Awards & Honours Mixed Quiz: Set 30

The correct answer is D, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. After troops under General Dyer fired on a gathering at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, Tagore wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, on 31 May 1919, renouncing the knighthood conferred on him in 1915. Option A is wrong, although the Rowlatt Act of 1919 led to the protests that brought the crowd to Jallianwala Bagh, because the renunciation was a response to the firing itself, which Tagore named in his letter. Option B is wrong because the Partition of Bengal of 1905, which Tagore opposed in song, was annulled in 1911, long before the knighthood. Option C is wrong because the Simon Commission came to India in 1928, nine years after the renunciation.

The correct answer is B, 1861. The Order of the Star of India was created in 1861, four years after the Revolt of 1857, to tie the princely rulers and senior officials of India to the British Crown, and its motto was Heaven's light our guide; it was given three classes in 1866, the Knight Grand Commander, the Knight Commander and the Companion. Option A is wrong because 1857 is the year of the Revolt itself, which was the reason for the order rather than its date. Option C is wrong because 1877 is the year of the Delhi Durbar at which Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. Option D is wrong because 1878 is the year of the other two orders, the Order of the Indian Empire and the Order of the Crown of India.

The correct answer is B, the Akademi Ratna or Akademi Fellowship. The Fellowship is the Akademi's highest honour and is deliberately scarce: not more than forty living persons hold it at any one time, which is why it is reserved for masters and senior scholars of the performing arts. Option A is wrong because the Akademi Puraskar, given every year with a tamrapatra, an angavastram and a purse, ranks below the Fellowship; a Fellow has usually received the Puraskar earlier in life. Option C is wrong because the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar was instituted in 2006 for artists who have not completed forty years of age and is an encouragement award, the junior honour of the three. Option D is wrong because the Tagore Akademi Puraskar was a special honour given in 2011 for the hundred and fiftieth birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore and is not the standing highest award.

The correct answer is C, music, dance and drama. The Sangeet Natak Akademi is the national academy for the performing arts, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Culture with its office at Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi, and it has given its annual Akademi Puraskar since 1952. Option A is wrong because literature belongs to the Sahitya Akademi, which gives the Sahitya Akademi Award in the recognised Indian languages. Option B is wrong because painting, sculpture and graphic art belong to the Lalit Kala Akademi, whose National Akademi Awards are announced with the National Exhibition of Art. Option D is wrong because cinema is handled by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which announces the National Film Awards and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award; none of the three academies deals with film. Learning the three academies by field settles most questions in this chapter.

The correct answer is D, Khudadad Khan. A sepoy of the 129th Baluchis, Khudadad Khan won the Victoria Cross for holding his machine gun position in Belgium in October 1914, becoming the first Indian to receive the decoration after Indian soldiers were made eligible for it in 1911. Option A is wrong but is the closest trap: Darwan Singh Negi of the Garhwal Rifles also won the Victoria Cross in 1914, a few weeks later in the same war. Option B is wrong because Gobind Singh won his Victoria Cross in 1917, in France. Option C is wrong because Shahamad Khan won his in 1916, in Mesopotamia. All four are genuine Indian recipients of the award, so the question turns entirely on who was first, which makes 1914 and the 129th Baluchis the detail to remember.

The correct answer is B, Clare Awards. At their start in 1954 the awards carried the name of Clare Mendonca, a critic associated with The Times of India, and only later did they come to be called the Filmfare Awards after the magazine. Option A, Phalke Awards, is wrong; the Dadasaheb Phalke Award is a government honour instituted in 1969 and presented with the National Film Awards. Option C, Times Awards, is a plausible invention because the magazine belongs to The Times Group, but the awards were never called that. Option D, Bombay Film Awards, is wrong as well and is offered only because the first ceremony was held in Bombay. This is a favourite question precisely because the earlier name is unexpected, so store the name Clare Mendonca with it.

The correct answer is C, forty years. The Sangeet Natak Akademi instituted the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar in 2006, naming it after the shehnai player Ustad Bismillah Khan, to recognise promise in music, dance, theatre, the traditional and folk arts and puppetry, and the eligibility condition is that the artist has not completed forty years of age. Option A is wrong because thirty years is the ceiling used by some state youth awards, not by this one. Option B is wrong because thirty-five is a distractor drawn from other young talent schemes. Option D is wrong because forty-five would place the award well into mid career and defeat its purpose as an encouragement honour. A useful cross link is that forty also appears in this chapter as the ceiling on the number of living Akademi Fellows, so keep the two uses of the figure separate.

