Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 29

Periyar launched the Self-Respect Movement in the Madras Presidency in 1925 to fight caste discrimination and Brahmin dominance. Periyar had left the Congress after he felt it did little for non-Brahmins.

The Cripps proposals let any province stay out of the new Union and deal with Britain separately, but the provincial members of the Constituent Assembly were to be elected, not nominated.

Indian tradition credits Shalihotra with the science of horses, and veterinary medicine for horses came to be called Shalihotra Shastra after him.

Both statements match the Jaina tradition: the place of Mahavira's enlightenment and the meaning of asrava. Mahavira left home at about thirty and spent some twelve years in hard penance.

Ibn Battuta came in the 14th century, Nikitin in the 15th, Monserrate in the 16th and Peter Mundy in the 17th.

John Kay, an English inventor, patented the flying shuttle in 1733, one of the first machines of the Industrial Revolution.

Shortughai, a Harappan trading settlement in north-eastern Afghanistan, is the site where traces of irrigation canals have been found. Most Harappan farmers relied on river floods and wells, and no canals have been found in the Indus heartland.

On 24 August 1925 Vithalbhai Patel became the first elected Indian (non-official) President, or Speaker, of the Central Legislative Assembly.

All four were Russian Marxists, so they belong to one school of thought. Plekhanov is called the father of Russian Marxism; in 1883 he founded the Emancipation of Labour group in Geneva with Vera Zasulich, who had begun as a populist revolutionary.

This was the heart of the 1719 agreement between Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath and the Mughal court. In 1718 Balaji Vishwanath, the first great Peshwa of Shahu, made a deal with the Sayyid brothers, the king-makers at Delhi.

Under the Mahalwari system the land belonged to the village community (the mahal), which was jointly responsible for the revenue; it did not belong to the Government.

Alexander Cunningham, the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, identified the site of ancient Taxila near Rawalpindi in the 1860s. Cunningham used the accounts of Greek writers on Alexander's campaign and of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang to match the city named in Indian texts with the ruins…

Kalsi, near Dehradun in Uttarakhand, has a full set of Ashoka's fourteen Major Rock Edicts carved on a single boulder.

Ramaswamy Naicker. E.V.

British rule pushed Indian farmers to grow crops for sale and export rather than for their own food. Heavy land revenue had to be paid in cash, so peasants turned to cash crops such as indigo, cotton, jute, opium, tea and sugarcane, which fed British industry and trade.

Of the three, only Rash Behari Bose worked actively with the Ghadar Party. The Ghadar Party was founded in 1913 at San Francisco by Indians in North America, with Lala Har Dayal and Sohan Singh Bhakna among its leaders.

After the Poona Pact of September 1932, Gandhi made the upliftment of the Harijans a central part of his work.

The fanam was a small gold (and later silver) coin used widely in South India in medieval times. The word comes from the Tamil 'panam', meaning money.

Pairs 1 and 3 are correct; the leaders in pairs 2 and 4 have been swapped. Dr. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951.

Malaviya, with Krishna Kant Malaviya, defended the peasants accused in the Chauri Chaura case. On 5 February 1922, at Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur district, a crowd of Non-Cooperation volunteers set fire to a police station after the police fired on them, and 22 policemen died.