National Symbols of India: Flag, Emblem and Anthem

The correct answer is C, 26 January 1950. The State Emblem of India was adopted on the day the Constitution came into force and the country became a Republic. It is adapted from the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath, with three of the four lions visible, a Dharma Chakra on the abacus flanked by a bull and a horse, and the motto Satyameva Jayate from the Mundaka Upanishad below it in Devanagari script.

Option A, 15 August 1947, is Independence Day and is the date candidates most often pick by mistake. Option B, 26 January 1959, is the right day of the year but the wrong year and is placed there to punish careless reading. Option D, 15 August 1952, matches neither event. Keep the pair apart: the National Flag was adopted on 22 July 1947 by the Constituent Assembly, while the emblem and the National Anthem belong to January 1950.

The correct answer is D, Elephant. The Indian elephant, Elephas maximus indicus, was declared the National Heritage Animal in 2010 on the recommendation of the Elephant Task Force, so that its protection could be given the same weight as that of the tiger. The step went with Project Elephant, which works on elephant corridors and on reducing conflict between elephants and people.

Option A, the lion, was the National Animal of India until 1972 and survives in the wild only in the Gir forest of Gujarat, but it holds no heritage animal status. Option B, the horse, is not a national symbol at all, although a horse appears on the abacus of the State Emblem. Option C, the tiger, is the National Animal of India, adopted in 1972, and the distinction between National Animal and National Heritage Animal is exactly what this question tests.

The correct answer is A, 22 July 1947. The Constituent Assembly adopted the tricolour on that day, a few weeks before independence, after a committee under Dr Rajendra Prasad settled the design. The Congress flag was taken as the base, the spinning wheel at the centre was replaced by the navy blue Ashoka Chakra of twenty four spokes, and the ratio was fixed at two to three.

Option B, 15 August 1947, is the day the flag was first hoisted over an independent India, not the day it was adopted. Option C, 26 November 1949, is the day the Constituent Assembly adopted the Constitution, which is observed as Constitution Day. Option D, 26 January 1950, is the day the Constitution came into force and the day the State Emblem and the National Anthem were adopted, which is why it is the commonest wrong choice here.

The correct answer is B, two to three. The Flag Code of India fixes the shape of the National Flag as a rectangle whose width stands to its length as two to three, so a flag six hundred millimetres in length is four hundred millimetres in height. The three bands of deep saffron, white and dark green are of equal depth, and the navy blue Ashoka Chakra of twenty four spokes is placed at the centre of the white band with its diameter roughly equal to the depth of that band.

Options A, C and D are the ratios of other national flags and of ordinary printed sizes, and they are offered because candidates remember that the flag is a rectangle but not the fixed proportion. Note also that the flag is traditionally woven from hand spun khadi and is made to a Bureau of Indian Standards specification.

The correct answer is C, Mundaka Upanishad. Satyameva Jayate, meaning truth alone triumphs, comes from a verse of the Mundaka Upanishad, which belongs to the Atharva Veda. It is written in Devanagari script below the abacus of the State Emblem, and it was Madan Mohan Malaviya who is credited with bringing the phrase into national use.

Option A, the Rigveda, is the oldest of the Vedas and the source of the Gayatri Mantra, but not of this motto. Option B, the Bhagavad Gita, is part of the Mahabharata and is the source of many quoted verses, which makes it a plausible guess. Option D, the Arthashastra of Kautilya, is a treatise on statecraft and economy, and is associated with the Mauryas, whose Lion Capital the emblem is drawn from, so it is placed here as a trap of association.

The correct answer is A, Calcutta. Rabindranath Tagore's Bengali song was sung for the first time at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress on 27 December 1911. Its first stanza was adopted as the National Anthem by the Constituent Assembly on 24 January 1950, the full version takes about fifty two seconds to play, and Tagore himself translated it into English as The Morning Song of India.

Option B, Bombay, hosted the first session of the Congress in 1885 and the Quit India resolution of 1942, but not this event. Option C, Lahore, hosted the 1929 session where Purna Swaraj was declared and the tricolour was unfurled on the bank of the Ravi. Option D, Nagpur, hosted the 1920 session that adopted the non cooperation programme. Vande Mataram, by contrast, was first sung at the 1896 Calcutta session.

