State Exams GK Questions 2026

Domkach is a wedding dance of the women of the household: once the men go off with the barat, the women of the groom's family sing and dance through the night in the courtyard, taking the men's parts themselves in a comic imitation.

Vidyapati, the Maithili poet of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who was honoured as the Maithil Kavi Kokil, wrote padas on Radha and Krishna that were sung in performance, and from this singing grew the Kirtaniya plays of Mithila, also staged as Bidapat Naach.

Sama-Chakeva is the Mithila festival in which girls make clay figures of the birds Sama and Chakeva, sing for the long life of their brothers through the Kartik nights and set the figures afloat or bid them farewell at the end; the songs are among the best known of Maithili…

Mahendar Misir of Misrauliya village in Saran district composed and sang Purbi, a light classical folk form built on the longing of a wife whose husband has gone away, and he is remembered as the emperor of Purbi.

The Darbhanga gharana, carried by the Mallick family under the patronage of the Darbhanga Raj, is one of the surviving gharanas of Dhrupad, the oldest form of Hindustani classical singing; Pandit Ram Chatur Mallick and Pandit Siyaram Tiwari belong to it.

Bismillah Khan was born at Dumraon in 1916, in the present Buxar district, into a family of shehnai players, and later settled at Varanasi.

Jat-Jatin is danced in the Mithila and Koshi tract of north Bihar, usually by a pair representing the husband Jat and the wife Jatin; the song moves through their quarrel, the failure of the rains and the husband leaving the village in search of work, which makes it the folk…

Jhijhiya is danced by women of the Mithila region during Navratri, each carrying on her head an earthen pot pierced with many holes and holding a lighted lamp; the dance is offered to the Goddess and is traditionally believed to turn away witchcraft and evil spells.

Bhikhari Thakur, born in 1887 at Kutubpur Diyara in Saran district, wrote the play Bidesia about a wife left behind when her husband migrates to Calcutta for work, and the name was then applied to the whole style of Bhojpuri naach he built, with its songs and its launda dancers.

A Kavad is a small shrine made of mango wood, painted a deep red and covered with figures of gods and heroes, and fitted with several hinged panels.

The palace maintained a painting workshop, and Sahibdin was its leading hand.

The Dhundhar school covers the painting of the Amber and Jaipur region and includes Alwar, Shekhawati and Uniara among its sub-styles.

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.