UPSC GK Questions 2026

Bhoja, the Paramara king of Dhar in the first half of the eleventh century, is credited with a long list of works, of which the Samarangana Sutradhara on architecture and town planning and the Saraswatikanthabharana on poetics are the best known.

The Paramaras ruled Malwa from Dhar from about the ninth century until Alauddin Khalji's army took the country in 1305.

The Udayagiri caves near Vidisha are Gupta rock-cut shrines of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, and the largest panel there shows Varaha, the boar incarnation of Vishnu, raising the earth goddess on his tusk.

The pillar stands at Besnagar beside Vidisha. It was set up in the second century before Christ by Heliodorus, a Greek ambassador sent by Antialcidas, the Indo-Greek king of Taxila, to the court of king Bhagabhadra.

The Mahakaleshwar temple at Ujjain is one of the twelve jyotirlingas, and it is singled out in every list because its lingam faces south, the only one of the twelve to do so; the bhasma aarti performed there before dawn is equally famous.

Avanti was one of the sixteen mahajanapadas of the sixth century before Christ, and it was divided into two parts: the north, ruled from Ujjayini or Ujjain, and the south, ruled from Mahishmati, which is identified with Maheshwar on the Narmada.

Ujjain stands on the Shipra, also written Kshipra, a tributary of the Chambal, and it is on the ghats of this river that the Simhastha, the Kumbh of Ujjain, is held every twelve years.

The relic caskets of Sariputta and Mahamoggallana, the two chief disciples of the Buddha, were found in Stupa 3 at Sanchi, which stands a short distance north-east of the Great Stupa and has a single gateway.

The four toranas that stand at the cardinal points of the Great Stupa were carved in the first century before Christ in the Satavahana period, and an inscription on one of them records the gift of ivory carvers of Vidisha.

The Great Stupa, Stupa 1 at Sanchi, was raised in brick in the third century before Christ in the reign of Ashoka, who also set up a pillar at the site bearing the schism edict and crowned by a lion capital.

Vishnu Shridhar Wakankar, an archaeologist from Ujjain, noticed the rocky outcrops from a train in 1957 and went on to explore and record the shelters and their paintings.

The Bhimbetka rock shelters lie in Raisen district, in the foothills of the Vindhyan range south of Bhopal, within the forest now protected as Ratapani.

Thanesar, the ancient Sthanvishvara in Kurukshetra district, was the capital of the Pushyabhuti dynasty, also called the Vardhana dynasty from the ending of its kings' names.

The pillar was brought from Topra in Yamunanagar district to Delhi by Firoz Shah Tughlaq in the fourteenth century and set up at his new city of Firozabad, where it still stands at Firoz Shah Kotla.

Jyotisar, a short distance from the town of Kurukshetra, is held by tradition to be the spot where Krishna spoke the Gita to Arjuna before the Mahabharata war, and an old banyan tree there is shown as a witness to it.

The Manusmriti describes Brahmavarta as the holy land created by the gods between the Saraswati and the Drishadvati, and that strip of country is the plain of present-day Haryana.

Banawali in Fatehabad district, excavated by R. S. Bisht, gave a terracotta model of a plough, which is one of the clearest pieces of evidence for ploughed fields in the Harappan world; the other famous evidence is the ploughed field surface found at Kalibangan in Rajasthan.

Rakhigarhi lies in Hisar district and covers the land of two villages, Rakhi Khas and Rakhi Shahpur, on a dried channel of the Drishadvati, today called the Chautang.

These three receive the largest number of hymns in the Rigveda. Indra, the war god and breaker of forts, has the greatest number; Agni, the fire that carries the offering to the gods, comes next; and Soma, both a plant and a god, has the whole of the ninth mandala…

The Shatapatha Brahmana belongs to the Shukla or White Yajurveda and the Taittiriya Brahmana to the Krishna or Black Yajurveda, so both are Brahmana texts of the Yajurveda.