SSC MTS GK Questions 2026

The algoza is a double flute: the player holds two pipes at once, blowing a drone on one while playing the melody on the other, and a shepherd or a Langa musician can keep this up for long stretches using circular breathing.

The Kalbelia folk songs and dances of Rajasthan were inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010.

Maand is the most refined style of Rajasthani singing, close enough to classical music to be treated as a raga in its own right, and Kesariya Balam Aavo Hamare Desh, made famous by Allah Jilai Bai of Bikaner, is its best known composition and effectively the state's signature song.

A Bhopa of Pabuji unrolls the painted scroll called the phad and sings the epic of Pabuji through the night, accompanying himself on the ravanhatta, a bowed instrument of a half coconut or gourd with a bamboo neck, a skin face and a row of jingling bells.

The kamayacha is the signature instrument of the Manganiyar musicians of Jaisalmer and Barmer: a large bowl of mango wood covered with goat skin, with gut and steel strings played with a horsehair bow, giving the deep drone that accompanies Manganiyar singing.

The fourth Sikh Guru, Guru Ram Das, founded the settlement of Ramdaspur around the sacred tank in the late sixteenth century, and the town came to be called Amritsar after the pool of nectar, the Amrit Sarovar.

After defeating Humayun at Chausa and Kannauj, Sher Shah Suri refounded Patna in 1541 as a fortified administrative and commercial town on the ruins of ancient Pataliputra, recognising the strategic value of the site on the Ganga.

Harshavardhana of the Pushyabhuti or Vardhana dynasty began his reign at Thanesar in Haryana and, after the death of his brother-in-law Grahavarman of the Maukhari house, united the two kingdoms and made Kannauj on the Ganga his capital around the early seventh century.

The two brothers of the Sangama family founded the city of Vijayanagara on the Tungabhadra in 1336 and with it the Vijayanagara empire, which lasted until the defeat at Talikota in 1565; the ruins at Hampi in Karnataka are a World Heritage Site.

Firoz Shah Tughlaq was the greatest city builder of the Sultanate. He founded Firozabad on the Yamuna in Delhi, where the Firoz Shah Kotla stands, and outside Delhi he laid out Hisar, known as Hissar-Firoza, along with Fatehabad, Firozpur and Jaunpur, the last named in memory of Muhammad bin Tughlaq…

The Gujarat sultan Ahmad Shah I founded Ahmedabad in 1411 near the older settlement of Asaval and Karnavati, and the city became the capital of the Gujarat Sultanate and a great centre of textile trade; the Bhadra fort and the Jama Masjid date from this period.

Akbar began building Fatehpur Sikri near Agra from 1571, naming it after his victory in Gujarat, and it served as his capital for roughly fourteen years before the court returned to Agra and later moved to Lahore.

Devagiri in the Deccan, the old Yadava capital, was renamed Daulatabad by Muhammad bin Tughlaq, who ordered the transfer of the court and the population of Delhi there in 1327 so that he could control both north and south from the centre of his empire.

The fifth ruler of the Qutb Shahi dynasty founded Hyderabad in 1591 on the banks of the Musi, a short distance from the crowded hill fort of Golconda, and the Charminar was raised in his reign at the centre of the new city.

The Kachhwaha ruler Sawai Jai Singh II moved his capital down from the hill fort of Amer and founded Jaipur in 1727, laying it out on a grid of nine rectangular blocks with the help of the scholar and planner Vidyadhar Bhattacharya, which makes it the first planned city of…

Udayin, also called Udayabhadra, was the son of Ajatashatru and the ruler of the Haryanka dynasty who built a fort at the meeting point of the Ganga and the Son and shifted the Magadhan capital there from Rajagriha.

Karewas are thick beds of fine clay, silt and sand laid down on the floor of a Pleistocene lake that once filled the Kashmir Valley; they form flat terraces above the Jhelum's floodplain, and the karewas around Pampore in Pulwama district produce the saffron for which the valley is famous…

The Damodar Valley Corporation was set up by an Act of Parliament in 1948, the first multipurpose river valley project of independent India, and it was consciously modelled on the Tennessee Valley Authority of the United States, which had combined flood control, irrigation, navigation and power generation in one basin…

The Ziro Valley in the Lower Subansiri district of Arunachal Pradesh is the home of the Apatani, who grow rice and rear fish in the same flooded field without using draught animals, a system studied as a model of sustainable wet-land farming; the valley is on India's tentative list for…

Yumthang lies beyond the village of Lachung in north Sikkim, at roughly 3,500 metres, and the Shingba Rhododendron Sanctuary around it gives the valley the popular name of the Valley of Flowers of Sikkim; hot springs rise on the bank of the Lachung river and the Zero Point lies further…