Diwan-e-Aam, the Diwan-e-Khas and a zenana garden.

Babur laid out the Aram Bagh at Agra in 1528, within two years of the first battle of Panipat, and it is the oldest Mughal garden that still survives in India.

Coarsely ground rice flour is pinched between finger and thumb and released in a thin stream, which makes it the easiest material to draw with, but the tradition gives a second reason: ants, insects, sparrows and squirrels eat the flour through the day, so the morning drawing is treated as…