UPSC Civil Services GK Questions 2026

Kalamandalam Kalyanikutty Amma is often described as the mother of Mohiniyattam, because she gathered and set in order the movements and repertoire of this graceful dance of Kerala, which is performed by women and belongs to the lasya or gentle style.

Uday Shankar was not a classical dancer in the strict sense; he created a new idiom by blending Indian movement with Western stagecraft, and he is regarded as the pioneer of modern or creative dance in India, having performed with the ballerina Anna Pavlova early in his career.

Sattriya grew in the sattras, the Vaishnava monasteries of Assam, and is traced to the saint and reformer Srimanta Sankardeva, who used dance and drama to carry his teaching to ordinary people; it is the most recent of the eight forms to be recognised as classical.

Guru Bipin Singh was the teacher who systematised Manipuri dance and, with the Jhaveri sisters as his leading pupils, carried it from Manipur to concert stages across India.

Vempati Chinna Satyam was the guru who shaped the modern repertoire of Kuchipudi, the dance that takes its name from a village in Andhra Pradesh and is traditionally traced to the saint-poet Siddhendra Yogi.

The poet Vallathol Narayana Menon founded Kerala Kalamandalam in the twentieth century to revive Kathakali and the other performing arts of Kerala, and the gurus trained there carry the name of the institution before their own.

Protima Gauri, also known as Protima Bedi, founded Nrityagram near Bengaluru as a residential village where dancers live and train in the manner of the old gurukul, and she herself was a dancer of Odissi.

Kelucharan Mohapatra was the guru who, with Pankaj Charan Das and others, reconstructed Odissi in the twentieth century from temple sculpture and the surviving traditions of Odisha, and he trained a generation of dancers including Sanjukta Panigrahi.

Sitara Devi was one of the great Kathak dancers of the twentieth century, and Rabindranath Tagore is said to have called her the empress of dance after watching her perform.

Birju Maharaj belonged to the Lucknow gharana of Kathak and to the Kalka-Bindadin family of dancers, and he is the name most often set when this form is tested; Shambhu Maharaj and Lachhu Maharaj of the same family came before him.

Rukmini Devi Arundale founded Kalakshetra at Madras in 1936, and the institution reshaped the presentation of Bharatanatyam and trained most of the following generations of dancers in the form.

A colloid is named according to the states of its two parts, the dispersed phase and the dispersing medium, and an emulsion is defined as a colloid in which a liquid is dispersed in another liquid, so the dispersing medium must itself be a liquid.

A molecule of water contains two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.

In crystallisation a hot saturated solution is allowed to cool slowly, and as it cools only the required substance comes out of solution in the regular form of crystals while the impurities, present in smaller amounts, stay dissolved in the liquid that is left behind, which is called the mother…

When salt dissolves in water it breaks up into separate ions, which are far smaller than the wavelength of visible light, so they cannot scatter a beam sideways and the path of light through the liquid stays invisible.

Chromatography separates substances that are dissolved in the same solvent and present in very small quantities, by letting the solution creep along a strip of filter paper.

Ammonium chloride passes directly from the solid to the vapour state on heating, without melting, while common salt does not.

Brass is made by melting copper with zinc, and the resulting homogeneous mixture is harder than copper, easier to cast and machine and gives the familiar yellow colour used for utensils, fittings and musical instruments.

When two miscible liquids boil at temperatures far apart, ordinary distillation is enough, because the more volatile liquid boils off almost completely before the other begins.

Kerosene and water do not mix, so on standing they form two distinct layers with the lighter kerosene above the denser water.