UPSC GK Questions 2026

A senior civil servant, he took office as the first Governor of Haryana on 1 November 1966, the day the state was created, and swore in the first Chief Minister.

He belonged to the Congress and was sworn in as the first Chief Minister of Haryana on 1 November 1966, the day the state came into being, heading a ministry formed from the Punjab legislators of the Haryana region.

It was appointed on 23 April 1966 under Justice J. C. Shah of the Supreme Court, took the tehsil as its unit and the language returns of the 1961 census as its test, and submitted its report on 31 May 1966, after which the Punjab Reorganisation Act was passed.

Parliament passed it as Act No. 31 of 1966 after the Shah Commission reported, and it created Haryana, made Chandigarh a Union Territory and joint capital, transferred the hill areas to Himachal Pradesh, kept a common High Court for both states and set up a board for the Bhakra-Nangal and…

On that day the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966 came into force and the Hindi-speaking districts of the old State of Punjab became the new State of Haryana, with seven districts and Chandigarh as a shared capital.

Harisena, a court poet and officer of Samudragupta, composed the eulogy engraved on the Ashokan pillar now standing in the Allahabad fort at Prayagraj; it lists the kings uprooted in the north, those of the south who were defeated and reinstated, and the frontier rulers who submitted, and it is…

The Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, on the Betwa in Lalitpur district, is one of the earliest stone temples with a surviving shikhara, and its panels of Vishnu lying on Shesha, of Nara and Narayana and of Gajendra-moksha are standard illustrations of Gupta sculpture.

Jaunpur was the capital of the Sharqi sultans in the fifteenth century, and their architects worked out a style of their own, marked by huge pylon-like gateways in front of the prayer hall instead of slender minarets; the Atala Masjid and the Jama Masjid of Jaunpur are its best examples…

The Buddha died, or attained Mahaparinirvana, at Kushinagar in the land of the Mallas, and the site keeps the Mahaparinirvana temple with its long reclining image of the Buddha and the Ramabhar stupa raised over the place of his cremation.

The polished sandstone capital of four addorsed lions, with its abacus of four animals and wheels and the Dharmachakra below, stood on the Ashokan pillar at Sarnath near Varanasi, where the Buddha preached his first sermon; the capital was adopted as the State Emblem of India, and the wheel from…

Ghiyas Beg, a Persian noble who rose to be Jahangir's treasurer with the title Itmad-ud-Daulah, was buried in a garden tomb across the Yamuna that Nur Jahan completed in the 1620s. It is the first Mughal building faced entirely in white marble and decorated with pietra dura inlay, techniques later…

He rebuilt the old fort of Agra in red sandstone between 1565 and 1573, and his successors added to it: the Jahangiri Mahal belongs to his own reign, while Shah Jahan raised the white marble Moti Masjid and the pavilions of the Khas Mahal and the Musamman Burj, where he…

Akbar's abandoned capital was inscribed in 1986, and the other two World Heritage properties of the state are the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort, both inscribed in 1983.

A severe famine struck Awadh, and the Nawab set thousands to work on the Bara Imambara in 1784 so that wages reached the hungry, with the story that nobles worked at night to pull down part of the day's building and keep the work going.

Akbar's conquest of Gujarat gave the empire its western ports, and the gateway raised at Fatehpur Sikri in 1576 to mark it is one of the tallest in India, its height increased by the long flight of steps it stands on.

Work on the tomb began in 1632, a year after Mumtaz Mahal's death, on the right bank of the Yamuna at Agra, in white marble brought from Makrana in Rajasthan; tradition names Ustad Ahmad Lahauri as its chief architect, and the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List…

Bhimbetka, in Raisen district, was inscribed in 2003 for its prehistoric paintings, which cover a span from the Upper Palaeolithic to the historical period in a single group of shelters.

The fort on the long sandstone hill at Gwalior holds the Teli ka Mandir of the Pratihara period, the Sas-Bahu temples, the Gujari Mahal built by Man Singh Tomar for Mrignayani and the Man Mandir palace of the same ruler, with its tiled decoration.

The Udayagiri caves lie on a hill near Vidisha, not far from Sanchi, and belong to the Gupta period; the great relief of Vishnu as Varaha lifting the earth goddess is carved there, and an inscription of the reign of Chandragupta II records the visit of one of his officers.

The temple at Bhojpur in Raisen district, with its single enormous linga cut from one stone, is attributed to the eleventh-century Paramara ruler Bhoj of Dhar, the same king remembered for his learning and for the lake he is said to have built at Bhopal.