The correct answer is C, Kerala Jyothi. Kerala instituted three civilian honours in 2021, modelled on the idea of a graded set: Kerala Jyothi at the top, Kerala Prabha next and Kerala Sree third. The first Kerala Jyothi went to the Malayalam writer and film maker M. T. Vasudevan Nair. Option A, Kerala Sree, is the third of the three, and option B, Kerala Prabha, is the second, so both are real awards but neither is the highest. Option D is wrong because the whole point of the scheme is that the three are graded, exactly as the Padma awards are graded into Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri. A simple memory rule is that light gets weaker down the list: Jyothi is a flame, Prabha is a glow and Sree is an honorific.

The correct answer is B, 1856. Queen Victoria instituted the Victoria Cross in 1856, and it bears the words For Valour; the award was then backdated so that acts of gallantry from 1854 onwards, during the Crimean War, could be recognised. Option A is wrong because 1837 is the year of the Indian Order of Merit, instituted by the East India Company and the oldest gallantry decoration in India. Option C is a careful trap: 1854 is the year from which the award counted, not the year it was created, so a question that asks when it was instituted must be answered with 1856. Option D is wrong because 1861 belongs to the Order of the Star of India. Indian soldiers became eligible for the Victoria Cross only in 1911.

The correct answer is C, 1961. The series was instituted that year to recognise acts of a humane nature in saving life from drowning, fire, electrocution, mine accidents and similar danger, and it is administered by the Ministry of Home Affairs. Option A is wrong because 1950 is the year the wartime gallantry awards, the Param Vir Chakra, the Maha Vir Chakra and the Vir Chakra, were instituted, with effect from 26 January 1950. Option B is wrong because 1954 is the year the Bharat Ratna and the Padma awards were instituted, a date often swapped with this one. Option D is wrong because 1972 belongs to no award of this family. The dates worth holding together in this topic are 1950 for the Chakras, 1954 for the civilian honours, 1951 for the police medals, 1957 for the children's bravery award and 1961 for the Jeevan Raksha Padak.

The correct answer is B, the Music Academy, Madras. The Academy, founded in 1928 in the wake of the Madras session of the Indian National Congress, began conferring the title Sangita Kalanidhi in 1929, and it is bestowed at the Academy's annual conference during the Margazhi music season on the musician who presides over that conference. It is a private institution's honour, not a state award, which is exactly the point an option sheet tests. Option A is wrong because the Sangeet Natak Akademi gives its own Puraskar and Fellowship in Carnatic music, but not this title. Option C is wrong because the Government of Tamil Nadu confers the Kalaimamani through its own body for music, dance, theatre and cinema. Option D is wrong because the Kalakshetra Foundation at Chennai, founded by Rukmini Devi Arundale, is a teaching institution in dance and music rather than an awarding body of this kind.

The correct answer is B, 5 September. The President confers the National Award to Teachers on Teachers' Day, which falls on 5 September, the birthday of Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. Option A, 14 November, is Children's Day in India, the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru, and it carries no teachers' award. Option C, 11 November, is National Education Day, observed on the birth anniversary of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India's first education minister, which makes it a very close distractor in this topic. Option D, 28 February, is National Science Day, marking the announcement of the Raman effect. Keeping the four education and science related days apart, 5 September, 11 November, 14 November and 28 February, settles a cluster of questions that recur every year. Note also that separate national awards exist for teachers in higher education and for teachers of children with disabilities.

The correct answer is D, the Indian Order of Merit. Instituted by the East India Company in 1837, the Indian Order of Merit was the oldest gallantry decoration in India and, until 1911, the only such award open to Indian soldiers, who could not then receive the Victoria Cross. Option A is wrong because the Victoria Cross was created in 1856 and Indians were made eligible for it only at the Delhi Durbar of 1911. Option B is wrong because the Indian Distinguished Service Medal came much later, in 1907, and ranked below the Order of Merit. Option C is wrong because the Order of the Indian Empire was an order of chivalry of 1878 for officials and princes, not a gallantry award for soldiers. Remember 1837 for the Order of Merit and 1911 for eligibility.

The correct answer is A, Prithviraj Kapoor. Prithviraj Kapoor, the actor of both stage and screen and the founder of Prithvi Theatres, received the award in 1971 and was its first posthumous recipient. Option B is wrong because B. N. Sircar, the producer who founded New Theatres in Calcutta, received the award in 1970, the year before, and received it in his lifetime. Option C is wrong because Pankaj Mullick, the composer and singer, received it in 1972, the year after. Option D is wrong because V. Shantaram, the director remembered for Do Aankhen Barah Haath and other films, received it much later, in 1985. The three consecutive years of 1970, 1971 and 1972 are worth holding together, because they are set against one another in exactly this way.

