UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Adi Badri lies in the Shivalik foothills of Yamunanagar district, and tradition treats it as the point where the Saraswati emerges, which is why the state has taken up work on the river and on a reservoir there.

It is the one place in Haryana developed as a hill station, and the twin Tikkar Taal lakes lie below it.

Pinjore lies on the Shivalik slope in Panchkula district, and the garden there is a Mughal charbagh laid out in descending terraces by Nawab Fidai Khan, the foster brother of Aurangzeb.

He raised the Kabuli Bagh mosque and the garden around it at Panipat to mark his victory in the first battle of Panipat in 1526, in which Ibrahim Lodi, the last Lodi sultan, was killed.

Jyotisar lies a few kilometres from Kurukshetra town, and tradition identifies it as the spot on the battlefield where Krishna gave the Gita sermon to Arjuna.

Renu, born at Aurahi Hingna in the Purnia country of north east Bihar, set the novel in a village called Meriganj just after independence, and made the village itself the hero, with its castes, quarrels, politics, superstitions and hopes.

Dinkar, born at Simaria in Begusarai district and honoured as Rashtrakavi for his nationalist verse, received the Jnanpith Award for Urvashi, a long poem that treats the love of Pururava and the apsara Urvashi as a meeting of the earthly and the divine.

The dialect takes its name from that region, and a demand for its recognition is made alongside the demand for Bhojpuri.

The name itself preserves the link: Magadha gives Magadhi, and Magadhi gives Magahi. Ardhamagadhi, a close relative, is the language in which the Jain canon preserves the sermons of Mahavira, and Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, grew out of the same eastern speech.

Bhikhari Thakur of Kutubpur in Saran district wrote, composed and staged plays with his own travelling troupe, and Bidesiya, on the suffering of a wife whose husband has migrated for work, became the name of a whole style of Bhojpuri theatre.

This is the traditional script of the Mithila region, used for Maithili manuscripts, panjis of genealogy and ritual texts, and it is related to the eastern group of scripts that also produced Bengali and Assamese letters.

Bhojpuri is spoken by crores of people in western Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh and the Indian diaspora of Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname and Trinidad, and it has a rich folk theatre, yet it has not been added to the Eighth Schedule.

His Varna Ratnakara, a fourteenth century work, is counted as the earliest prose composition in Maithili and indeed one of the earliest in any modern Indian language.

Vidyapati was the poet of the Mithila court in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and his Maithili padavali of songs about Radha and Krishna is still sung in north Bihar.

This amendment added four languages to the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, namely Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali, and raised the total number of scheduled languages from eighteen to twenty-two.

Pant headed the government of the United Provinces from 1937 and continued as the first Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh when the state took its present name in 1950, holding the office until 1954, after which he became Union Home Minister.

Begum Akhtar was born at Faizabad in 1914 and made her name at Lucknow as a singer of ghazal, dadra and thumri; she was called Mallika-e-Ghazal, the queen of the ghazal, and her voice shaped the way Urdu poetry is sung in the subcontinent.

Birju Maharaj belonged to the Kalka and Bindadin line of the Lucknow gharana of Kathak, the school that grew under the patronage of the Nawabs of Awadh and is known for expression, abhinaya and grace rather than for sheer footwork.

Sucheta Kripalani became Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 1963 and held the office until 1967, which made her the first woman to head the government of any Indian state.

Dhyan Chand was born at Allahabad on 29 August 1905, grew up at Jhansi and played in the Indian teams that won the hockey gold at Amsterdam in 1928, Los Angeles in 1932 and Berlin in 1936, the last as captain.