State Exams GK Questions 2026

Kathputli is the string puppet, or marionette, tradition of Rajasthan. The figures are carved from wood, painted in bright colours and dressed in long trailing skirts, and they are made without legs; the puppeteer works them from above with strings while a dholak keeps time and a sharp whistling sound…

Amanta is formed from ama, the new moon, and anta, the end, so the month closes on the new moon day and the next month opens with the bright fortnight; Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat follow it.

The word panchang is made of panch, meaning five, and anga, meaning limb, and the five limbs recorded for every day are the tithi or lunar day, the vara or weekday, the nakshatra or lunar mansion, the yoga and the karana.

The Julian calendar then in use counted the year slightly too long, and by the sixteenth century the error had grown to ten days; the Pope's reform of 1582 dropped those days and changed the leap year rule, so that a century year is a leap year only when it…

The astrophysicist, known for the Saha ionisation equation that explains the spectra of stars, headed the committee set up under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in 1952; it reported in 1955 and the calendar it recommended came into use on 22 March 1957.

The Gupta era, dated to 319 or 320 CE, is taken to begin with the accession of Chandragupta I, the first great ruler of the dynasty, and most Gupta inscriptions are dated in it.

Its months follow the phases of the moon and no month is ever added to bring the year back into line with the seasons, so twelve lunar months give about 354 days and the Hijri year slips about eleven days earlier against the Gregorian year; that is why Ramzan can…

That journey of 622 CE is called the Hijrat, and the era takes its name from it; the first month of the Hijri year is Muharram.

Vikram Samvat began in 57 BCE, so the Vikrami year is obtained by adding 57 to the Christian year; this is the era printed on wedding invitations and traditional almanacs in northern India and is the official calendar of Nepal.

The Saka reckoning is most often linked with the Kushana ruler Kanishka, and it is the era on which the Indian National Calendar is built, so the Saka year is about 78 less than the Christian year.

The national calendar begins on 1 Chaitra, which corresponds to 22 March in an ordinary year and to 21 March in a leap year, so that the year opens near the spring equinox.

That day was 1 Chaitra 1879 of the Saka era, and the calendar came into use on the recommendation of the Calendar Reform Committee, which had reported in 1955.

The national calendar counts its years in the Saka reckoning, which began in 78 CE, so a Saka year is found roughly by subtracting 78 from the Christian year; it is printed in the Gazette of India and read out in the news bulletins of All India Radio.

The words, meaning touch the sky with glory, come from the eleventh chapter of the Gita, where the universal form of the Lord is described, and they were adopted as the motto of the Indian Air Force.

Speaking at Patna in 1974 during the student movement in Bihar, he asked for a total revolution covering social, economic, political, cultural and educational life, and the movement he led became the gathering point for the opposition to the government of the day.

Two words promising the removal of poverty carried her to a very large majority in the general election of that year, and the phrase has been quoted in Indian politics ever since.

He repeated the line constantly in his lectures to Indian youth after returning from the Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, and the thought is drawn from the Katha Upanishad.

The full line is Satyameva Jayate Nanritam, meaning truth alone triumphs, not falsehood, and the first two words were inscribed in Devanagari below the Lion Capital of Ashoka when the State Emblem was adopted in 1950.

He wrote the song in Sanskritised Bengali and placed it in his novel Anandamath, published in 1882; it was sung at the Congress session of 1896 and became the chief song of the national movement, and the Constituent Assembly later gave it the same honour as the national anthem.

He used the line while raising and addressing the Indian National Army in South East Asia during the Second World War, asking his soldiers for the ultimate sacrifice in return for the freedom of the country; Dilli Chalo and Jai Hind come from the same years and the same army.