Awards & Honours GK Questions with Answers – Page 8

The original rules of 1954 did not allow a posthumous award; the provision was added in 1955, and the first person honoured after his death was Lal Bahadur Shastri, the second Prime Minister of India, in 1966, the year he died at Tashkent.

The first three recipients of the Bharat Ratna, all in 1954, were C. Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India, the physicist C. V. Raman and the philosopher S. Radhakrishnan, who later became President.

The Bharat Ratna was instituted on 2 January 1954 by President Dr Rajendra Prasad, on the same day as the Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri, and the first awards were conferred later the same year on C. Rajagopalachari, C. V. Raman and S. Radhakrishnan.

The chess grandmaster received the award in its first year, 1991-92, when it was called the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna; it was renamed the Major Dhyan Chand Khel Ratna in 2021 and remains the highest sporting honour of the country.

She won a bronze medal in weightlifting at the Sydney Olympics of 2000, in the sixty-nine kilogram category, and became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal of any colour.

The Malayalam poet received the first Jnanpith Award in 1965 for his collection Odakkuzhal, meaning the bamboo flute; the award is given by the Bharatiya Jnanpith for outstanding writing in any of the languages recognised by the Constitution.

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award, the highest honour in Indian cinema, was instituted in 1969 to mark the birth centenary of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, who made Raja Harishchandra in 1913, and the first award went to the actress Devika Rani, who was also a founder of Bombay Talkies.

She won the Academy Award for Best Costume Design in 1983, for the film Gandhi released in 1982, sharing it with John Mollo, and she was the first Indian to win an Oscar in any category.

He commanded a company of the 4th Battalion of the Kumaon Regiment at Badgam near Srinagar in November 1947 and held off a far larger force of raiders until he was killed; the Param Vir Chakra, instituted on 26 January 1950 with effect from 15 August 1947, was conferred on…

Known as the Frontier Gandhi and as Badshah Khan, he led the Khudai Khidmatgar movement in the North-West Frontier Province and became a citizen of Pakistan after partition; India honoured him with the Bharat Ratna in 1987, the first time the award went to someone who was not an Indian…

He died at Tashkent in January 1966 after signing the agreement that ended the war of 1965, and the Bharat Ratna was conferred on him that same year, the first time the honour was given after the recipient's death.

She received the Bharat Ratna in 1971, while she was Prime Minister, and she remains the first woman on the list.

The Bharat Ratna was instituted in 1954 and in that first year it went to three men: C. Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, then Vice-President and later President, and the physicist C. V. Raman.

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light, the phenomenon known as the Raman effect, which he announced on 28 February 1928; that date is kept as National Science Day.

He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 for Gitanjali, becoming not only the first Indian but the first Asian of any country to receive a Nobel Prize.

FIFA introduced it in 2009 for the most beautiful goal of the year, and it is named after Ferenc Puskas of Hungary, the forward of the great side of the nineteen fifties.

The German midfielder, captain of the side that won the World Cup of 1990, was the first FIFA World Player of the Year when the award began in 1991; FIFA gave it until 2015, with the Ballon d’Or years of 2010 to 2015 in between, and replaced it with The…

The International Cricket Council began its annual awards in 2004, and the cricketer of the year receives the trophy named after the great all-rounder of the West Indies; the first winner was Rahul Dravid of India, and Sachin Tendulkar, Ravichandran Ashwin and Virat Kohli have also received it.

France Football and FIFA joined their two awards into one for those six years, so the winner of each of those years holds the FIFA Ballon d’Or; the partnership ended and the two awards were given separately again from 2016, when FIFA began The Best FIFA Men’s Player.

The women’s award was introduced in 2018, more than sixty years after the men’s, and the Norwegian forward, then with Lyon, was its first winner.