The correct answer is B, Anandamath. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee composed Vande Mataram in Sanskritised Bengali and later placed it in his novel Anandamath, published in 1882, where the ascetic rebels sing it. The song was first sung at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress, and in January 1950 it was given a status equal to that of the National Anthem.

Option A, Gora, is a novel by Rabindranath Tagore and is offered because Tagore wrote the anthem. Option C, Durgeshnandini, is indeed by Bankim Chandra and is his first Bengali novel, which makes it the strongest distractor, but it does not carry the song. Option D, Godan, is a Hindi novel by Munshi Premchand about a peasant and is unrelated to this topic.

The correct answer is A, Gangetic dolphin. Platanista gangetica, the South Asian river dolphin of the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna systems, was notified as the National Aquatic Animal in 2009. It is nearly blind and hunts by echolocation, it surfaces to breathe, and it is treated as an indicator of the health of the river, which is why the declaration came alongside the work on the Ganga.

Option B, the olive ridley turtle, nests in huge numbers at Gahirmatha in Odisha and is protected, but it holds no such title. Option C, the mahseer, is a large freshwater game fish of Himalayan rivers and is threatened, not a national symbol. Option D, the dugong, is a marine mammal of the Gulf of Mannar and the Andaman waters, and is sometimes confused with the dolphin because both are protected aquatic mammals.

The correct answer is B, Chaitra. The Saka calendar was adopted as the National Calendar with effect from 22 March 1957, which was the first of Chaitra in the Saka year 1879. It is used along with the Gregorian calendar for the Gazette of India, for news broadcasts of All India Radio and for government communications addressed to the public. Chaitra normally begins on 22 March and on 21 March in a leap year.

Option A, Vaisakha, is the second month of the Saka calendar and the month of Buddha Purnima and Baisakhi, so it is a natural wrong choice. Option C, Magha, falls in the winter and carries Magha Purnima and Vasant Panchami. Option D, Kartika, falls around Diwali and is the eighth month. Only Chaitra opens the year.

The correct answer is C, D. Udaya Kumar. His design won a public competition and the Union Cabinet approved it on 15 July 2010. The sign joins the Devanagari letter ra to the Latin capital R without its vertical stroke, and the two parallel horizontal lines at the top stand both for the bands of the tricolour and for the equals sign, suggesting a balanced economy. He was then a doctoral student of design at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Option A, Pingali Venkayya, proposed the flag design from which the National Flag developed. Option B, Nandalal Bose, of the Bengal School, decorated the pages of the Constitution of India. Option D, Deenanath Bhargava, was the artist who drew the State Emblem for the Constitution under Nandalal Bose's guidance. All three belong to national symbols, which is why they are grouped here.

The correct answer is A, Pingali Venkayya. He was a freedom fighter from the Machilipatnam region of present day Andhra Pradesh who studied flags for years and presented a design to Mahatma Gandhi at Vijayawada in 1921. The Congress flag that grew out of it carried a spinning wheel; when the Constituent Assembly adopted the National Flag on 22 July 1947, the spinning wheel was replaced by the Ashoka Chakra of twenty four spokes.

Option B, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, wrote Vande Mataram, the National Song. Option C, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote Jana Gana Mana, the National Anthem, and is the commonest wrong answer because both men are linked to national symbols. Option D, Sarojini Naidu, was a poet and Congress president and the first woman Governor of an Indian state, but she had no part in the flag's design.

The correct answer is B, the inverted bell shaped lotus. The original capital at Sarnath rests on an inverted lotus shaped like a bell, and that part was deliberately omitted from the State Emblem, which begins at the abacus. This is the detail that separates a candidate who has looked at the emblem from one who has only read about it.

Option A is wrong because the Dharma Chakra is retained at the centre of the abacus and is in fact the wheel taken into the National Flag. Option C is wrong because the bull to the right and the horse to the left are both kept on the abacus, with the outlines of the other wheels at the edges. Option D is wrong because the lions are kept, though only three of the four are seen in the two dimensional emblem while the fourth is hidden behind them.