Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 22

The Junagadh rock inscription of the Shaka ruler Rudradaman I records how he restored the Sudarshana lake after a storm burst its dam.

The socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia proposed the Chaukhamba Raj, a Four Pillar State, to spread power away from the centre.

In 1865 the overland line through the Ottoman Empire and Persia was joined to a submarine cable in the Persian Gulf, and messages could pass between Britain and India for the first time.

The Swadeshi Movement grew out of the protest against the partition of Bengal, and the Extremists, Aurobindo Ghosh among them, wanted to turn it into a nationwide mass struggle.

Cowasjee Nanabhoy Davar, a Parsi businessman of Bombay, set up the Bombay Spinning and Weaving Company, which began production in 1856 and is regarded as India's first modern cotton mill.

All three statements are true: Lachit Borphukan was the Ahom commander who defeated the Mughals at Saraighat, and the NDA's best cadet receives a gold medal in his name.

Watt's improvements turned the steam engine from a device that merely pumped water out of mines into a source of power for factory machines.

Intercontinental ballistic missiles came first in 1957, communication satellites followed from 1958 onwards, and the World Wide Web arrived only around 1989 to 1991.

The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 was Gandhiji's first satyagraha in India, and its great significance was that it tied the grievances of peasants to the national movement.

In the mid-18th century the English East India Company's main exports from Bengal were cotton textiles, silk, saltpetre and opium.

The Majjhima Nikaya is part of the Pali Canon, the Tipitaka of Theravada Buddhism. The Tipitaka has three baskets: the Vinaya Pitaka on rules for monks and nuns, the Sutta Pitaka on the Buddha's discourses, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka on philosophy.

The associations of 1836 to 1885 were run by landlords, lawyers, teachers and journalists, drew their membership from the English-educated and propertied classes, and worked mainly in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Poona.

The session had originally been planned for Poona, but an outbreak of cholera there led to the change of venue to Bombay.

Surendranath Banerjee's Association called the first National Conference in Calcutta in December 1883, bringing delegates from several parts of India to discuss questions of national importance, and it held a second conference in December 1885.

The Madras Mahajana Sabha was founded that year by M. Viraraghavachariar, G. Subramania Iyer and P. Anandacharlu as a presidency-wide body for southern India, and it held a conference in Madras in December 1884 that brought together representatives of local associations.

They founded the Bombay Presidency Association in 1885, partly in reaction to the European hostility shown during the Ilbert Bill controversy, and the body became the main platform of western India in the year the Congress was born.

It appealed to a somewhat wider social group than the landlord bodies that preceded it, and within a year many of its members moved into the Indian Association.

In 1876 the maximum age for the Indian Civil Service examination was reduced, which made it even harder for Indian candidates, who had to travel to England to sit the examination, to qualify.

It aimed to create a strong body of public opinion, to unify Indians on common political questions, to promote Hindu and Muslim friendship and to draw the masses into public movements, and it kept the membership fee low so that poorer people could join.

The Sabha was set up in Poona in 1870 to act as a bridge between the government and the people, and its members held written authority from the villages around Poona to speak on their behalf, which gave it a representative character unusual for the time.