Art & Culture Mixed Quiz: Set 41

The correct answer is A, Raja Man Singh of Gwalior. Man Kautuhal was compiled under the patronage of Raja Man Singh Tomar, who ruled Gwalior from 1486 to 1516.

Man Singh Tomar was a great patron of music, and his court is closely linked with the growth of the Dhrupad style of Hindustani singing. Man Kautuhal, a treatise on music and ragas, was prepared by scholars of his court and is named after him. In the reign of Aurangzeb, Faqirullah translated it into Persian as Rag Darpan, which is how much of its content survives. Man Singh also built the Man Mandir palace inside Gwalior Fort.

B is wrong: Tansen, Akbar's court singer, trained in the Gwalior tradition but lived after Man Singh and did not commission this work.

C is wrong: Meera Bai was a Bhakti poet-saint of Rajasthan, known for her devotional songs to Krishna, not for a music treatise.

D is wrong: Amir Khusrau lived in the Delhi Sultanate period, about two centuries earlier.

Exam tip: Man Kautuhal = Raja Man Singh Tomar of Gwalior; its Persian version Rag Darpan = Faqirullah.

The correct answer is A, Nanded in Maharashtra, where Guru Gobind Singh spent his last days in 1708 and where Takht Sri Hazur Sahib was raised. The five Takhts, or seats of Sikh religious authority, must be learnt as a set, because the question is usually set by swapping one place for another. Option B, Patna in Bihar, is the site of Takht Sri Patna Sahib, which marks the birthplace of Guru Gobind Singh in 1666. Option C, Talwandi Sabo in Punjab, is Takht Sri Damdama Sahib, where Guru Gobind Singh had a recension of the Granth prepared. Option D, Anandpur Sahib in Punjab, is Takht Sri Keshgarh Sahib, where the Khalsa was founded in 1699. The fifth is the Akal Takht at Amritsar, built by Guru Hargobind in 1606. Note that three of the five are in Punjab, with one each in Bihar and Maharashtra.

The correct answer is B, Air, Earth, Fire, Sky and Water. These are the five great elements, the Pancha Mahabhuta, that Indian philosophy saw as the building blocks of the physical world.

In Sanskrit they are prithvi (earth), jal or ap (water), agni or tejas (fire), vayu (air) and akasha (sky or space). Schools such as Samkhya and Vaisheshika used them to explain matter, and Ayurveda builds its three doshas from them: vata from air and space, pitta from fire and water, and kapha from earth and water. Each element is also linked with one of the five senses, such as akasha with hearing.

A is wrong: gas is not one of the five; air (vayu) is the element meant.

C is wrong: it replaces air with gas and earth with land, which are not the classical names.

D is wrong: it repeats earth as land and leaves out sky (akasha), the fifth element.

Exam tip: Pancha Mahabhuta = Prithvi, Jal, Agni, Vayu, Akash.

The correct answer is A, Odisha. The Konark Festival is held on an open-air stage beside the thirteenth century Sun Temple at Konark in Odisha, a World Heritage monument, and the classical styles of the country are performed there in the first week of December. Option B, Gujarat, is the trap, because it holds its own dance festival at a Sun Temple, the Modhera Dance Festival or Uttarardh Mahotsav at Modhera, so a candidate who remembers only the words Sun Temple can be led astray. Option C, Andhra Pradesh, is associated with Kuchipudi and with the Lepakshi and Tirupati temple traditions but not with this festival. Option D, West Bengal, holds the Dover Lane Music Conference and the Kolkata literary festivals. Pair Konark with Odisha and Modhera with Gujarat, and keep the two Sun Temples apart.

The correct answer is A, A joyous folk dance. Hallisaka was a circular group dance, and the Bagh painting shows women dancing in a ring around a central figure to the music of drums and cymbals.

The Bagh Caves are nine Buddhist rock-cut caves on the bank of the Baghani river in Dhar district, Madhya Pradesh, dating to about the late 5th and 6th centuries CE. Their wall paintings, close in style to Ajanta, are mostly secular in theme. The best-known panel, in Cave 4 (the Rang Mahal), shows a lively hallisaka dance: a troupe of women musicians forms a circle around a dancer, a scene of celebration rather than worship. Much of the original painting was later transferred to the Gujari Mahal museum in Gwalior for preservation.

