Manipur, Meghalaya and Mizoram GK: Capitals, Lakes and Festivals

The correct answer is B, Imphal. Imphal lies in the valley at the centre of Manipur, surrounded by hills, and holds the Kangla Fort, the old seat of the Meitei kings, and Ima Keithel, the market run entirely by women. Option A is wrong; Aizawl is the capital of Mizoram, which stands on a long ridge and from which the Tropic of Cancer passes close by. Option C is wrong; Shillong is the capital of Meghalaya and was the capital of undivided Assam until 1972, when Meghalaya was separated and Assam moved its capital to Dispur. Option D is wrong; Kohima is the capital of Nagaland and is remembered for the battle fought there in 1944, though its nearness to Manipur makes it a natural distractor. Imphal is also where the Indian National Army campaign of 1944 was directed, and Moirang in the same state saw the flag raised in April of that year.

The correct answer is C, Manipur. Keibul Lamjao lies in the southern part of Loktak Lake and rests on phumdis, floating mats of soil, roots and decaying vegetation thick enough to carry animals and even huts; nowhere else in the world is a national park built on such a surface. It was created to protect the sangai, the brow-antlered deer that is the state animal of Manipur. Option A is wrong; the national parks of Meghalaya are Nokrek and Balphakram, both in the Garo hills and both on solid ground. Option B is wrong; Assam has Kaziranga and Manas, famous for the one-horned rhinoceros and for the tiger reserve on the Bhutan border, but no floating park. Option D is wrong; Mizoram has Phawngpui Blue Mountain National Park and Murlen National Park, which lie in high hill country.

The correct answer is A, phumdi. A phumdi is a mat of soil, plant matter and organic debris in various stages of decay that floats on the surface of Loktak Lake in Manipur; the largest of them carries Keibul Lamjao National Park, and fishermen build circular enclosures called athaphums from them. Option B is wrong; a beel is an oxbow lake or a wetland of the Brahmaputra and Ganga floodplains, the word used in Assam and Bengal, as in Deepor Beel near Guwahati. Option C is wrong; a chaur is a seasonal waterlogged depression of north Bihar, such as the Kabar Taal in Begusarai. Option D is wrong; jheel is only the general Hindi word for a lake or a marsh and names no particular formation. The specific vocabulary of each region is exactly what this kind of question tests.

The correct answer is A, 21 January 1972. The North-Eastern Areas Reorganisation Act 1971 took effect on that day, turning Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura into full states and creating the Union Territories of Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, then called the North East Frontier Agency; the day is observed as statehood day in all three states. Option B is wrong for these three but is the date on which Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh became states, fifteen years later. Option C is wrong; 1 December 1963 is the day Nagaland became the sixteenth state of India, the first of the north-eastern states to be created after independence. Option D is wrong; 16 May 1975 is the day Sikkim became the twenty-second state under the thirty-sixth amendment. Learning these four dates in order answers most questions set on the north-east.

The correct answer is B, Meghalaya. The name is Sanskrit for the home of the clouds and was chosen for the new state in 1972 because of the rainfall of its southern slopes, which face the moist air coming off the Bay of Bengal and receive the heaviest rain in the country at Mawsynram and Cherrapunji. Option A is wrong; Mizoram is called the land of the highlanders or the land of the blue mountains, from Phawngpui, its highest peak. Option B being correct, option C is wrong; Manipur is called the jewelled land or, in a phrase of Jawaharlal Nehru, the jewel of India, from the valley ringed by hills. Option D is wrong; Sikkim is often described as the land of the thunderbolt or, in the Lepcha phrase, the valley of rice, and its mountain Kanchenjunga is the highest in India. These epithets are a standard source of questions in this part of the syllabus.

The correct answer is B, Meghalaya. Mawsynram lies in the East Khasi Hills district, a short distance west of Cherrapunji, now called Sohra, and the two places between them hold the records for rainfall in the country; the moist air from the Bay of Bengal is forced up the steep southern face of the Khasi hills, cools and sheds its water in enormous quantity. Option A is wrong; Assam lies in the Brahmaputra valley, which is wet but nowhere near these figures, and its rainfall questions usually concern floods rather than records. Option C is wrong; Arunachal Pradesh is heavily watered and holds the largest forest cover among the north-eastern states, but its wettest stations do not approach Mawsynram. Option D is wrong; Nagaland has a hill climate of moderate rainfall. The pairing of Mawsynram and Cherrapunji with Meghalaya is one of the most frequently asked facts about the north-east.

