UPSC GK Questions 2026

Mrichchhakatika, the little clay cart, tells the story of the merchant Charudatta and the courtesan Vasantasena and is valued for its picture of ordinary city life rather than of kings.

Tholu Bommalata uses large leather puppets held against a lit screen, and the shadows tell episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata through the night.

Yakshagana is performed through the night in coastal Karnataka on episodes from the epics, with tall headgear, painted faces, a singer who carries the story and drums that mark the dance.

The Natya Shastra describes the playhouse, the actor's gestures, music, dance and the theory of rasa, the sentiment a performance raises in the spectator, and it is the foundation of every classical form of Indian theatre and dance.

Alam Ara carried recorded dialogue and songs and opened in Bombay in 1931; Irani also produced Kisan Kanya in 1937, the first Indian colour film, which is why his name answers two questions in this chapter.

Dadasaheb Phalke made it in 1913 as a silent film on the legend of the truthful king, and it is counted as the first Indian feature film.

In Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat he played the Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khalji, whose siege of Chittor in 1303 is the historical background of the story, which is drawn from the Padmavat of Malik Muhammad Jayasi.

She won the Academy Award for costume design in 1983 for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, sharing it with John Mollo, and was the first Indian to win an Oscar in any category.

The Dadasaheb Phalke Award was instituted in 1969 for lifetime contribution to Indian cinema and is named after Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, who made the first Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, in 1913 and is called the father of Indian cinema; the first recipient was the actress Devika Rani.

Ankiya Nat is the one-act devotional play written by Srimanta Sankardeva, the saint of the Vaishnava movement in Assam, and its performance is called a Bhaona, staged in the prayer hall of a satra or naamghar with a narrator, songs and masks.

Project Elephant was launched in 1992 to protect elephants, their habitat and the corridors along which herds move between forests, and it also deals with human elephant conflict and the welfare of captive elephants.

This nearly blind freshwater dolphin of the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna systems finds its prey by echolocation and was declared the National Aquatic Animal of India in 2009, a step meant to draw attention to the pollution and damming of its rivers.

The hangul, also called the Kashmir stag, is the only surviving Asiatic subspecies of the red deer in India and its last viable population lives in Dachigam, a park in the hills above Srinagar whose name means ten villages.

The Himalayan region is home to wild goats such as the ibex and the tahr and to the snow leopard, which hunts them above the tree line, so pair (a) is right.

CITES was drafted and signed at Washington in 1973, but a treaty begins to bind its members only after enough countries ratify it, and that stage was reached in 1975.

Silent Valley National Park lies in the Palakkad district of Kerala, in the Nilgiri hills of the Western Ghats, and protects one of the last stretches of undisturbed tropical evergreen forest in the country.

The Asiatic cheetah once hunted across the open grassland and scrub of central and peninsular India, was trained by rulers for coursing blackbuck, and was wiped out by shooting and by the ploughing of its grassland.

The Wild Ass Sanctuary lies in the Little Rann of Kachchh in Gujarat and is the last home of the Indian wild ass, locally called the khur, a Schedule I animal that grazes on the raised patches of grass known as bets in the salt desert.

The Red List arranges risk in a ladder, and the three threatened grades in falling order of severity are Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable.

The greater one-horned rhinoceros, the animal of Kaziranga and Manas in Assam, is placed in Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, the schedule that carries the highest protection and the strictest punishment for hunting or trade.