Art & Culture Mixed Quiz: Set 50

The tomb in Mehrauli, Delhi, built in the late 13th century, has the earliest surviving true arch in India. A true arch is built from wedge-shaped stones (voussoirs) held in place by a keystone at the top, so it spreads weight sideways.

The pillar was set up by Heliodorus, the Greek ambassador of the Indo-Greek king Antialcidas at the court of a local ruler, and its Brahmi inscription calls it a Garuda pillar raised in honour of Vasudeva, the god of gods; it is the standard epigraphic proof that Bhagavatism, the early…

The best-known Chandimangala, Chandimangal or Abhayamangal, was composed in Bengali by Mukundarama Chakravarti, honoured as Kavikankan, in the late 16th century.

Chand Baori is at Abhaneri in Dausa district of Rajasthan, opposite the Harshat Mata temple, and is attributed to King Chanda of the Nikumbha house in about the ninth century; its criss-cross flights descending thirteen storeys make it one of the deepest stepwells in India.

Dhanyakataka is the ancient Dharanikota, beside Amaravati on the Krishna river in present-day Andhra Pradesh. Dhanyakataka was a capital of the Satavahanas, who ruled the Deccan around the beginning of the Common Era, and the great Amaravati stupa stood close by.

The original Swadesh Darshan spread its money along fifteen themed circuits, each linking several places and often several states, and experience showed that the spending became thin and scattered.

Its Chitrasutra section sets out the rules of painting and image making, including proportion, posture, the limbs of painting and the measurement system called iconometry, and it is grouped with the Shilpa Shastras and the manuals Manasara and Mayamata as the canonical guides for artists.

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.

The Devi Mahatmya, known also as the Durga Saptashati or Chandi Path from its seven hundred verses, is a section of that Purana; it narrates the goddess slaying Mahishasura, Shumbha and Nishumbha, and is recited through Navaratri, which is why it is treated as the first full statement of the…

The amendment of 2010 declared the belt of a hundred metres around every centrally protected monument or site a prohibited area, in which construction and mining are barred except for repairs to the monument itself, and the next two hundred metres a regulated area, where building needs the permission of…

The kolam is the Tamil threshold drawing, made each morning in white rice flour on ground that has been swept and sprinkled.

The gesture joins the thumb and forefinger of each hand into a circle, the wheel, and holds them before the chest, marking the turning of the wheel of law in the deer park at Sarnath, where the Buddha preached to his first five disciples.

Babur laid out the Aram Bagh at Agra in 1528, within two years of the first battle of Panipat, and it is the oldest Mughal garden that still survives in India.

Fort Dansborg was built in 1620 at Tranquebar, now Tharangambadi in the Mayiladuthurai district of Tamil Nadu, after the Danish East India Company obtained the site from the Nayak ruler of Thanjavur.

Mahishasuramardini means the slayer of the buffalo demon Mahishasura, and the form shows the many-armed goddess, each hand holding a weapon given by a god, driving her trident into the demon as he emerges from the buffalo's body, with the lion at her side.

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…

The Dasha Mahavidyas are the ten great forms of the goddess in Tantric Shaktism, the list beginning with Kali and Tara and including Tripura Sundari, Bhuvaneshvari, Bhairavi, Chhinnamasta, Dhumavati, Bagalamukhi, Matangi and Kamala.

Mandana reverses the usual method: the floor or the lower wall is first washed with geru, the red ochre of the region, and the design is then laid over it in white chalk or lime, so the figure is light on a red field.

Jahangir built Shalimar Bagh above the Dal Lake in 1619 for his queen Nur Jahan, and it is the largest of the Mughal gardens of Kashmir, laid out in terraces with the Diwan-e-Aam, the Diwan-e-Khas and a zenana garden.

The word means three bends, and the posture shifts the head one way, the torso another and the hip a third, giving the figure the swaying grace seen in dancing images and in classical Odissi.