UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Sharda Sinha, called the Bihar Kokila, carried the Chhath songs of Bihar from the river ghats to recordings heard across the country, and she sang Maithili and Bhojpuri wedding, Sohar and Sama-Chakeva songs as well.

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.

In this 2010 judgment the Supreme Court traced the history of PIL and, worried that the device was being used for publicity, private profit and political rivalry, compiled a set of directions for the courts.

Both sat on the Supreme Court in the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, both wrote the judgments that relaxed locus standi and accepted letters as petitions, and both pushed free legal aid and prison reform through the court.

The Court also warned in the same judgment that a PIL must not be used to settle a personal score, and it dismissed the petition on that ground.

Epistolary jurisdiction is the practice by which the Supreme Court, and later the High Courts, treated a simple letter or postcard describing a violation of rights as a formal writ petition, dispensing with the usual requirements of form, court fee and a lawyer.

It says that the Supreme Court in the exercise of its jurisdiction may pass such decree or make such order as is necessary for doing complete justice in any cause or matter pending before it, and that such a decree is enforceable throughout India.

The petition followed the gang rape of a social worker in rural Rajasthan who had tried to stop a child marriage.

The phrase travelled into Indian constitutional writing and now describes a court that reads rights expansively, fills a legislative vacuum and supervises the executive until a constitutional duty is discharged.

Often called the Mini Constitution because of the number of provisions it touched, it added several Directive Principles, among them Article 39A on equal justice and free legal aid, Article 43A on worker participation in management and Article 48A on the protection of the environment, forests and wildlife.

It is a Directive Principle that requires the State to secure a legal system which promotes justice on the basis of equal opportunity, and in particular to provide free legal aid by suitable legislation or schemes so that no citizen is denied the opportunity to secure justice by reason of…

The Supreme Court held that where a legal wrong is caused to a person or a class of persons who cannot approach the court because of poverty, disability or a socially disadvantaged position, any member of the public acting in good faith may move the court on their behalf.