Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 39

A geologist with the Geological Survey of India, he picked up a stone hand axe at Pallavaram near Madras in 1863, the first recorded Palaeolithic tool from the subcontinent, and his later surveys in the south earned him the name of the father of Indian prehistory.

The correct answer is D, because Jorwe is a Chalcolithic site in Maharashtra that gives its name to the Jorwe culture, not to the Malwa culture, which is named after its own region in Madhya Pradesh and is represented by Navdatoli, Eran and Nagda.

The north-western hill belt of the Sulaiman and Kirthar ranges holds Mehrgarh in the Bolan valley, the earliest village of the subcontinent, where wheat and barley were grown and cattle, sheep and goat were kept about eight thousand years ago.

At this Chalcolithic settlement on the Ghod river in Maharashtra the dead were buried within the habitation area, laid out straight with the head pointing north, and pots with food and water were placed beside them.

The rock shelters of Bhimbetka in the Raisen district of Madhya Pradesh were occupied from the Lower Palaeolithic onwards, and their lower layers have yielded hand axes and cleavers along with the earliest of their paintings.

The Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age is the first and by far the longest phase of prehistory, the time of hunting and food gathering, of hand axes, cleavers, flakes and burins, and of people who had neither agriculture nor pottery.

The Dandi March of 1930 was a protest against the British salt tax, and common salt is sodium chloride, NaCl.

Formed in April 1918 by B. P. Wadia among the textile workers of Madras, it is regarded as India's first trade union in the modern, organised sense.

In Mughal times a mauza was a village, the basic unit of revenue records, not a rebellious territory. Mughal revenue records were kept village by village, and each village was called a mauza.

The Dharmashastras assigned the Vaishyas both the study of the Vedas and trade, along with agriculture and cattle-rearing. The Dharmasutras and Dharmashastras, such as the Manusmriti, laid down ideal occupations for the four varnas.

The penal indenture system in the Assam tea gardens ended in 1926, when the Workman's Breach of Contract Act was repealed.

The Linguistic Provinces Commission under Justice S.K. Dhar was set up in June 1948 for this purpose.

Kalinga does not appear in the list of sixteen mahajanapadas given in the Buddhist text Anguttara Nikaya. The sixteen mahajanapadas of the sixth century BCE were Anga, Magadha, Kashi, Kosala, Vajji, Malla, Chedi, Vatsa, Kuru, Panchala, Matsya, Surasena, Assaka, Avanti, Gandhara and Kamboja.

Steatite seals and bricks of a standard ratio are the hallmarks of the Harappan Civilisation. Harappan seals were usually carved from steatite, a soft stone, and carry animal motifs such as the unicorn together with signs of the undeciphered script.

Pairs 2 and 3 are correct; pairs 1 and 4 are wrongly matched. Lakshmikarna, also called Karna, was an eleventh-century Kalachuri ruler of Tripuri, not a Pala king, though he fought the Palas of Bengal.

In Sufism a murid is the disciple who follows a spiritual master, called the pir or shaikh. Sufi orders, or silsilas, such as the Chishti and Suhrawardi, grew around a master and his disciples living in a khanqah (hospice).

As Viceroy, he issued the Resolution on Local Self-Government of 18 May 1882, remembered as its Magna Carta. Ripon, Viceroy from 1880 to 1884, wanted local boards and municipalities with a majority of elected, non-official members and an elected chairman where possible.

After the imperial Guptas weakened in the 6th century, power in the north was shared by the later Guptas of Magadha, the Pushyabhutis, the Maukharis and the Maitrakas.

Of the three places, only Broach in Gujarat had an English factory in the first quarter of the 17th century.

The Moidams are the mound-burials of the Ahom royal family and nobles at Charaideo in Assam. The Tai-Ahoms, who ruled the Brahmaputra valley for about six centuries from the 13th century, buried their kings, queens and nobles in vaulted chambers covered by large earthen mounds.