Awards & Honours Quiz: Sangeet Natak Akademi Awards, Tansen Samman and Other Art Awards

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 B, Madhya Pradesh. The Tansen Samman was instituted by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 1980 for Hindustani classical music and is presented at the Tansen Samaroh held every year at Behat near Gwalior, where the memorial of Tansen stands. Madhya Pradesh also gives the Kalidas Samman, the Tulsi Samman for folk and tribal art, the Lata Mangeshkar Award for light music and the Kabir Samman for poetry, so the state is the single most productive source of questions in this chapter. Option A is wrong because Uttar Pradesh gives the Yash Bharati and Bharat Bharati honours instead. Option C is wrong because Rajasthan's cultural awards are administered through its own akademis and do not include this samman. Option D is wrong because Maharashtra's state honours do not include the Tansen Samman, although Gwalior gharana musicians have long worked in Maharashtra.

The correct answer is A, Hindustani classical music. The samman is named after Tansen, the singer of Akbar's court who is counted among the nine jewels of that court, and the Government of Madhya Pradesh gives it for Hindustani classical music at the Tansen Samaroh at Behat near Gwalior. Option B is wrong because the highest recognition in Carnatic music is the Sangita Kalanidhi, conferred by the Music Academy in Madras, and no Madhya Pradesh samman is reserved for that tradition. Option C is wrong because dance in Madhya Pradesh is honoured through the Kalidas Samman in the years when that award's rotation falls on classical dance, not through the Tansen Samman. Option D is wrong for the same reason: theatre is one of the rotating fields of the Kalidas Samman. Remember the pairing as Tansen for Hindustani music and Kalidas for the rotating national award.

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, 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 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, 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 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, 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.

The correct answer is B, the Lalit Kala Akademi. The national academy of art, set up in 1954 and working from Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi, holds the National Exhibition of Art and gives the National Akademi Awards to the works selected in it, covering painting, sculpture, graphic art and allied forms; it also elects its own Fellows. Option A is wrong because the Sangeet Natak Akademi deals only with the performing arts, giving the Akademi Puraskar, the Fellowship and the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar. Option C is wrong because the Sahitya Akademi is the academy of letters and gives awards in the recognised Indian languages along with the Bhasha Samman and translation prizes. Option D is wrong because the Indian Council for Cultural Relations carries Indian culture abroad through chairs, centres and exchanges, and is not an awarding academy for the visual arts.