Railway GK Questions 2026

Stri Purush Tulana, a Marathi tract published in 1882, argued that the standards society applied to women were far harsher than those applied to men, and it is studied as one of the earliest feminist writings in any Indian language.

Amrita Pritam is the best known woman writer of modern Punjabi, and the Jnanpith Award of 1981 was given to her for the Punjabi poetry collection Kagaz Te Canvas.

Geetanjali Shree's novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and became the first book written in Hindi, and the first from any Indian language, to take that prize.

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine short stories about Indian and Indian-American lives, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, making Lahiri the first writer of Indian origin to win that prize for fiction.

Arundhati Roy's first novel, set in Ayemenem in Kerala and built around the twins Rahel and Estha, won the Booker Prize in 1997, the fiftieth year of Indian independence.

The Golden Threshold, published in 1905, was her first collection of poems in English, and it was followed by The Bird of Time in 1912 and The Broken Wing in 1917.

She received the Jnanpith Award in 1976 for the Bengali novel Pratham Pratishruti, the first part of a trilogy that follows three generations of women in a Bengali household, and she was the first woman to receive the award in its history.

Nelson Mandela, the leader of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa and later its President, received the Bharat Ratna in 1990, the same year in which Dr B. R. Ambedkar was honoured posthumously.

The Bharat Ratna is a medallion shaped like a peepal leaf, about an inch and three-eighths wide, bearing a sun on the front with the words Bharat Ratna below it in Devanagari, and the State Emblem with the motto Satyameva Jayate on the reverse.

The Carnatic vocalist M. S. Subbulakshmi received the Bharat Ratna in 1998 and was the first musician in the list.

Article 18 abolishes titles and forbids the State from conferring any title except a military or academic distinction. The civilian awards survive because they are treated as decorations and not as titles, and for the same reason a recipient may not write Bharat Ratna before or after a name.

Until December 2011 the Bharat Ratna could be given only for art, literature, science and public service. The rules were then widened to cover any field of human endeavour, and in 2014 Sachin Tendulkar became the first sportsperson to receive the award, along with the scientist C. N. R. Rao.

The Pashtun leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, called the Frontier Gandhi and the founder of the Khudai Khidmatgar movement, received the Bharat Ratna in 1987 and was the first recipient who was not an Indian citizen.

Indira Gandhi received the Bharat Ratna in 1971, while she was Prime Minister, and she is the first woman in the list.

The original rules of 1954 did not allow a posthumous award; the provision was added in 1955, and the first person honoured after his death was Lal Bahadur Shastri, the second Prime Minister of India, in 1966, the year he died at Tashkent.

The first three recipients of the Bharat Ratna, all in 1954, were C. Rajagopalachari, the last Governor-General of India, the physicist C. V. Raman and the philosopher S. Radhakrishnan, who later became President.

The Bharat Ratna was instituted on 2 January 1954 by President Dr Rajendra Prasad, on the same day as the Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri, and the first awards were conferred later the same year on C. Rajagopalachari, C. V. Raman and S. Radhakrishnan.

Bhand Pather is the traditional folk theatre of Kashmir, performed by hereditary players called bhands.

Srimanta Sankardeva, the fifteenth and sixteenth century Vaishnava saint and reformer of Assam, wrote the one-act plays called Ankiya Naat, and their performance in the namghar or the satra is called Bhaona.

Bidesia is the Bhojpuri folk theatre of Bihar created by Bhikhari Thakur in the early twentieth century.