The correct answer is A, Meghalaya. In the Khasi and Jaintia hills villagers train the aerial roots of the Indian rubber fig across streams and let them thicken over decades into bridges that strengthen with age rather than rotting, as a wooden bridge would in that rainfall; the double-decker bridge at Nongriat near Cherrapunji is the best known of them and they are called jingkieng jri locally. Option B is wrong; Mizoram is known for its bamboo, its Cheraw dance and the Blue Mountain, not for root bridges. Option C is wrong; Manipur is known for Loktak Lake and the floating national park, which is the other living landscape of the north-east and is sometimes confused with this one. Option D is wrong; Tripura is known for Neermahal, the water palace, and the rock carvings of Unakoti. The root bridges are among the features proposed for World Heritage listing.

The correct answer is B, the Garos. Wangala is the post-harvest festival of the Garo people of the western hills of Meghalaya, held in autumn in thanksgiving to Misi Saljong, the giver of the harvest, and it takes its popular name from the long drums played in rows; the Khasis of the same state hold Nongkrem and Shad Suk Mynsiem, and the Jaintias hold Behdienkhlam. Option A is wrong; the Mizos hold Chapchar Kut in spring, with the Cheraw bamboo dance, and Mim Kut and Pawl Kut later in the year. Option C is wrong; the Meiteis of the Manipur valley hold Lai Haraoba, Yaoshang and Ningol Chakouba, the festival at which married daughters are invited home. Option D is wrong; the Angamis of Nagaland hold Sekrenyi, and the Nagaland festival best known outside the state is the Hornbill Festival at Kisama each December.

The correct answer is B, 20 February 1987. Mizoram became the twenty-third state of India on that day under the fifty-third amendment of the Constitution, and Arunachal Pradesh became the twenty-fourth state on the same date. Option A is wrong for statehood but is a real date in the story: on 21 January 1972 the Mizo hills district of Assam was separated as the Union Territory of Mizoram, which it remained for fifteen years. Option C is wrong as the date of statehood, though it is the date of the Mizo Peace Accord, signed on 30 June 1986 between the Government of India and the Mizo National Front, which made statehood possible; a careless reader picks it. Option D is wrong; 1 December 1963 is the statehood day of Nagaland. The useful pairing to carry into the hall is 1972 for the Union Territory, 1986 for the accord and 1987 for the state.

The correct answer is A, the Mizo National Front. The Front had grown out of the famine relief committee formed during the Mautam of the nineteen fifties and had been in armed revolt since 1966 under Laldenga; the accord signed on 30 June 1986 ended the insurgency, gave the territory statehood and brought Laldenga into office as chief minister, and it is widely regarded as the most durable accord of its kind in India. Option B is wrong; the Mizo Union was the earlier political party that worked within the system from the nineteen forties and had dissolved long before. Option C is wrong; the National Socialist Council of Nagaland is a Naga organisation, with which a ceasefire was agreed in 1997 and a framework agreement in 2015. Option D is wrong; the United Liberation Front of Asom is an Assamese organisation, and the Assam Accord of 1985 was signed with the All Assam Students Union, not with it.

The correct answer is C, Mizoram. In the Cheraw, pairs of men sit facing each other and tap long bamboo staves together in rhythm while dancers step in and out of the closing bamboos; it is performed above all at Chapchar Kut, the spring festival held when the cleared jhum fields are waiting to be burnt, and it is the best known dance of the state. Option A is wrong; the dance of Manipur is the Manipuri classical form, with the Ras Leela and the drum dance Pung Cholom, and its martial art is Thang-ta. Option B is wrong; Meghalaya has the Nongkrem dance and Shad Suk Mynsiem of the Khasis and the Wangala drumming of the Garos. Option D is wrong; Tripura has the Hojagiri, danced by Reang women balancing on earthen pitchers, which is the other north-eastern dance commonly offered in these options and is easy to confuse with the Cheraw.

The correct answer is C, Mizoram. Article 371G, inserted when the state was created in 1986, provides that no Act of Parliament about the religious or social practices of the Mizos, Mizo customary law and procedure, the administration of civil and criminal justice involving decisions according to Mizo customary law, or the ownership and transfer of land shall apply to Mizoram unless the Legislative Assembly so decides by resolution. Option A is wrong; the corresponding provision for Nagaland is Article 371A, the model on which the Mizoram article was drafted. Option B is wrong; Manipur has Article 371C, which provides for a committee of the Assembly for the hill areas. Option D is wrong; Sikkim has Article 371F, inserted by the thirty-sixth amendment in 1975. Learning the sequence as A for Nagaland, C for Manipur, F for Sikkim, G for Mizoram and H for Arunachal Pradesh prevents the usual confusion.