SSC MTS GK Questions 2026

Ashvaghosha, a Sanskrit poet and Buddhist thinker, is placed at the court of the Kushana ruler Kanishka in the first and second centuries of the common era, and he also wrote the Saundarananda and is associated with the fourth Buddhist council held in Kashmir under Kanishka.

His play takes up the later life of Rama, after the events of the Ramayana.

Dinkar is the poet of Rashmirathi, a retelling of the Mahabharata from Karna's side, and of Kurukshetra and Parashuram ki Pratiksha, and he is often called a poet of rebellion.

The award was instituted by the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1961 and is the senior literary honour given for a body of work in any of the languages recognised by the Constitution.

He deliberately chose the spoken language over Sanskrit so that the story of Rama could reach ordinary listeners, and the poem is still recited and staged across the Hindi belt.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale is said to have given her the title Bharat Kokila, the Nightingale of India. She was also the first woman to be president of the Indian National Congress, at the Kanpur session of 1925, and the first woman governor of an Indian state, in the United Provinces.

It became a marching song of the freedom movement and is played by the armed forces at ceremonial parades.

Kamayani takes the flood story of Manu from Indian tradition and turns it into a long allegory in which Manu stands for the mind, Shraddha for faith and Ida for reason.

The poem is arranged in songs meant to be sung and danced, and it is the text on which the Odissi repertoire and the Ashtapadi singing of temples rest.

The Meghaduta, or Cloud Messenger, is his short lyric poem in which a yaksha banished from his home asks a passing monsoon cloud to carry a message to his wife in Alaka, and the cloud's route becomes a description of the Indian landscape.

Rabindranath Tagore set it to music and sang it at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896, and after independence its first two stanzas were given the status of national song, declared to hold a place of honour equal to the national anthem.

The prize of 1913 made him the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in any field.

In the Gupta age a workshop at Sarnath, near Varanasi, carved in cream Chunar sandstone and produced the seated preaching Buddha whose hands form the dharmachakra mudra, the gesture of teaching, and whose robe clings so closely that art historians describe it as wet drapery.

Bamiyan, in the highlands of what is now Afghanistan, lay on the trade route through the Hindu Kush and was part of the wide Gandhara cultural region, along with Hadda, Begram, Jalalabad, Swat and Taxila.

The best known of them is the standing figure of Kanishka in spotted red sandstone, broken at the neck, whose inscription names him Maharaja Rajatiraja Devaputra Kanishka, and it is now in the Government Museum at Mathura.

The correct answer is C, the wheel, the dharmachakra, which stands for the first sermon delivered in the deer park at Sarnath, an event called the dharmachakra pravartana, the turning of the wheel of law.

Amaravati lies in the lower Krishna valley in Andhra Pradesh, and the other sites of the same school, Nagarjunakonda, Jaggayyapeta, Ghantasala and Bhattiprolu, are in the same stretch of country.

Besides Buddhist figures it carved the earliest known images of the Jain tirthankaras, found at the Kankali Tila mound, and the earliest images of Brahmanical deities including Vishnu, Shiva, Surya, Balarama and Kubera, along with a long line of yakshi figures.

Kanishka, the greatest Kushana ruler, is linked with both, and the Kushanas also set up royal portrait statues at Mat near Mathura.

The Gandhara sculptor treated cloth as a Roman sculptor did, with deep, heavy, naturalistic folds falling over both shoulders, and the halo behind the head is left plain.