Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 15

Ziyarat means a visit to a sacred place, and in India it came to mean the pilgrimage to the dargah of a sufi saint to seek blessings.

The Congress Socialist Party was formed in 1934 as a group within the Indian National Congress to push it towards socialism, and Jayaprakash Narayan became its first general secretary.

A lawyer of Madras who turned to the labour cause, Chettiar organised the first May Day meetings in India on 1 May 1923 and founded the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan; a red flag was used on the occasion.

Both measures were aimed at the growing labour and communist movement, the first to deport foreign agitators and the second to curb strikes in public utility services, and the two young men threw bombs and leaflets to make, in their words, the deaf hear.

Spratt had been sent to India by the Communist Party of Great Britain and worked with the Workers and Peasants Parties; he was arrested in March 1929 and tried at Meerut along with Benjamin Francis Bradley and Lester Hutchinson, the three Englishmen in the dock.

Sweeping arrests were made in March 1929, soon after the great strikes of 1928, and the trial at Meerut went on until 1933, making it one of the longest political trials of the colonial period.

Manabendra Nath Roy, who had gone abroad in search of arms during the First World War and had helped found the Communist Party of Mexico, formed a small emigre Communist Party of India at Tashkent on 17 October 1920 with a handful of muhajirs and revolutionaries.

It allowed unions to register, gave a registered union the standing of a body that could hold property and sue, and protected its office bearers from certain civil suits and from the charge of criminal conspiracy for lawful union work.

In 1918 Gandhi led the Ahmedabad mill workers in their demand for a wage rise and undertook his first fast as a weapon in an industrial dispute; out of that struggle grew the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association in 1920, which stood for arbitration between workers and owners rather than class…

The All India Trade Union Congress was founded at Bombay on 31 October 1920 and Lala Lajpat Rai, the Punjab Congress leader, took the chair as its first president, linking the labour cause to the national movement.

Bahman Pestonji Wadia, a theosophist associated with Annie Besant, organised the workers of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills at Madras in 1918 into the Madras Labour Union, the first body in India with members, subscriptions and office bearers, and therefore the first trade union in the modern sense.

A follower of Jyotiba Phule and the editor of the Marathi paper Dinbandhu, Lokhande organised the Bombay mill workers in 1884 and placed their demands for shorter hours and a weekly holiday before the Factory Commission, which is why the body is called the first labour association in India.

Ansari. Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari was a physician and a Congress leader who presided over the Madras session of the Congress in 1927; he had nothing to do with the communist prosecutions and was never an accused in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case.

He built the Chennakesava temple at Belur in the Hassan district to mark his victories, including the defeat of the Cholas at Talakad, and his reign from about 1108 to 1152 also saw the beginning of the Hoysaleswara temple at Halebidu.

Sarangadeva served at the court of Singhana II, the most powerful Yadava king, and his Sangita Ratnakara is the work from which both the Hindustani and the Carnatic traditions later drew their theory of ragas and talas.

Under this last great Yadava king Marathi flourished as a language of administration and devotion, and the saint Jnaneshwar wrote the Jnaneshwari, also called the Bhavarthadipika, in 1290.

Rudrama Devi was the daughter of Ganapatideva and succeeded him at Warangal, holding the throne for about three decades against rebellions by nobles and attacks from the Yadavas and the Pandyas, and the Venetian traveller Marco Polo wrote with admiration of her government.

The temple at Palampet in Mulugu district of Telangana was built in 1213 by Recherla Rudra, a general of Ganapatideva, and it is named Ramappa after its sculptor, the only temple in India popularly known by the name of its craftsman.

His long reign, from 1076 to 1126, was the cultural high point of the Western Chalukyas, and his court held both Bilhana, who wrote the Vikramankadeva Charita in praise of the king, and Vijnaneshwara, whose Mitakshara became the most widely followed authority of Hindu law in large parts of India.

He was a Chalukya feudatory who overthrew the last Rashtrakuta ruler in 973 and founded the line that ruled the Deccan from Manyakheta and then from Kalyani for more than two centuries.