Performing Arts and Intangible Heritage

The word itself supplies the answer: tri bhanga means three bends or three breaks, so the pose must be described in terms of three points of flexion in the body. Those points are the neck, the waist and the knee, and the bends are in alternating directions, producing the sinuous S curve that gives the figure its characteristic grace.

• Option (a) describes exactly this, one leg bent with the body oppositely curved at waist and neck, and is the official answer. The pose is the signature stance of Odissi among the classical dance forms and is pervasive in sculpture, in the Krishna Venugopala images playing the flute, in the yakshi figures and in the bronzes.
• Option (b) is incorrect because it describes aharya abhinaya, the element of costume and make up, together with the codified characterisation seen in forms such as Kathakali; it concerns representation of a character, not the disposition of the body.
• Option (c) is incorrect because it describes angika abhinaya, expression through bodily movement, which is a general description of dance itself and not of any particular pose.
• Option (d) is incorrect because it describes a mood, shringara rasa, rather than a posture, and it is included to catch the candidate who associates the sinuous pose with eroticism and stops there. The elimination route is the etymology: only one option describes a bend at all, let alone the number of them.

• Option (b) is correct. The Gond and the Korku are the tribal communities of the Satpura and Melghat belt of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh with whom this month-long tree-planting observance is associated, saplings of fruit-bearing species being planted as an act of collective religious merit and then protected by the community.
• Option (a) is incorrect. The Bhutia and the Lepcha are Sikkim and Darjeeling communities; the Lepcha are the autochthonous people of Sikkim and their sacred landscape observances are directed at Khangchendzonga rather than at a planting campaign.
• Option (c) is incorrect. The Irula and the Toda are Nilgiri communities of Tamil Nadu, the Irula a particularly vulnerable tribal group known for snake catching and the Toda pastoralists with a buffalo-centred ritual life.
• Option (d) is incorrect. The Sahariya are a particularly vulnerable tribal group of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and the Agariya are associated with traditional iron smelting in central India, and with salt panning in the Little Rann in the western usage of the name. There is no elimination route worth the name. All four are genuine tribal pairs and each is regionally coherent, so the candidate either holds this specific association or does not.

• Statements 1 and 2 are correct and statement 3 is incorrect, so the official answer is (b).
• Statement 1 is correct: Sattriya grew out of the ankiya nat, the one-act devotional play, and combines music, dance and dramatic narration, so it is a total theatre form rather than dance alone.
• Statement 2 is correct: it was created in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Srimanta Sankaradeva as a medium of the Ekasarana Nama-dharma form of Vaishnavism, and has been preserved as a living tradition in the sattras, the Vaishnava monasteries of Assam, where it was performed by celibate monks, the bhokots; it was recognised as a classical dance form by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 2000, the eighth to be so recognised.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the pivot. The musical basis of Sattriya is the borgeet, the devotional songs composed by Sankaradeva and his disciple Madhavadeva in Brajavali, set to their own ragas and to the talas played on the khol and cymbals. Tulsidas, Kabir and Mirabai belong to the northern Bhakti tradition and have no connection with the Assamese Vaishnava repertoire. The governing point is that Sattriya is the creation of one identifiable regional Bhakti movement with its own literature and music, which the statement replaces with unrelated northern saint-poets.

• Option (d) is correct. Kalaripayattu is a martial art of Kerala, practised in the kalari, a pit-like training ground, and organised in a graded progression from body conditioning and footwork, through wooden weapons, to metal weapons including the flexible urumi, and finally to unarmed combat and the pressure-point techniques associated with the marma tradition. It is closely linked to Ayurveda through its system of massage and bone-setting, and it survives as a living practice rather than as a reconstructed one.
• Option (c) is the strongest distractor and is worth separating carefully, because it describes something real in almost the right place: the dance-drama traditions of northern Malabar are Theyyam and, elsewhere in Kerala, Krishnanattam and Kathakali, and Kathakali in fact draws its body training and stances from Kalaripayattu, which is why the two are easily conflated.
• Option (a) is incorrect: the Shaiva devotional tradition of the south is that of the Nayanars, whose hymns form the Tevaram.
• Option (b) is incorrect: the bronze tradition of the region is Chola bronze casting by the lost wax method. The word payattu, meaning practice or exercise, is itself the clue that the answer concerns training rather than performance or worship.

