Bihar Mixed Quiz: Set 17

Sikki is a reed grass of the wetlands of north Bihar whose stalks turn a bright golden colour when dried.

Madhubani painting is also called Mithila painting because it grew in the Mithila region of northern Bihar, chiefly in the districts of Madhubani and Darbhanga, and the form takes its common name from the first of these districts.

Sama Chakeva is a festival of the Mithila region of north Bihar, beginning on Kartik Purnima, when the migratory birds arrive.

Chhath is kept for the Sun God, Surya, along with Chhathi Maiya, and the whole ritual is built around the sun: the vratis stand in water and offer arghya, that is water and prasad, first to the setting sun on the evening of shashthi and then to the rising sun…

Bhikhari Thakur, born in 1887 at Kutubpur Diyara in Saran district, wrote the play Bidesia about a wife left behind when her husband migrates to Calcutta for work, and the name was then applied to the whole style of Bhojpuri naach he built, with its songs and its launda dancers.

He argued the case for separation in print, most notably in his 1906 pamphlet on the partition of Bengal and the separation of Bihar, used the press and the Bihari Students Conference to build opinion, and pressed the demand before the colonial government.

This amendment added four languages to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, namely Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, and raised the total number of scheduled languages from eighteen to twenty-two.

Vikramshila was founded by the Pala king Dharmapala and became, after Nalanda, the most important centre of Buddhist learning in eastern India, especially of tantric studies; its ruins at Antichak in Bhagalpur district show a large brick stupa surrounded by monastic cells.

The Patna Kalam was made by families of painters trained in the Mughal manner who left Delhi and Murshidabad in the eighteenth century and settled at Patna.

The government appointed the Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee in 1917 with Gandhi as one of its members, and acting on its report Parliament of the province passed the Champaran Agrarian Act in 1918.

Gaya holds the Pitrapaksha Mela in the dark half of Ashwin, when families come from across the country to offer pind daan at the Vishnupad temple and at the appointed spots along the Falgu river.

A sanyasi turned organiser, he built the Bihar Pradesh Kisan Sabha in 1929 to press tenants' claims against the zamindars, and the body became the model for the All India Kisan Sabha founded at Lucknow in April 1936, of which he was the first president with N. G. Ranga as…

Jhijhiya is danced by women of the Mithila region during Navratri, each carrying on her head an earthen pot pierced with many holes and holding a lighted lamp; the dance is offered to the Goddess and is traditionally believed to turn away witchcraft and evil spells.

Sher Shah was besieging the Bundelkhand fort of Kalinjar when a gunpowder explosion on 22 May 1545 fatally injured him; the fort fell on the same day.

Vidyapati was the poet of the Mithila court in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and his Maithili padavali of songs about Radha and Krishna is still sung in north Bihar.

Pir Ali Khan kept a bookshop at Patna which served as a meeting place for those planning the rising, and he led the attack of 3 July 1857 in the city.

Manjusha is called snake painting because the serpent of the Bishahari legend is its ruling motif: snakes fill the panels, and the borders carry a continuous wavy line that reads as a serpent, one of the border patterns being named lahariya, the wave.

Bihula Bishahari is the snake festival of the old Anga country, the belt around Bhagalpur, in which the goddess is worshipped as Bishahari and the sung story of Bihula, the young wife who is said to have brought her husband Bala Lakhandar back to life, is performed through the nights…

Jat-Jatin is danced in the Mithila and Koshi tract of north Bihar, usually by a pair representing the husband Jat and the wife Jatin; the song moves through their quarrel, the failure of the rains and the husband leaving the village in search of work, which makes it the folk…

His Varna Ratnakara, a fourteenth century work, is counted as the earliest prose composition in Maithili and indeed one of the earliest in any modern Indian language.