Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 66

The last Mughal emperor was captured at Delhi in September 1857, tried by the British, deprived of his title and sent to Rangoon in Burma, where he died in 1862.

The General Service Enlistment Act of 1856, passed while Lord Canning was Governor General, required new recruits of the Bengal Army to serve wherever they were sent, including overseas.

The new rifle needed a cartridge whose end had to be bitten open, and the sepoys believed the paper was greased with the fat of cows and pigs, which offended Hindus and Muslims alike.

Kunwar Singh, a zamindar of Jagdishpur in the Shahabad region, was about eighty years old when he took up arms, fought the British at Arrah with his brother Amar Singh and carried the revolt into central India before returning to Bihar, where he died in 1858.

Begum Hazrat Mahal, a queen of the deposed ruler of Awadh, led the revolt at Lucknow in 1857 and had her young son Birjis Qadr proclaimed the ruler of Awadh.

He was the adopted son of the last Peshwa, Baji Rao II, and the refusal of his pension by the Company was one of the causes of the revolt.

Mangal Pandey was a sepoy of this regiment stationed at Barrackpore near Calcutta. In March 1857 he attacked his officers rather than use the new greased cartridges; he was court martialled and hanged on 8 April 1857, and his regiment was disbanded.

On 10 May 1857 the sepoys of the garrison at Meerut refused the new cartridges, killed their European officers, released their imprisoned comrades and marched towards Delhi, which they reached on 12 May.

In the Gupta and post-Gupta period the empire was divided into bhuktis, which were provinces, and inscriptions call the governor of a bhukti an uparika or uparika-maharaja, usually a prince or a trusted noble.

Alexander and Porus fought the Battle of Hydaspes in 326 BCE on the banks of the Jhelum, the river the Greeks called Hydaspes and the Rig Veda calls Vitasta.

Gopala founded the Pala dynasty in Bengal in the middle of the eighth century, and the Khalimpur copper plate records that he was raised to the throne by the chiefs to end a long spell of disorder known as matsyanyaya, the rule of the fish.

Aram Bagh stands in Agra in Uttar Pradesh, on the left bank of the Yamuna across from the Taj Mahal, and it is held to be the oldest Mughal garden in India.

Ibn Batuta, the Moroccan traveller, reached Delhi in the fourteenth century during the reign of Muhammad Bin Tughlaq, who appointed him the qazi of Delhi and later sent him as an envoy to China.

Hiuen Tsang, the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, travelled in India in the seventh century, when Harshavardhana of the Pushyabhuti dynasty ruled from Kannauj.

Ibrahim Lodi came to the throne of Delhi in 1517 after the death of his father Sikandar Lodi. He was the third and last ruler of the Lodi dynasty, which was the final dynasty of the Delhi Sultanate.

Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana and was one of the five founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. He took Ghana to independence in 1957, the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to break free of colonial rule, and served first as its Prime Minister and then as its President.

Signed in 1765 after the Battle of Buxar, it was concluded by Robert Clive with the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II and with Shuja-ud-Daulah of Awadh.

Charles Wood, the President of the Board of Control, sent the Despatch in 1854 while Dalhousie was Governor-General.

The Charter Act of 1833 made the Governor-General of Bengal the Governor-General of India with authority over the Bombay and Madras Presidencies, took away their power to make laws, and added a law member to the Council, a post first held by Lord Macaulay.

The Government of India Act of 1858 ended the rule of the East India Company and transferred power to the British Crown, so the Governor-General was additionally styled Viceroy, the personal representative of the Crown.