B is wrong: the Hallisalasya panel shows dancers and musicians, not a seated Buddha.

C is wrong: Shiva and Parvati on Kailasha is a famous sculptural theme at Ellora, not this painting.

D is wrong: the churning of the ocean is a Puranic theme not shown in this Buddhist cave panel.

Exam tip: Bagh Caves, Dhar (MP) = secular Gupta-age murals, Cave 4 hallisaka dance; compare Ajanta for Jataka themes.

The correct answer is B, 1954. The Lalit Kala Akademi was founded on 5 August 1954 as the national academy of art, in the same year as the Sahitya Akademi, which was inaugurated on 12 March 1954. It holds the National Exhibition of Art, gives the National Akademi Awards and elects Fellows of its own. Option A is wrong because 1952 belongs to the Sangeet Natak Akademi, which was created by a resolution of 31 May 1952 and inaugurated in January 1953, making it the eldest of the three. Option C is wrong because 1959 is the year the National School of Drama was set up by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Option D is wrong because 1961 is associated with other institutions of that decade and not with this academy. The simplest line to remember is one academy in 1952 and two in 1954.

The correct answer is B, 1 and 3 only. Sankirtana combines singing, drumming and dance to tell the life and deeds of Krishna, but cymbals are not its only instruments.

Sankirtana is the ritual singing, drumming and dancing practised by the Vaishnava people of the Manipur valley in temples and at life-cycle ceremonies. Performers narrate the life and deeds of Krishna through song and graceful movement, often in a circle, while devotees watch in reverence. Two instruments lead the performance: the pung, a barrel-shaped drum played while dancing, and the kartal, or hand cymbals. UNESCO inscribed Sankirtana on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013.

A is wrong: it includes statement 2, which is false because the pung drum is also central.

C is wrong: it includes the false statement 2 and leaves out statement 1.

D is wrong: it leaves out statement 3, which is also correct.

Exam tip: Manipuri Sankirtana = pung (drum) and kartal (cymbals); UNESCO intangible heritage list in 2013.

The correct answer is A, Victorian Gothic. The station, built as Victoria Terminus and designed by Frederick William Stevens, is the finest Victorian Gothic Revival building in India, with pointed arches, a ribbed central dome, turrets, stained glass, gargoyles and a stone figure of Progress on the dome. It was completed in 1888 as the headquarters of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004; the wider precinct around it was inscribed in 2018 as the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles of Mumbai. Option B is wrong because Baroque in India means the Portuguese churches of Old Goa, such as the Basilica of Bom Jesus. Option C is wrong because Dravidian is the temple style of the south, marked by a vimana and a gopuram, as at Thanjavur. Option D is wrong because Nagara is the north Indian temple style with a curvilinear shikhara, as at Khajuraho.

The correct answer is C, the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Established in 1953 with its seat at New Delhi, it is the national academy for the performing arts, it supports festivals, archives and training, and it is the authority whose recognition decides which dance styles are counted as classical. Option A, the Sahitya Akademi, was set up in 1954 as the national academy of letters and gives the Sahitya Akademi Award in each recognised language. Option B, the Lalit Kala Akademi, also of 1954, is the academy for the visual arts, that is painting, sculpture and graphics. Option D, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, founded in 1950, carries Indian culture abroad through cultural centres and exchanges rather than administering the arts at home. Remember the years together: 1953 for Sangeet Natak and 1954 for Sahitya and Lalit Kala.

The correct answer is A, Parasnath hill, Jharkhand. Sammed Shikharji stands on Parasnath hill in the Giridih district of Jharkhand, the highest hill in the state, and is held to be the place where twenty of the twenty-four tirthankaras attained liberation, which makes it the holiest of all Jain tirthas. Option B, Shatrunjaya hill in Gujarat, carries the Palitana temple cluster, the largest group of Jain temples in the country, but it is not the place of liberation of the tirthankaras. Option C, Vindhyagiri hill at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, carries the Gommateshwara statue of Bahubali. Option D is a distractor; the Chandragiri hill associated with Jainism is also at Shravanabelagola, not in Madhya Pradesh. Pavapuri in Bihar, where Mahavira attained nirvana, is a separate site.

