SSC GK Questions 2026

Pawapuri in Nalanda district is held to be the place where Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara, attained nirvana, and the Jal Mandir of white marble stands in the middle of a lotus tank said to have formed where his ashes were taken.

The Vishwa Shanti Stupa or World Peace Pagoda was built in 1969 on Ratnagiri hill at Rajgir in Nalanda district by a Japanese Buddhist order, and the ropeway that climbs to it is one of the best known in eastern India.

Two Ashokan pillars were found at Rampurva in West Champaran district, one crowned by a bull capital and the other by a lion capital; the bull capital is the best known animal capital from Bihar after the Sarnath lions and is kept in New Delhi.

The Kumhrar mound in Patna has yielded the remains of a Mauryan hall whose roof was carried on eighty polished sandstone pillars, read as an assembly or audience hall of Pataliputra, together with the Arogya Vihara of a later period.

The tomb of Sher Shah Suri rises on a stone plinth in the middle of a tank at Sasaram, an octagonal chamber under a single large dome with smaller domed kiosks around it, and it is the high point of Indo-Afghan building in India.

The Golghar was built in 1786 to a design by Captain John Garstin of the Bengal Engineers, as a store of grain against another famine like that of 1770; its beehive shape and the two spiral stairways on the outside make it the best known colonial building of Patna.

The Barabar hills in Jehanabad district hold the Lomas Rishi and Sudama caves, cut in the Mauryan period and polished inside to a mirror finish; the carved chaitya-arch doorway of the Lomas Rishi cave is the earliest example of that motif in stone.

Vikramshila was founded by the Pala king Dharmapala and became, after Nalanda, the most important centre of Buddhist learning in eastern India, especially of tantric studies; its ruins at Antichak in Bhagalpur district show a large brick stupa surrounded by monastic cells.

The founding of Nalanda is credited to the Gupta ruler Kumaragupta I in the fifth century CE, after which it grew for seven hundred years under later Gupta, Maukhari and Pala patronage until the raid of Bakhtiyar Khalji about 1193 CE.

The excavated remains of the ancient university at Nalanda were added to the World Heritage List in 2016 as an archaeological site, and they are the second World Heritage Site of Bihar.

Uttar Pradesh has three World Heritage Sites and all three are in Agra district: the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan in white marble for Mumtaz Mahal; the Agra Fort, raised by Akbar in red sandstone on the Yamuna; and Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar's planned capital with the Buland Darwaza, the…

Kushinagar, in the east of the state near Gorakhpur, was the capital of the Malla republic, and the Buddha died there under sal trees; the event is called mahaparinirvana.

Asaf-ud-Daula of Awadh had the Bara Imambara built at Lucknow in 1784 as a famine relief work, so that labourers could earn wages through a year of scarcity.

Barsana, remembered as Radha's village, holds the best known Lathmar Holi, in which the women of Barsana playfully beat back the men who come from Nandgaon with long sticks, and the play is repeated the next day at Nandgaon.

The Prayag Prashasti, also called the Allahabad pillar inscription, was composed in Sanskrit by Harisena, a minister and court poet of Samudragupta.

Akbar built the fort at the confluence in 1583 and renamed the town Illahabas, from which the name Allahabad came; the city was renamed Prayagraj in 2018.

Mathura, on the right bank of the Yamuna, is revered as the place where Krishna was born in the prison of Kansa, and the Krishna Janmabhoomi complex marks the spot.

The Kashi Vishwanath temple at Varanasi is the jyotirlinga of Uttar Pradesh. It stands in the old city close to the Ganga, a short walk from the Dashashwamedh ghat where the evening Ganga Aarti is held.

At Prayagraj the Yamuna joins the Ganga, and tradition holds that the Saraswati flows there unseen, so the meeting point is called the Triveni Sangam, the braid of three streams.

After attaining enlightenment at Bodh Gaya, the Buddha walked to the deer park at Sarnath, near Varanasi, and preached to the five companions who had earlier left him.