Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 28

Begum Hazrat Mahal was a wife of Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Awadh, who had been deposed and sent to Calcutta in 1856.

Under this policy of Lord Dalhousie, a dependent princely state whose ruler died without a natural heir lapsed to the Company, and adoption was not accepted; Satara, Jaitpur, Sambalpur, Nagpur and Jhansi were taken over in this way, and Jhansi was annexed in 1854 after the death of Gangadhar Rao.

Lakshmibai was born at Varanasi in 1828 in a Marathi Brahmin family and was named Manikarnika, called Manu at home; she took the name Lakshmibai on her marriage to Gangadhar Rao, the ruler of Jhansi.

Chand Bibi, also called Chand Sultana, was the daughter of Hussain Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar and the wife of Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur, and she acted as regent in both kingdoms.

Ahilyabai Holkar ruled from 1767 to 1795 and shifted her seat to Maheshwar on the north bank of the Narmada, which became a centre of administration, temple building and handloom weaving; the Maheshwari sari is still named after it.

Rani Durgavati ruled the Gond kingdom of Garha-Katanga, in the region of present Madhya Pradesh called Gondwana, and governed as regent for her young son after her husband death.

Rudramadevi was the daughter of the Kakatiya ruler Ganapatideva and ruled the Kakatiya kingdom of Warangal, in present Telangana, in the second half of the thirteenth century; she is one of the very few women to have governed a southern kingdom in her own name, and her grandson Prataparudra II…

Razia was the daughter of Iltutmish of the Slave or Mamluk dynasty, who nominated her over his sons, and she ruled Delhi from 1236 to 1240 with the title Jalalat-ud-din, the only woman to occupy that throne.

As Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, John Marshall carried out long excavations at Taxila from 1913 onwards and published a detailed account of the city's successive settlements; the site was later inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980.

Ikhtiyaruddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji, a commander in the service of the Ghurids, overran Bihar at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century and destroyed the monastic universities of the region, after which organised Buddhist learning in eastern India came to an end.

Later Tibetan accounts call the library of Nalanda Dharmaganja, the treasury of the law, and say that it consisted of three buildings named Ratnasagara, Ratnodadhi and Ratnaranjaka, the tallest of which is described as a nine-storeyed structure.

Valabhi, in the Saurashtra region of Gujarat, was the capital of the Maitraka rulers and a famous centre of Hinayana Buddhist learning; the pilgrim I-tsing wrote that it stood beside Nalanda in reputation, and students went from there into royal service.

Gopala, the founder of the Pala dynasty in the eighth century, established the Odantapuri monastery in the region of Bihar Sharif, and its plan is said to have been followed when the first monasteries were built in Tibet.

Atisha Dipankara Srijnana was the most famous teacher of Vikramashila, the Pala monastery at Antichak in Bhagalpur, and in the eleventh century he was invited to Tibet, where he reformed Buddhist practice and is remembered as one of its great masters.

The Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang studied the Yogachara philosophy at Nalanda under Shilabhadra, who was then the aged head of the monastery, during the reign of Harshavardhana in the seventh century.

Takshashila, called Taxila by Greek and later English writers, was the capital of the Mahajanapada of Gandhara in the north-west of the subcontinent, in what is now the Rawalpindi district of Pakistan, and it was already a famous centre of learning in the time of the Buddha.

The Pala king Dharmapala founded Vikramashila at Antichak in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar about the turn of the ninth century, and it became famous for tantric studies and for the scholars called dvarapanditas who examined candidates at its gates.

The Gupta ruler Kumaragupta I founded the Nalanda Mahavihara in the fifth century of the Christian era near Rajgir in present-day Bihar, and a seal bearing his name has been found at the site.

Xuan Zang, also written Hiuen Tsang, travelled in India in the seventh century of the Christian era, during the reign of Harshavardhana of Kannauj, which is roughly fourteen hundred years before our own time.

Parishishtaparvan and Trishashtilakshana Mahapurana are Jaina works, while Nettipakarana and Avadanashataka are Buddhist.