The correct answer is B, the Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque, begun by Qutbuddin Aibak in the Qutb complex at Delhi at the end of the twelfth century and the earliest surviving mosque in the country. Its name means 'might of Islam', its screen of pointed arches was raised by masons trained in Indian temple technique, and the Iron Pillar stands in its courtyard. Option A, the Jama Masjid, is Shah Jahan's great mosque completed in the 1650s and formally called the Masjid-i-Jahan Numa; it is the largest mosque in India but far from the oldest. Option C, the Moti Masjid or Pearl Mosque, exists in two famous versions, Shah Jahan's in Agra Fort and Aurangzeb's in the Red Fort at Delhi. Option D, the Mecca Masjid at Hyderabad, was built by the Qutb Shahi rulers near the Charminar. Separately remember the Cheraman Juma Masjid at Kodungallur in Kerala, which tradition holds to be the first mosque built in India.

The correct answer is B, France. Le Corbusier is counted as a French architect. He was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland in 1887, settled in Paris, took French citizenship in 1930 and worked from France for the rest of his life. Jawaharlal Nehru brought him to India to plan Chandigarh, the shared capital of Punjab and Haryana, after the first planner Albert Mayer and his architect Matthew Nowicki left the project. Le Corbusier laid the city out in numbered sectors on a grid and designed the Capitol Complex in Sector 1 — the High Court, the Secretariat, the Legislative Assembly and the Open Hand monument — which UNESCO added to its World Heritage list in 2016. Option A is wrong because Germany is the home of the Bauhaus school and Walter Gropius, not of Le Corbusier. Option C is wrong because Italy is linked with Renaissance architects such as Brunelleschi and Palladio. Option D is wrong because Spain is known for Antoni Gaudí of Barcelona. Exam tip: Chandigarh — Le Corbusier; New Delhi — Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker.

The correct answer is C, 2004. UNESCO created the Creative Cities Network in 2004 to link cities that place their creative industries at the centre of local development, and a city joins in one of seven fields: Crafts and Folk Art, Design, Film, Gastronomy, Literature, Media Arts or Music. Option A is wrong because 1992 is the year the Memory of the World Programme for documentary heritage was launched, the natural confusion in this chapter. Option B is wrong because 2003 is the year of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, under which Yoga, Ramlila and Durga Puja are listed. Option D is wrong because 2015 is the year Jaipur and Varanasi became India's first members of the network, not the year the network itself was set up. Separate the year of a programme from the year of a country's first entry.

The correct answer is B, Only two. Bhaja is a Buddhist cave site and Sittanavasal a Jain one, but Besnagar has no Shaivite cave shrine. Besnagar, near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, is known for the Heliodorus pillar of about 113 BCE, a Garuda pillar set up by a Greek envoy who called himself a devotee of Vasudeva, so its link is Vaishnava. Bhaja, near Lonavala in Maharashtra, has some of the earliest Buddhist rock-cut chaityas and viharas, from about the second century BCE. Sittanavasal, near Pudukkottai in Tamil Nadu, is a Jain cave, the Arivar Koil, famous for its paintings of a lotus pond. So pair 1 is wrong and pairs 2 and 3 are right. Option A is wrong because two pairs match, not one. Option C is wrong because Besnagar is not a Shaivite cave site. Option D is wrong because Bhaja and Sittanavasal are correctly matched. Exam tip: Besnagar means Heliodorus and Vasudeva; Bhaja is Buddhist, Sittanavasal is Jain.

The correct answer is B, Suryavarman II, dedicated to Vishnu. The Khmer king Suryavarman II raised Angkor Wat in the twelfth century in what is now Cambodia as a temple of Vishnu, and its scale makes it the largest Vishnu temple in the world; the building later came to be used as a Buddhist shrine and now appears on the national flag of Cambodia. Option A is wrong because Jayavarman VII, who ruled later, built Angkor Thom with the Bayon at its centre and was a Mahayana Buddhist, which is why the faces on the Bayon are Buddhist. Option C is wrong because Rajendra Chola I was an Indian ruler whose fleet raided Srivijaya; he built the Gangaikonda Cholapuram temple in the Tamil country, not in Cambodia. Option D is wrong because Kaundinya belongs to the founding legend of the earlier kingdom of Funan and built nothing of this kind.

