UPSC GK Questions 2026

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.

Azad, the leader of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association after the Kakori case, was surrounded by the police at Alfred Park in Allahabad on 27 February 1931 and died fighting there.

Born at Allahabad in 1861 and known as Mahamana, Malaviya founded the Banaras Hindu University in 1916, collecting donations across the country for it, served four times as President of the Congress and edited the newspaper Leader.

Both men came from Shahjahanpur and were members of the Hindustan Republican Association.

Mangal Pandey came from Nagwa village in Ballia district and was a sepoy of the 34th Bengal Native Infantry.

She was born at Varanasi in 1828 and was named Manikarnika, called Manu in the family; after her marriage to Gangadhar Rao she became the Rani of Jhansi.

Shastri was born on 2 October 1904 at Mughalsarai in the Chandauli tract, a station town now named Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Nagar.

Bhushan belonged to Tikwapur in the present Kanpur district and wrote the Shivraj Bhushan, Shivabavani and Chhatrasal Dashak in Braj Bhasha, praising Shivaji and Chhatrasal Bundela in the veer rasa at a time when most Riti poets wrote love poetry for courts.

Firaq Gorakhpuri, whose real name was Raghupati Sahay, was born at Gorakhpur in 1896 and received the Jnanpith Award in 1969 for the Urdu collection Gul-e-Naghma, becoming the first Urdu writer to win the prize.

The Nagari Pracharini Sabha was founded at Varanasi in 1893 by students of the Queens College to press for the use of Devanagari and Hindi in the courts and offices, and it went on to publish dictionaries, manuscripts and the Hindi Shabdasagar.

Mahadevi Verma, born at Farrukhabad in 1907, was given the Jnanpith Award in 1982 for Yama, a collection that brings together her lyric poetry.

Prasad, who lived at Varanasi from 1889 to 1937, published Kamayani in 1936; it retells the story of Manu, Shraddha and Ida as an allegory of feeling and intellect and is treated as the chief long poem of Chhayavad.

Premchand, whose real name was Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, was born at Lamhi village near Varanasi in 1880 and died in 1936.

Bhojpuri descends from Magadhi Apabhramsha and is grouped with Magahi and Maithili in the Bihari group of the Eastern Indo-Aryan family, a classification made by George Abraham Grierson in the Linguistic Survey of India.

Braj Bhasha is the speech of the Braj tract, which covers Mathura, Agra, Aligarh, Hathras and Etah, and it belongs to the Western Hindi group that descends from Shauraseni Apabhramsha.

Jayasi belonged to Jais in the present Amethi district and completed the Padmavat in 1540.

Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, the Eastern Hindi speech of the Awadh region around Ayodhya, and began the work at Ayodhya in 1574.