Bihar Mixed Quiz: Set 18

Bhagalpur on the Ganga has woven tussar silk for centuries and is called the silk city of Bihar; its handloom weavers produce the coarse golden silk from cocoons reared on forest trees, and the city is a cluster for silk furnishing and sari weaving.

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.

Rajgir, the old capital of Magadha in Nalanda district, holds the Malmas Mela in the intercalary month called Malmas or Adhimas, which returns about once in three years.

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.

Bismillah Khan was born at Dumraon in 1916, in the present Buxar district, into a family of shehnai players, and later settled at Varanasi.

Manjusha art belongs to Bhagalpur and the Angika-speaking country around it. The paintings are made on the manjusha, a temple-shaped box built of bamboo strips and jute paper, which is carried in procession during the Bihula-Bishahari festival of the rainy season, and the panels tell the story of Bihula and…

Bhojpuri is spoken by crores of people in western Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Indian diaspora of Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname and Trinidad, and it has a rich folk theatre, yet it has not been added to the Eighth Schedule.

The festival takes its very name from shashthi, the sixth day of the bright half of Kartik, on which the evening offering to the setting sun is made.

The Darbhanga gharana, carried by the Mallick family under the patronage of the Darbhanga Raj, is one of the surviving gharanas of Dhrupad, the oldest form of Hindustani classical singing; Pandit Ram Chatur Mallick and Pandit Siyaram Tiwari belong to it.

The Act of 1935 reorganised several provinces, and on 1 April 1936 Orissa was constituted as a separate province, leaving Bihar on its own.

This is the traditional script of the Mithila region, used for Maithili manuscripts, panjis of genealogy and ritual texts, and it is related to the eastern group of scripts that also produced Bengali and Assamese letters.

The Barabar hills in Jehanabad district hold the Lomas Rishi and Sudama caves, cut in the Mauryan period and polished inside to a mirror finish; the carved chaitya-arch doorway of the Lomas Rishi cave is the earliest example of that motif in stone.

Mahendar Misir of Misrauliya village in Saran district composed and sang Purbi, a light classical folk form built on the longing of a wife whose husband has gone away, and he is remembered as the emperor of Purbi.

Gandhi reached Patna on 10 April 1917, stayed briefly in the city, then went to Muzaffarpur, where J. B. Kripalani was teaching and had gathered students to receive him, and only afterwards moved on to Motihari in Champaran, where the order to leave the district was served on him.

Bhikhari Thakur of Kutubpur in Saran district wrote, composed and staged plays with his own travelling troupe, and Bidesiya, on the suffering of a wife whose husband has migrated for work, became the name of a whole style of Bhojpuri theatre.

The peasant organisations of the provinces came together at Lucknow in April 1936 as the All India Kisan Sabha, and the Bihar leader Sahajanand Saraswati was chosen its first president, with N. G. Ranga of Andhra as general secretary.

Sama-Chakeva is the Mithila festival in which girls make clay figures of the birds Sama and Chakeva, sing for the long life of their brothers through the Kartik nights and set the figures afloat or bid them farewell at the end; the songs are among the best known of Maithili…

The name itself preserves the link: Magadha gives Magadhi, and Magadhi gives Magahi. Ardhamagadhi, a close relative, is the language in which the Jain canon preserves the sermons of Mahavira, and Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, grew out of the same eastern speech.

Vidyapati, the Maithili poet of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who was honoured as the Maithil Kavi Kokil, wrote padas on Radha and Krishna that were sung in performance, and from this singing grew the Kirtaniya plays of Mithila, also staged as Bidapat Naach.

The dialect takes its name from that region, and a demand for its recognition is made alongside the demand for Bhojpuri.