Art & Culture Mixed Quiz: Set 44

The Rigveda manuscripts, preserved at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune, were inscribed on the International Register in 2007 as a record of one of the oldest surviving bodies of religious poetry anywhere.

Swadesh Darshan was launched in 2014-15 as a central sector scheme of the Ministry of Tourism, which means the entire expenditure is borne by the central government, and its purpose is the integrated development of tourist circuits built around a theme such as Buddhism, the Ramayana or the coast.

It was translated into Pahlavi in the Persian empire and from that version into Arabic as Kalila wa Dimna, the two names being those of the jackals of the stories, and from Arabic it passed into Persian, Syriac, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and then into the languages of Europe.

The Survey was set up in that year, in the first years of Crown rule after the revolt of 1857, with Alexander Cunningham as its first Archaeological Surveyor, and it was reorganised as a full department with Cunningham as Director-General in 1871.

The scheme began in 2014-15 as PRASAD, the Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual Augmentation Drive, and was renamed in 2017 as the National Mission on Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual, Heritage Augmentation Drive.

In early Buddhist art the Buddha was not shown in human form, and an empty seat stood for him seated in meditation.

The Survey is an attached office of that ministry, has its head office in New Delhi and divides the country into circles, each under a Superintending Archaeologist, which look after the monuments and sites declared to be of national importance.

Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh joined the network as a City of Music in 2023, recognised for the Gwalior gharana, the oldest surviving gharana of khayal singing, and for its association with Tansen, the musician of Akbar's court, whose tomb and annual Tansen Samaroh are in the city.

The two manuscripts were inscribed on the International Register in April 2025 on a nomination made by the Ministry of Culture, and both are in the custody of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune.

The Ramakien is the Thai retelling of the Ramayana, painted along the galleries of the Emerald Buddha temple at Bangkok and performed in masked dance; the kings of the present Thai dynasty take the title Rama from it, and the old capital Ayutthaya is named after Ayodhya.

The name is the Thai form of Ayodhya, the city of Rama in the Ramayana, and it fits a court whose epic was the Ramakien and whose kings bore the title Rama.

It began in 2006, is held every January at the Diggi Palace in Jaipur, admits visitors free of charge and draws writers, translators and publishers from many countries, which is how it came to be called the greatest literary show on Earth.

HRIDAY covered twelve heritage cities with an outlay of five hundred crore rupees, namely Ajmer, Amaravati, Amritsar, Badami, Dwarka, Gaya, Kanchipuram, Mathura, Puri, Varanasi, Velankanni and Warangal.

Vasco da Gama died at Kochi in 1524 and was buried in this church, and his remains were moved to Portugal some years later, though the gravestone is still shown to visitors.

The correct answer is B, Daya Ram Sahni, who dug at Harappa on the bank of the Ravi in 1921 while John Marshall was Director-General, and who ten years later became the first Indian to head the Survey.

The Zonal Cultural Centres were created from 1985 onwards to work with folk and tribal arts across cultural rather than political boundaries, and there are seven of them: the North Zone Centre at Patiala, the North Central Zone Centre at Prayagraj, the West Zone Centre at Udaipur, the South Zone…

The correct answer is B, Xuanzang, who travelled overland through Central Asia in the seventh century, spent years in India in the reign of Harshavardhana, studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Silabhadra, and carried manuscripts back to China, where he translated them and left the fullest foreign account of…

Adopt a Heritage was announced on World Tourism Day in 2017 by the Ministry of Tourism along with the Ministry of Culture and the Archaeological Survey of India, and it allows a company, trust or individual to take up a monument and pay for its drinking water, toilets, signage, lighting…

He found the Survey starved of money and nearly wound up, restored its budget, appointed John Marshall as Director-General in 1902 and carried the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904, the first law in India that let the government protect a monument and stop its owner from damaging or exporting…

Incredible India was launched by the Ministry of Tourism in 2002 as an international marketing campaign, and its advertisements in foreign magazines and on television turned Indian tourism into a recognised brand, with the exclamation mark in the logo forming the letter I. The campaign has since had further editions.