Art & Culture Previous Year Questions (PYQ) with Answers – Page 4

The Dashavatara temple at Deogarh stands in Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh, on the bank of the Betwa river. Built around the early sixth century, it is one of the earliest Hindu temples in north India and is dedicated to Vishnu.

The round drum below the lions of the Sarnath capital carries an elephant, a bull, a horse and a lion; there is no deer.

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.

Mopin is the harvest and agricultural festival of the Galo people of Arunachal Pradesh, held in early April. It is a prayer to the goddess Mopin Ane for a good crop, for health and for prosperity, and for the driving away of evil and illness.

The Sheesh Mahal, or palace of mirrors, inside the Agra Fort was built in Shah Jahan's reign as a bath and dressing chamber for the royal household.

The abacus of the Sarnath capital carries four animals, not a cow: an elephant, a horse, a bull and a lion, and in the usual reading the horse stands for the south while the bull stands for the west.

The Ahmadiyya movement was founded in 1889 at Qadian in the Punjab by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, and it is one of the religious movements of modern India that grew out of the reformist debates of the nineteenth century, drawing on both Islamic tradition and the liberal ideas of the age.

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.

The Lingaraja Temple stands in Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha, and is the largest temple in that city. It was built in the eleventh century, mainly under the Somavamshi ruler Jajati Keshari and completed by the Ganga rulers, and is dedicated to Shiva as Tribhuvaneshwara, the lord of three worlds.

The Bahmani buildings at Gulbarga belong to the Deccan or Provincial style of Indo-Islamic architecture. When the Bahmani sultanate broke away from Delhi in 1347 it developed its own manner, blending Persian and Turkish ideas brought by architects from Iran with local craft and stone.

Tusu Parab is the harvest festival of Jharkhand, kept at Makar Sankranti in mid-January when the winter paddy is in.

She won the best actress award in 1975 for her role in the Gujarati film Meena Gurjari, early in a career that moved between cinema, theatre and dance.

The Champakkulam Moolam boat race is held on the Pampa river in Alappuzha, Kerala, and is the oldest snake-boat race in the state.

Golconda in Hyderabad was the capital of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, which ruled the Golconda Sultanate from 1518, when Quli Qutb Shah broke away from the Bahmani kingdom.

The Ramappa temple is dedicated to Shiva, worshipped there as Ramalingeswara. It stands at Palampet in the Mulugu district of Telangana and was built in the thirteenth century under the Kakatiya ruler Ganapati Deva by his general Recharla Rudra.

Ustad Ilyas Khan was a sitar player. He was born in Lucknow in 1924 into a family of musicians and belonged to the Etawah or Imdadkhani gharana, the school built up by Imdad Khan and carried forward by Enayat Khan and Vilayat Khan.

Pandit Ram Narayan was the musician who lifted the sarangi from an accompanying instrument to a solo concert instrument in Hindustani music.

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.

The fire dance of Rajasthan is performed by men of the Jasnathi Siddha sect, who dance barefoot on a bed of glowing embers to the beat of drums, calling out 'fatai, fatai'.