SSC GK Questions 2026

From the eighteenth century the merchant families of Shekhawati, in the Jhunjhunu, Sikar and Churu districts, built large courtyard houses and had their outer and inner walls covered with painted plaster.

Usta art, also called Munawwat or gold manoti work, is a craft in which a raised design is built up and then gilded, traditionally on camel hide but also on leather objects, wood and the walls and ceilings of palaces.

A Phad is a long horizontal cloth on which the whole life story of a folk deity, most often Pabuji or Devnarayan, is laid out in episodes, and it is not simply hung for display: a Bhopa priest-singer carries it from village to village, unrolls it at night and sings…

The Chitrashala is a gallery within the Garh Palace of Bundi, built in the time of Rao Raja Ummed Singh, and its walls and ceilings carry some of the finest murals in Rajasthan, painted in the blue and green that the Bundi style loves.

A Ragamala is a series in which each musical mode is given a visual form, with a season, a time of day and a mood attached to it.

A Pichhwai is a large painting on cloth that is hung behind the image of Shrinathji in the temple, the word itself meaning that which hangs at the back, and it is changed according to the season and the festival being observed.

Kota separated from Bundi in the seventeenth century and, while it inherited Bundi's feeling for dense forest and water, it turned that setting to a subject of its own, the royal hunt.

Nihal Chand developed the elongated, idealised face that defines the Kishangarh style and used it for Radha and Krishna as well as for the single portrait now called Bani Thani, often set against the water of the Gundalao lake.

Bani Thani is the best known single work of the Kishangarh sub-style of the Marwar school, painted in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the art historian Eric Dickinson called it the Indian Mona Lisa.

In this 2010 judgment the Supreme Court traced the history of PIL and, worried that the device was being used for publicity, private profit and political rivalry, compiled a set of directions for the courts.

Both sat on the Supreme Court in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, both wrote the judgments that relaxed locus standi and accepted letters as petitions, and both pushed free legal aid and prison reform through the court.

The Court also warned in the same judgment that a PIL must not be used to settle a personal score, and it dismissed the petition on that ground.

Epistolary jurisdiction is the practice by which the Supreme Court, and later the High Courts, treated a simple letter or postcard describing a violation of rights as a formal writ petition, dispensing with the usual requirements of form, court fee and a lawyer.

It says that the Supreme Court in the exercise of its jurisdiction may pass such decree or make such order as is necessary for doing complete justice in any cause or matter pending before it, and that such a decree is enforceable throughout India.

The petition followed the gang rape of a social worker in rural Rajasthan who had tried to stop a child marriage.

The phrase travelled into Indian constitutional writing and now describes a court that reads rights expansively, fills a legislative vacuum and supervises the executive until a constitutional duty is discharged.

Often called the Mini Constitution because of the number of provisions it touched, it added several Directive Principles, among them Article 39A on equal justice and free legal aid, Article 43A on worker participation in management and Article 48A on the protection of the environment, forests and wildlife.

It is a Directive Principle that requires the State to secure a legal system which promotes justice on the basis of equal opportunity, and in particular to provide free legal aid by suitable legislation or schemes so that no citizen is denied the opportunity to secure justice by reason of…

The Supreme Court held that where a legal wrong is caused to a person or a class of persons who cannot approach the court because of poverty, disability or a socially disadvantaged position, any member of the public acting in good faith may move the court on their behalf.

Decided in 1979, it arose from a newspaper report on undertrial prisoners in Bihar who had been in jail awaiting trial for longer than the maximum sentence their alleged offences carried.