The correct answer is B, Tamil Nadu. Bharatanatyam grew in the temples of Tamil Nadu, where it was performed by devadasis under the older name sadir or dasiattam, and it was brought to the concert stage in the twentieth century by E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale, who founded Kalakshetra at Madras in 1936.

Option A, Kerala, is the home of two other classical forms, Kathakali and Mohiniyattam, and is the commonest distractor here because all three are southern. Option C, Karnataka, has the rich Yakshagana tradition, but Yakshagana is a folk theatre form and is not in the Akademi list of eight classical dances. Option D, Andhra Pradesh, is the home of Kuchipudi, which is also a southern classical form and is often confused with Bharatanatyam; the surest way to separate them is that Kuchipudi is a dance-drama in which performers speak, while Bharatanatyam is a silent solo.

The correct answer is A, the meditation of the Buddha. In early Buddhist art the Buddha was not shown in human form, and an empty seat stood for him seated in meditation.

Sculptors at Bharhut, Sanchi and other early sites of roughly the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE used symbols in place of the Buddha's figure. An empty seat, often under the Bodhi tree, showed his meditation and enlightenment. The wheel (dharmachakra) stood for the first sermon at Sarnath, the stupa for the mahaparinibbana, and a riderless horse for his departure from home. Human images of the Buddha became common only later, in the Gandhara and Mathura schools.

B is wrong: the first sermon is shown by the wheel of law, often with deer.

C is wrong: the mahaparinibbana, his final passing away, is shown by the stupa.

D is wrong: the mahabhinishkramana, the great departure, is shown by a horse without a rider.

Exam tip: empty seat = meditation; wheel = first sermon; stupa = mahaparinibbana; horse = great departure; lotus or elephant = birth.

The correct answer is B, Shalbhanjika. The shalabhanjika, a woman holding the branch of a tree, comes from popular fertility beliefs, not from Buddhist teaching.

The gateways of the Great Stupa at Sanchi carry rich carvings. Many show the Buddha's life without showing him in human form, using symbols instead. Alongside these, the sculptors carved figures drawn from wider popular traditions, such as yakshas, yakshis, elephants and the shalabhanjika, a graceful woman whose touch was believed to make trees flower and bear fruit. Her presence shows how Buddhism absorbed older local beliefs.

A is wrong: the empty seat stands for the Buddha's meditation and enlightenment, a direct Buddhist symbol.

C is wrong: the tree, the Bodhi tree, recalls the Buddha's enlightenment at Bodh Gaya.

D is wrong: the wheel stands for the Dharmachakra, the first sermon at Sarnath.

Exam tip: Sanchi symbols: lotus or elephant for birth, empty seat or tree for enlightenment, wheel for the first sermon, stupa for the mahaparinirvana.

The correct answer is B, Manipur. The Sangai, also called the dancing deer, is the state animal of Manipur and survives only in the floating meadows of the Keibul Lamjao National Park on Loktak Lake; the festival named after it is held in late November and shows the state's crafts, cuisine, indigenous sports and the Ras Lila of Manipuri dance. Option A, Assam, holds Bihu, the festival of the agricultural year, and the Kaziranga elephant festival. Option C, Tripura, celebrates Kharchi Puja and the Garia festival. Option D, Sikkim, holds the Losar and Saga Dawa observances of its Buddhist calendar. The pairing to carry into the exam is Sangai, the brow-antlered deer, Keibul Lamjao, Loktak Lake and Manipur, all four of which belong to the same state and often appear together.

The correct answer is B, Udvada in Gujarat, where the Iranshah Atash Behram keeps the fire that Parsi tradition traces to the community which left Iran and landed on the Gujarat coast. An Atash Behram is the highest of the three grades of Zoroastrian fire temple, and of the nine in the world eight are in India, at Udvada, Navsari, Surat and Mumbai, with the ninth at Yazd in Iran. Option A, Navsari, does have an Atash Behram and is an important Parsi centre, but it is not the seat of the Iranshah fire. Option C, Sanjan, is the place where the migrants are said to have come ashore, which makes it the cleverest distractor, since the fire later moved through several places before reaching Udvada. Option D, Malabar Hill in Mumbai, is the site of the Towers of Silence, the community's traditional place for the disposal of the dead, not a fire temple. Non-Parsis are not admitted inside a fire temple.