Haryana Mixed Quiz: Set 16

The Gugga or Gugga Naumi observance falls in the month of Bhadon, when the followers of Gugga Pir, the folk deity associated with protection from snakes, carry the chhari, a tall staff decorated with peacock feathers and coloured cloth, from village to village, dancing and singing his ballad as they…

Pandit Deepchand is the first great name in the history of Saang and is credited with turning a loose village entertainment into a sung play with a structure: an opening invocation, a story carried in verse, prose passages between the songs and a troupe built around the poet.

Hindi is the official language of Haryana, settled by the Haryana Official Language Act of 1969, and an amendment to that law in 2010 gave Punjabi the position of second official language of the state.

Haryanvi belongs to the Central or Western Hindi group of Indo-Aryan, which descends from Shauraseni Apabhramsha and also contains Khari Boli, Braj and Bundeli.

The Ragini is the stanza song of Haryana, built on a fixed refrain to which the singer returns after every verse.

The tomb stands on a mound at Thanesar, built in marble and sandstone with a tall Persian dome in a walled garden, and the resemblance to a small Mughal mausoleum has earned it the name Taj Mahal of Haryana.

Pandit Lakhmi Chand is the greatest of the Saang poets of Haryana, and his raginis are still sung across the state.

The fair runs for a fortnight every February, which is also the reason it is counted with the Taj Mahotsav at Agra and the Khajuraho Dance Festival as the February events of north and central India.

Pandit Jasraj was born in a village of Haryana into a family of musicians and became the best known voice of the Mewati gharana, which takes its name from the Mewat region on the Haryana and Rajasthan border.

Raja Nahar Singh of Ballabgarh, in the present Faridabad district, sided with the rebels of Delhi, and after the city was retaken he was arrested, tried and hanged in January 1858 at Chandni Chowk in Delhi, his state being confiscated.

One tradition places the birth of the Braj poet Surdas at Sihi, a village in Faridabad district, and Haryana claims him on that ground; other accounts place his birth at Runakta near Agra, so the question is always set as a tradition rather than as a settled fact.

Abdali, also known as Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of the Afghan kingdom at Kandahar, defeated the Marathas at Panipat on 14 January 1761 with the help of the Rohilla chief Najib-ud-Daula and Shuja-ud-Daula of Awadh.

A traditional Saang troupe was made up entirely of men, and the younger singers took the women's parts in costume, singing the same raginis in a higher register.

The tomb of Abd-ur-Rahim, known as Sheikh Chilli, stands on a high plinth at Thanesar in Kurukshetra district, with a marble dome and a madrasa court beside it, and belongs to the reign of Shah Jahan.

Sant Garib Das of Chhudani, in the present Jhajjar district, founded the Garibdasi sect in the eighteenth century and left a very large body of devotional verse, collected as the Sat Granth, which is still recited by his followers.

A senior civil servant, he took office as the first Governor of Haryana on 1 November 1966, the day the state was created, and swore in the first Chief Minister.

Chhathi takes its name from the number six, and the ceremony falls on the sixth day after a birth, when the mother and the newborn are brought out, the household is purified and the women of the family and the neighbourhood sing and dance in the courtyard.

Mewat recorded 907 females for every 1,000 males in 2011, the highest of any district in Haryana, even though the same district had the lowest literacy rate in the state.

Vishnu Prabhakar, who spent many years at Hisar and is counted among the writers of Haryana, wrote Awara Masiha, a biography of the Bengali novelist Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay built on years of travel and research, and it is the work for which he is best remembered.

Jyotisar, a short distance from the town of Kurukshetra, is held by tradition to be the spot where Krishna spoke the Gita to Arjuna before the Mahabharata war, and an old banyan tree there is shown as a witness to it.