State Exams GK Questions 2026

Bismillah Khan was born there on 21 March 1916, moved to Varanasi as a boy and turned the shehnai, until then an instrument of ceremonies, into a concert instrument.

An indigo cultivator of Champaran, he followed Gandhi from one meeting to another, including the Lucknow session of the Congress in 1916, until Gandhi agreed to come and see the condition of the tenants for himself.

The zamindar of Jagdishpur in the Shahabad tract, now Bhojpur district, took command of the sepoys at Arrah when he was nearly eighty, fought the British through 1857 and died in 1858 soon after recovering his estate.

Born on 11 October 1902 at Sitabdiara on the border of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, he escaped from Hazaribagh jail during the Quit India movement, built the socialist movement after independence and in 1974 gave the call for Sampoorna Kranti, or Total Revolution, which became the centre of the agitation…

Called Bihar Kesari, he headed the provincial government from 1946 and continued as the first Chief Minister of Bihar until 1961.

Rajendra Prasad was born there on 3 December 1884, worked with Gandhi during the Champaran inquiry of 1917, presided over the Constituent Assembly from December 1946 and became the first President of India in January 1950.

Men of the Shekhawati region strap on a horse made of bamboo and cloth, dress in bright costume with a sword in hand and enact the tales of local bandits and heroes to the fife and the dhol, and the dance is a regular feature of wedding processions.

Rammat is staged in the open during Holi in these cities, with troupes singing the heroic and devotional stories of the desert to the dhol and the nagara, and it is one of the oldest theatre forms of western Rajasthan.

Khyal is the chief folk drama of Rajasthan, a sung play performed through the night on an open stage, and its schools are named after their artists or their places; the Kuchamani Khyal of Kuchaman is the best known of them and is associated with Lachhiram.

The Bhils of Mewar perform Gavari for about forty days after Rakshabandhan in honour of the goddess, moving from village to village with fixed characters and episodes while the performers keep strict vows for the whole period, which makes it the longest and most elaborate folk performance of Rajasthan.

In this dance of acrobatic skill a woman places one earthen or brass pot upon another in a tall column on her head and then dances on the narrow rim of a brass thali, on the edge of a sword or on a heap of broken glass, keeping the column…

Men of the Bhil and other communities of Mewar and Marwar dance Gair in a large circle during Holi, striking long sticks together in time with the dhol and the thali, and where women join the circle the form is called Gair Ghoomar.

Followers of Jasnath, whose centres lie in the Bikaner and Churu area, perform the fire dance by stepping on and dancing over a bed of burning embers to the beat of the dhol, the dance being an act of faith at their fairs.

The Chari dance is performed by Gujjar women of this belt, who balance on the head a brass pot, the chari, filled with cotton seeds soaked in oil and set alight, so the dance goes on beneath a flame; it marks weddings and the birth of a son.

Women of the Kamad community perform Terah Taali seated on the ground as an act of devotion to Baba Ramdev, with thirteen small brass cymbals called manjiras tied to the wrists, elbows, waist and ankles and struck in rhythm, while the men of the troupe play the tandoora.

The songs and dances of the Kalbelia community, the traditional snake charmers of Rajasthan, were added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010; the women dance in a flowing black skirt worked with silver ribbon to the been and the khanjari, with movements…

When the Central Government declares an association unlawful under the UAPA, the notification does not stand on the Government's word alone: it must be referred to a Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Tribunal constituted of one person who is a sitting judge of a High Court, and the Tribunal decides within six…

The Prevention of Terrorism Act was enacted in 2002 and repealed in 2004, and the amendment of the UAPA made in the same year carried its definitions of terrorist act and terrorist organisation into that older Act, which is why the UAPA is today the principal anti-terror law.

The committee headed by Justice B. P. Jeevan Reddy, appointed in 2004 to review AFSPA, reported in 2005 that the Act should be repealed and that the powers genuinely needed should instead be written into the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

The National Investigation Agency Act was passed in the weeks following the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai, which had exposed the absence of a central agency able to take over a terror case on its own, since police and public order are State subjects.