UPSC GK Questions 2026

She learned Bharatanatyam at a time when the form was losing its temple patronage, gave it a place on the public concert stage, and founded Kalakshetra in 1936 as a school where it could be taught systematically along with music and craft.

The form rests on two basic stances, the square chowk and the three-bent tribhanga, in which the head, the torso and the hips are deflected in opposite directions to produce the sculptural line seen in Odisha temple carving.

It began with the kathakars, the story-tellers who narrated the epics in north Indian temples, and under Mughal patronage it moved into the court, took on Persian costume and turned towards abstract rhythm.

In the tarangam the dancer balances on the raised rim of a brass plate and moves it in rhythm, often with a pot of water carried on the head, which demonstrates the control over balance for which the Andhra form is famous.

Sattriya of Assam was the eighth and last form to enter the Akademi list, and that single date is the fact papers ask most often about it.

The Natya Shastra is the Sanskrit treatise that lays down the grammar every classical form follows, dividing performance into nritta, nritya and natya, naming the four kinds of abhinaya, and describing the rasas.

The name means story-play, and the form stages episodes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Its characters are identified by make-up types, chiefly pacha for noble heroes, kathi for proud anti-heroes such as Ravana, thadi for fierce figures, kari for demonesses and minukku for gentle women and sages.

Bharatanatyam grew in the temples of Tamil Nadu, where it was performed by devadasis under the older name sadir or dasiattam, and it was brought to the concert stage in the twentieth century by E. Krishna Iyer and Rukmini Devi Arundale, who founded Kalakshetra at Madras in 1936.

The Bhagavad Gita is a section of the Bhishma Parva of the epic, in which Krishna counsels Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

Ashvaghosha wrote the Buddhacharita, a life of the Buddha in Sanskrit verse, and also Saundarananda, and tradition places him at Kanishka's court along with the physician Charaka and the Buddhist scholar Vasumitra.

The Panchatantra, meaning the five treatises, uses talking animals to teach practical wisdom and statecraft, and the frame story explains that it was composed to educate princes who had no taste for formal learning.

The Thirukkural is a work of short couplets arranged under three heads, virtue, wealth and love, and it is written so plainly that it is quoted as a guide to conduct rather than read only as literature.

Pitaka means basket, so the canon is called the three baskets. The Vinaya Pitaka contains the rules of discipline for monks and nuns, the Sutta Pitaka holds the discourses of the Buddha, and the Abhidhamma Pitaka deals with philosophy and the analysis of mind and matter.

Mudrarakshasa, meaning the signet ring of Rakshasa, is a political drama in which Chanakya outwits the minister Rakshasa and secures the throne for Chandragupta Maurya.

The Ramayana is accordingly called the Adi Kavya, the first poem.

The Ashtadhyayi, meaning the work in eight chapters, fixed the rules of Sanskrit in a set of short formulas and is admired as the earliest scientific grammar of any language, since it describes the whole language through a compact system of rules.

He wrote the Rajatarangini, whose name means the river of kings, in Kashmir in the twelfth century. Because he arranged rulers in order of time and used inscriptions, coins and earlier records, the work is treated as the earliest piece of history writing in India in the modern sense.

The Harshacharita is a biography of his patron and one of the earliest historical biographies written in Sanskrit, while Kadambari is a romance in ornate prose and is often described as one of the first novels in any Indian language.

That play, whose title means the little clay cart, was written by Shudraka, and it is unusual among Sanskrit dramas because its hero is an impoverished merchant and its plot turns on ordinary city life rather than on gods and kings.

The Arthashastra sets out the duties of a king, the working of ministers and spies, taxation, law, trade, agriculture and warfare, and it is one of the main sources for Mauryan administration.