Railway GK Questions 2026

The Vijayanagara workshops extended the bronze tradition from deities to royal portraiture, and the standing copper figures of the emperor Krishnadevaraya with his two queens, Tirumala Devi and Chinnaji Devi, were placed in the Venkateshvara temple at Tirumala, where they remain.

Swamimalai is a temple town in the Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu, in the old Chola heartland near Kumbakonam, and its stapathi families have cast panchaloha images by the solid lost-wax method in an unbroken line from the Chola workshops.

Dhokra takes its name from the Dhokra Damar metal workers and is the hollow lost-wax craft of this eastern and central belt, with Bikna village in the Bankura district of West Bengal and the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh as its best known centres; Bastar Dhokra carries a geographical indication tag.

Daimabad lies on the Pravara river in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra and is the southernmost late Harappan site known.

Under the Pala rulers of Bengal and Bihar, from about the ninth century onwards, the monastery workshops of Nalanda and the village of Kurkihar near Gaya cast hundreds of small metal images of the Buddha, Tara, Avalokiteshvara and other Bodhisattvas in ashtadhatu, the eight-metal alloy.

The image was dug up in 1861 at Sultanganj in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar during railway work, stands over two metres high, and was cast in copper in the transition between the Gupta and Pala periods.

The upper right hand of Nataraja holds the damaru, the small hour-glass shaped drum whose beat stands for the sound from which creation begins.

The dwarf is Apasmara, also called Muyalakan in Tamil, and he personifies ignorance and forgetfulness; by pressing him down with the right foot while dancing the ananda tandava, Shiva shows that knowledge subdues the darkness of the mind.

The workshops of the Kaveri delta produced their finest images under Chola rule, and the term Chola bronze is used for the whole class of processional icons cast in that period at centres connected with Thanjavur, Chidambaram, Tiruvarur and Tiruvenkadu.

Panchaloha means five metals, and the Shilpa texts of the south prescribe this mixture for an icon that is to be consecrated and worshipped, with copper as the dominant metal and only a token quantity of gold and silver.

The craftsman models the image in beeswax, covers it with fine clay, heats the mould until the wax runs out through a vent, and fills the cavity with molten alloy; when the metal sets the clay is broken away, so each cast is a single original.

The Dancing Girl is a small bronze figure about ten and a half centimetres high, found at Mohenjo-daro in the Larkana district of Sindh and now displayed in the National Museum, New Delhi.

Under this Act the central or a state government may appoint a commission to inquire into any definite matter of public importance, and must do so if Parliament or the state legislature passes a resolution to that effect.

It is created by Article 280 of the Constitution, which requires the President to constitute it every fifth year or earlier to recommend the distribution of the net proceeds of taxes between the Union and the states, the principles governing grants-in-aid and other matters referred to it.

The Committee on Prevention of Corruption, appointed in 1962 under K. Santhanam, reported in 1964 and recommended a central body to oversee vigilance work in the government.

The National Commission on Farmers was set up in 2004 and from its second term was chaired by the agricultural scientist Professor M. S. Swaminathan, the geneticist associated with the Green Revolution in India.

The Committee on the Financial System of 1991 and the Committee on Banking Sector Reforms of 1998, both chaired by M. Narasimham, a former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, set the agenda for liberalising Indian banking.

After the death of Potti Sriramulu and the creation of Andhra State in 1953, the government appointed the States Reorganisation Commission under Justice Saiyid Fazl Ali, with the historian K. M. Panikkar and the educationist Hriday Nath Kunzru as its other two members.

The Education Commission of 1964 to 1966, chaired by the physicist Dr Daulat Singh Kothari, was the first body to study education at every stage from the primary school to the university.

The commission was appointed in 1983 under Justice Ranjit Singh Sarkaria, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, to review the working arrangements between the Union and the states.