UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Prithviraj Chauhan III beat Muhammad Ghori at Tarain, near Thanesar in present day Haryana, in 1191, and the wounded invader escaped from the field.

The Atpur inscription, also called the Ahar inscription, is dated 977 and belongs to the reign of Shaktikumar; it lists the Guhil rulers from Guhadatta onwards and is the main inscriptional source for the early line of Mewar, with the Samoli inscription of 646 standing earlier and the Chirwa inscription…

The Bijoliya rock inscription of Bhilwara district, dated 1170, sets out the Chauhan line from Vasudeva, the founder at Shakambhari or Sambhar, and describes the family as Brahmins of the Vatsa gotra, which is one of the strongest arguments against the Agnikula story of their birth from fire.

Mihir Bhoja, also called Bhoja I, was the greatest of the Gurjara Pratiharas; he ruled from Kannauj in the ninth century, was a devotee of Vishnu and issued silver coins carrying the title Adivaraha, the primeval boar, one of Vishnu's forms.

He ruled in about the middle of the eighth century from Bhinmal in the Jalore region and is credited with stopping the Arab armies that had taken Sindh, a service which even the Rashtrakuta records acknowledge when they describe the Pratihara as the defender of the west.

The four clans named in the Agnikula account are the Pratihara or Parihar, the Chauhan or Chahamana, the Solanki or Chaulukya and the Parmar or Paramara.

Tod, who served as the Political Agent of the East India Company in western Rajputana, wrote the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan and argued that the Rajputs were descended from the Scythians of Central Asia, pointing to shared habits of warfare, the place of the horse and certain funeral rites.

Chand Bardai's Prithviraj Raso tells that four clans, the Pratihara, the Chauhan, the Solanki and the Parmar, rose from a fire pit at Mount Abu where the sage Vashishtha performed a sacrifice, and from this account the Agnikula or fire born theory takes its name.

At Buxar in Bihar on 22 October 1764 Munro defeated the combined armies of Mir Qasim, the deposed Nawab of Bengal, Shuja ud Daula, the Nawab of Awadh, and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II.

He was a son of Bahadur Shah I and a grandson of Aurangzeb, and he governed Bihar as subahdar from Patna.

Hemu, also called Hem Chandra Vikramaditya, was the Hindu general and chief minister of the Sur ruler Muhammad Adil Shah.

Sher Shah was besieging the Bundelkhand fort of Kalinjar when a gunpowder explosion on 22 May 1545 fatally injured him; the fort fell on the same day.

Sher Shah had the land measured, graded it as good, middling or bad, fixed the state's share at about one third of the average produce, and then issued every cultivator a patta, a title deed setting out his holding and what he owed, so that no intermediary could demand more.

The Sadak e Azam ran from Sonargaon in eastern Bengal through Bihar, Agra, Delhi and Lahore to the Indus in the northwest, and Sher Shah lined it with wells, shade trees and sarais.

Sher Shah withdrew the debased mixed coins in circulation and issued a silver rupiya of about one hundred and seventy eight grains of fixed purity, along with a copper dam, and set a rate between them.

Sher Shah's tomb stands in the middle of a large tank at Sasaram in Rohtas district, the town whose jagir his father held, and it is the work of the architect Aliwal Khan; its octagonal plan, high plinth and great dome make it one of the finest Indo Islamic monuments…

It was fought on 26 June 1539 at Chausa on the Ganga, in present Buxar district of Bihar, and Sher Khan's victory broke Humayun's army; the emperor himself escaped across the river and the Mughal hold on the east collapsed.

He was born Farid Khan, the son of Hasan Khan, an Afghan of the Sur clan who held the jagir of Sasaram in what is now Rohtas district of Bihar.

Chak hao is the scented black rice of Manipur, used for a dark kheer at feasts and registered as a Geographical Indication, as is the kachai lemon of the same state.

Dum pukht belongs to the Awadhi kitchen of Lucknow, where meat, rice and spices are sealed inside a heavy pot with dough and left on a low fire so that the food cooks in its own steam.