UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Chilarai, whose given name was Shukladhwaj, was the brother and commander of the Koch king Nara Narayan, the son of the founder Biswa Singha, and his campaigns in the sixteenth century carried Koch power across the lower Brahmaputra valley before the kingdom split into Koch Bihar and Koch Hajo.

The Buranjis are the official and family histories kept by the Ahom state and its nobles, written first in the Tai Ahom language and script and later in Assamese, and they are the main written source for the political history of the Brahmaputra valley between the thirteenth and the nineteenth…

The treaty of 1826 ended the First Anglo-Burmese War, and by it Burma gave up its claims over Assam, Manipur, Cachar and Jaintia and ceded Arakan and Tenasserim, so Assam passed to the East India Company and six centuries of Ahom rule came to a close.

Mir Jumla, Aurangzeb's governor of Bengal, marched up the valley in 1662, occupied the capital Garhgaon and forced the Ahom king Jayadhwaj Singha to accept the Treaty of Ghilajharighat in 1663, under which the Ahoms paid a heavy indemnity, ceded territory and gave hostages.

Lachit Borphukan commanded the Ahom forces in 1671 and destroyed the Mughal flotilla at Saraighat near Gauhati by fighting a cavalry army on water during the rains; his birth anniversary is kept as Lachit Divas on 24 November, and the best passing cadet of the National Defence Academy receives a…

Pratap Singha, also called Susenghphaa, who ruled in the first half of the seventeenth century, created the Borphukan as viceroy of the lower Brahmaputra valley with his seat at Gauhati, and the Borbarua as the chief executive and judicial officer of the upper valley.

Suhungmung, better known as the Dihingia Raja, ruled from 1497 to 1539, annexed the Chutiya kingdom of the upper valley in 1523, broke Kachari power, and was the first Ahom king to take a Hindu title, Swarganarayan, which marks the dynasty's entry into the wider Indian religious world; the Bengal…

The Ahom administration graded its officers by the number of paiks, the men liable to compulsory service, placed under them, and the Hazarika commanded a thousand, the name itself coming from the word for a thousand.

Sukaphaa settled at Charaideo near modern Sivasagar in 1228, and even after the administrative capital shifted the site remained the ritual centre of the dynasty, where the kings and queens were buried under earthen mounds called moidams; the Charaideo moidams were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2024.

Sukaphaa was a Tai prince from the upper Irrawaddy region who crossed the Patkai hills with a small following and founded the Ahom kingdom in 1228, settling at Charaideo near present-day Sivasagar; Assam keeps his memory as Asom Divas on 2 December.

The Bering Strait lies between the easternmost point of Asia and the westernmost point of North America and links the Bering Sea of the Pacific with the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean; the International Date Line runs through it, and the Diomede Islands within it belong one to Russia…

It receives a very large river inflow from northern Europe, lies in a cool region where evaporation is slight, and exchanges water with the North Sea only through the narrow Danish straits, so its water is brackish rather than fully saline, especially in the Gulf of Bothnia.

The Dead Sea lies in the rift valley of the Jordan river, which flows into it and has no outlet, so dissolved salts have gone on accumulating until the water is several times as salty as the ocean and almost nothing lives in it; its shore is more than four…

It is a northern extension of the Black Sea, joined to it by the Kerch Strait, and its depth nowhere much exceeds a dozen metres, which makes it the shallowest sea on earth; the Don river empties into it.

The Aral Sea is a landlocked salt lake of Central Asia that lost most of its water after the Soviet authorities diverted its two feeding rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, to irrigate cotton, leaving salt flats, stranded fishing boats and a ruined local climate; it is the…

This strait at the southern end of the Red Sea, between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, leads into the Gulf of Aden and so to the Arabian Sea, and together with the Suez Canal at the northern end it makes the Red Sea a link in the…

Despite its name it has no outlet to any ocean and is therefore a lake, the largest enclosed water body on earth; it is bordered by five countries, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Azerbaijan, and is fed mainly by the Volga.

Lying in the middle of the North Atlantic, it is bounded on all sides by the currents of the North Atlantic gyre rather than by any coast, and it takes its name from the floating Sargassum weed in which European and American eels breed.

This narrow passage between Spain in Europe and Morocco in Africa is the only natural opening of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean, and it has carried the trade of three continents since antiquity.

It is a marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean, bounded by the Philippines on the west, Taiwan and Japan on the north and the Mariana Islands on the east, and it is the largest sea on earth; the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point of the ocean floor, lies…