Indian History GK Questions with Answers – Page 69

By it Ranjit Singh and the East India Company agreed that the river Sutlej would divide their spheres, so the cis-Sutlej Sikh chiefs passed under Company protection and Ranjit Singh turned his energy westwards towards Multan, Kashmir and Peshawar.

The fifth Guru gathered the hymns of his predecessors along with verses of saints such as Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas and Sheikh Farid, and completed the Adi Granth in 1604, installing it in the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar with Baba Buddha as the first granthi.

On Baisakhi in 1699 at Anandpur Sahib, Guru Gobind Singh initiated the first five volunteers, the Panj Pyare, with the ceremony of the double-edged sword and created the Khalsa, giving its members the five articles of faith and the names Singh and Kaur.

The Panditrao was the ecclesiastical head in the Ashta Pradhan, fixing the dates of religious ceremonies, supervising grants to temples and learned men, and punishing offences against religious custom.

The Third Battle of Panipat was fought on 14 January 1761 between the Maratha army led by Sadashivrao Bhau, with Vishwasrao the Peshwa's son, and Ahmad Shah Abdali, also called Durrani, supported by the Rohillas and the Nawab of Awadh.

The Amatya, also called the Majumdar, kept the accounts of the kingdom and checked the income and expenditure of every district, which makes him the finance member of the eight.

Tanaji led the night assault that recovered the fort of Kondana from the Mughal garrison in 1670 and was killed in the fighting.

The Third Anglo-Maratha War of 1817 to 1818 was settled by a set of separate treaties with the Maratha houses, and the one with the Holkar chief of Indore was signed at Mandsaur, or Mandeshwar, in January 1818.

Basavanna was a minister in the Kalachuri court in twelfth-century Karnataka and led the Virashaiva or Lingayat movement, whose followers wore the linga on their body, rejected temple ritual, Brahmanical authority and caste, and composed short prose-poems called vachanas in Kannada; Akka Mahadevi and Allama Prabhu belong to the same…

Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, remembered as Gharib Nawaz or helper of the poor, brought the Chishti order to India towards the end of the twelfth century and settled at Ajmer in Rajasthan, where his tomb became one of the most visited shrines in the subcontinent for Hindus and Muslims alike.

Established in India at Multan by Shaikh Bahauddin Zakariya, it held that a mystic could accept land, wealth and office from the state and still lead a spiritual life, and its shaikhs worked closely with the Sultans of Delhi.

Tulsidas retold the story of Rama in the Awadhi speech of eastern Uttar Pradesh, which put the epic within reach of people who could not read Sanskrit and made the Ramcharitmanas the most widely recited devotional work of north India.

Writing in the eighth century, he argued that Brahman alone is real, that the individual soul is not different from Brahman, and that the world as ordinarily perceived is the work of maya; this is Advaita, non-dualism.

The Alvars were the twelve Vaishnava saint-poets of the Tamil country, active roughly between the sixth and the ninth centuries, whose hymns were later gathered as the Divya Prabandham and sung in temples.

The second Guru standardised and popularised Gurmukhi, the script in which the hymns of the Gurus were written down, and this made it possible to preserve the teaching of the movement in the language its followers actually spoke.

Amir Khusrau served as a poet at the courts of several Delhi Sultans, but his spiritual allegiance was to Nizamuddin Auliya, and he was buried beside his master.

Mahbub-i-Ilahi means the beloved of God, and it is the title by which this Chishti master of Delhi has been known for seven centuries.

A khanqah was the hospice or lodge where a Sufi master lived with his disciples, taught, held assemblies of devotional music and fed whoever came to the door, whatever their faith or caste.

The Vernacular Press Act was enacted in 1878 by Lord Lytton to silence Indian-language newspapers, which had begun to criticise British rule sharply, especially over the famine and the cost of the Delhi Durbar.

Lord Curzon announced the partition of Bengal on 19 July 1905 and it came into effect on 16 October 1905, splitting the province into a Muslim-majority eastern half and the rest of Bengal.