Art & Culture Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 2

The shalabhanjika, a woman holding the branch of a tree, comes from popular fertility beliefs, not from Buddhist teaching. The gateways of the Great Stupa at Sanchi carry rich carvings.

Elephanta, on Gharapuri island near Mumbai, is a Shaivite rock-cut group whose panels tell Shiva stories: the Trimurti Sadashiva, Ardhanarishvara, Gangadhara, the marriage of Shiva and Parvati and Shiva as Nataraja.

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.

Patalkot is a deep, horseshoe-shaped valley in the Tamia area of Chhindwara district, and most of its villages are home to the Bharia tribe.

The Jhumar dance of Haryana takes its name from the jhumar, an ornament that married women wear on the forehead.

Sattriya was developed in the sattras, the Vaishnavite monasteries of Assam, by the saint-reformer Srimanta Sankardev in the 15th century.

The dance takes its name from its birthplace, the village of Kuchipudi, earlier called Kuchelapuram, in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh.

Prabha Atre was trained in and sang in the Kirana style of Hindustani classical music. Prabha Atre (1932-2024) of Pune learned from Sureshbabu Mane and Hirabai Barodekar, both disciples of Abdul Karim Khan, the founder of the Kirana gharana.

This statement is false: Unani remains one of the systems under the Ministry of Ayush. AYUSH stands for Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, and Sowa-Rigpa was added to the family in 2010.

Kashmir Shaivism, a non-dual (Advaita) school of Shaiva philosophy, is traced to the sage Vasugupta, who lived in Kashmir around the late 8th or early 9th century CE.

The Adivaraha cave temple at Mamallapuram has two rare royal portrait panels of the Pallava kings. One shows Simhavishnu seated between two queens, and the other shows his son Mahendravarman I standing with his two queens, with labels in the Pallava Grantha script naming them.

Both statements correctly describe how the Ajanta murals were prepared and painted. The Ajanta caves in Maharashtra, carved between about the 2nd century BCE and the 5th century CE, hold the finest surviving Buddhist murals of ancient India.

The antariya was the lower garment of ancient India, a long piece of cotton or fine fabric wrapped around the hips and legs and tucked in, much like the later dhoti.

Chola bronzes are celebrated for their beauty and casting skill, and they follow the same iconographic rules and style as the stone sculpture of the period.

Statements 1 and 3 describe real parts of the Sarnath pillar, while the abacus is neither elliptical nor plain. The Mauryan pillar at Sarnath, set up by Ashoka, had a tall, smooth, tapering shaft of polished Chunar sandstone.

The Brihadisvara Temple at Thanjavur was built by Rajaraja Chola I and dedicated to Shiva, so its early Chola murals show Shaiva themes.

In October 2023 UNESCO added Gwalior to its Creative Cities Network as a City of Music.

The NCSM is an autonomous society of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. It was formed in 1978 to take over the science museums then run by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, and its headquarters is in Kolkata.

Santiniketan and the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas were inscribed in 2023; the other two were listed years earlier. Both were added at the 45th session of the World Heritage Committee at Riyadh in September 2023, taking India's total to 42 sites at the time.

The Nalayira Divyaprabandham, meaning "four thousand sacred compositions", gathers the Tamil hymns of the twelve Vaishnava saints known as Alvars.