The correct answer is B, 1980. The Government of Madhya Pradesh instituted the Kalidas Samman in 1980, in the same year as the Tansen Samman, and named it after the Sanskrit poet and dramatist Kalidasa, whose association with Ujjain the state claims. The award is national in scope and rotates across classical music, classical dance, theatre and the plastic arts, so a recipient in one year may be a painter and in the next a dancer. Option A is wrong because 1975 precedes the state's cultural awards policy of 1980, under which both sammans were created. Option C is wrong because 1985 is close to the founding of two later honours of the same family, the Tulsi Samman of 1983 and the Lata Mangeshkar Award of 1984. Option D is wrong because by 1990 the samman had already been given for a decade. Remember 1980 as the year of both Tansen and Kalidas.

The correct answer is C, M. S. Subbulakshmi. The Carnatic vocalist M. S. Subbulakshmi received the Bharat Ratna in 1998 and was the first musician in the list. Option A is wrong because Lata Mangeshkar, the playback singer, was honoured in 2001, three years later. Option B is wrong because Bismillah Khan, the shehnai player from Varanasi, was honoured in the same year as Lata Mangeshkar, 2001. Option D is wrong because the Hindustani classical vocalist Bhimsen Joshi received the award in 2008. The sitar player Ravi Shankar, honoured in 1999, also comes after Subbulakshmi, so the order to remember is Subbulakshmi in 1998, Ravi Shankar in 1999, Lata Mangeshkar and Bismillah Khan in 2001 and Bhimsen Joshi in 2008. The wider point to hold is that six musicians appear in the list in all, drawn from Carnatic and Hindustani classical music, film playback singing and the shehnai, and a question may ask for any one of them by instrument or by gharana rather than by name.

The correct answer is A, Queen Victoria's assumption of the title Empress of India. Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India at the Delhi Durbar of 1877, and the Order of the Indian Empire was created the following year to honour a wider and more junior group of officials than the Star of India covered; its motto, Imperatricis auspiciis, means under the auspices of the Empress. Option B is wrong because the Revolt of 1857 led to the earlier Order of the Star of India, of 1861. Option C is wrong because the Delhi Durbar of 1911, held for George V, is remembered for the shift of the capital to Delhi and for Indians becoming eligible for the Victoria Cross. Option D is wrong because the Partition of Bengal came in 1905.

The correct answer is A, Krishnarao Shankar Pandit. The vocalist of the Gwalior gharana, the oldest of the Hindustani khayal gharanas, received the first Tansen Samman from the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 1980, a fitting choice because the samman is presented near Gwalior at Tansen's memorial. Option B is wrong because Kumar Gandharva, who made his home at Dewas in Madhya Pradesh and sang in a style of his own drawn from folk tunes, was honoured later and not first. Option C is wrong because Bhimsen Joshi belonged to the Kirana gharana and is associated above all with the Bharat Ratna conferred on him and with the Sawai Gandharva festival at Pune. Option D is wrong because Amjad Ali Khan is a sarod player of the Senia Bangash lineage, and the samman in its early years went to vocalists of the Gwalior tradition.

The correct answer is A, the Param Vir Chakra. The Param Vir Chakra, instituted on 26 January 1950 with effect from 15 August 1947, is India's highest award for gallantry in the face of the enemy and so takes the place the Victoria Cross held before independence; it was designed by Savitri Khanolkar and its first recipient was Major Somnath Sharma. Option B is wrong because the Ashoka Chakra is the highest gallantry award for valour away from the battlefield, so it corresponds to the George Cross rather than the Victoria Cross. Option C is wrong because the Maha Vir Chakra is the second in the wartime series, below the Param Vir Chakra. Option D is wrong because the Bharat Ratna, instituted in 1954, is the highest civilian honour and not a gallantry award at all.

The correct answer is A, Devika Rani. India's highest honour in cinema was instituted in 1969, the birth centenary year of Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, who made Raja Harishchandra in 1913, and the award for 1969 went to the actress Devika Rani. It is announced with the National Film Awards by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which keeps cinema outside the Ministry of Culture and its three academies. Option B is wrong because Nargis is remembered as the first actress to receive the Padma Shri in Indian cinema and was later a member of the Rajya Sabha, but not as the first Phalke awardee. Option C is wrong because Prithviraj Kapoor received the award in the early years, in 1971, and posthumously, which makes him a strong distractor. Option D is wrong because Sulochana, the silent era star, belongs to an earlier generation and did not receive it.