• Pairs 1 and 3 are correctly matched and pair 2 is not, so the official answer is (c).
• Pair 1 is correct: Garba is the circular folk dance of Gujarat performed around a perforated earthen lamp-pot during Navaratri, the name deriving from garbha, the womb, and the form is distinct from though performed alongside the stick dance, Dandiya Raas.
• Pair 3 is correct: Yakshagana is the night-long dance-drama of coastal Karnataka, combining elaborate headgear and painted faces with sung narration by the bhagavata and stories drawn from the epics and puranas.
• Pair 2 is incorrect: Mohiniyattam is a classical dance of Kerala, a solo form in the lasya mode performed by women in off-white and gold costume with the swaying torso movement that gives it its character, and its name refers to Mohini, the enchantress form of Vishnu. The classical dance of Odisha is Odissi, distinguished by the tribhanga stance and the chowka position. The item is decided on pair 2 alone, and the association of Mohiniyattam with Kerala is among the most securely known facts in the Indian classical dance syllabus, so rejecting it removes (b) and (d) at once.

• Option (b) is correct. The Manganiyar are a hereditary community of professional musicians in the Thar desert districts of western Rajasthan, principally Jaisalmer and Barmer, and across the border in Sindh. They are Muslim by faith but perform for Hindu and Muslim patrons alike and their repertoire draws on both traditions, the patronage system of jajmani binding particular musician families to particular patron families across generations. Their characteristic instrument is the bowed kamaycha, with the dholak and khartal, and they are often paired in discussion with the Langas, the other hereditary musician community of the region, who use the sindhi sarangi and the algoza.
• Option (a) is incorrect: the martial traditions of the north-east are Thang Ta of Manipur and the associated forms.
• Option (c) is incorrect: the Carnatic tradition is not associated with any single hereditary community of this kind.
• Option (d) is incorrect: pietra dura, the inlay of semi-precious stone in marble, is a Mughal decorative technique seen at the Taj Mahal and practised at Agra, and is a craft rather than a community's musical identity. The item rewards familiarity with the folk music map of Rajasthan.

• Option (a) is correct. Kalamkari is a textile art practised on cotton in Andhra Pradesh, the name coming from the kalam, the bamboo or date palm pen used to draw and to apply the mordants and dyes. It has two centres and two idioms: Srikalahasti, temple based and entirely freehand, depicting narrative panels from the epics and the Puranas for use as temple hangings, and Machilipatnam or Pedana, which uses carved wooden blocks and grew under Persian and Golconda patronage for export. The dyes are vegetable, and the sequence of washing, myrobalan treatment, drawing, mordanting and repeated washing runs to many stages.
• Options (b), (c) and (d) each get one element right and the rest wrong, which is the design of the item: the material must be cotton, not bamboo, wool or silk, and the region must be southern. The elimination route is the word kalam itself, a pen, which points to a drawn rather than a woven or block dyed craft and to the Deccan rather than the north.

• Items 1 and 3 hold the tag, so the official answer is (c). Banaras Brocades and Sarees were registered in 2009 in the handicrafts class, the registration covering the districts of Varanasi, Mirzapur, Chandauli, Bhadohi, Jaunpur and Azamgarh, and it was sought to protect the weavers against machine made and imported imitations. The Tirupathi Laddu was registered in the same period on the application of the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, and the registration was contested on the ground that a temple offering distributed as prasadam is not a good in trade, which makes it the most instructive of the three for a candidate.
• Item 2 is incorrect: Rajasthani daal-bati-churma is a regional cuisine, not a product with a defined producer, place of origin and reputation attributable to that origin, and a dish cooked in every household of a State cannot satisfy the requirement that the qualities be essentially attributable to a delimited geographical area. The elimination route is that a home cooked dish is not the kind of thing the Act protects, and rejecting item 2 removes options (b) and (d), while the Banarasi saree is among the best known Indian registrations and removes (a).

• Statement 1 is correct. Sankirtana as practised in Manipur is a composite ritual form in which singing, drumming and dance are performed together in the precincts of the Vaishnava temple, and it is inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity as a performing art combining all three.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the eliminating statement. The pung, a barrel drum, is the central instrument of the form, so much so that the drummer dancer performance is itself named pung cholom. Cymbals, the kartal, are used and give the kartal cholom its name, but they are emphatically not the only instruments.
• Statement 3 is correct. The repertoire narrates the life and deeds of Krishna, the form having developed under the Vaishnava patronage established in Manipur in the eighteenth century. Rejecting statement 2 eliminates (a) and (c), and statement 1 being self evidently true from any description of the form disposes of (d), leaving (b). Governing principle: the word 'only' in a statement about instruments, foods, species or States is the most reliable single marker of a false statement in this paper family.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Chaliha Sahib is a forty day observance of the Sindhi community in honour of Jhulelal, the community's patron, associated with the water deity Varuna, marked by fasting and vigil and celebrated wherever Sindhi populations settled after Partition.
• Pair 2 is incorrectly matched. The Nanda Raj Jaat Yatra is the great quadrennial pilgrimage of Garhwal and Kumaon in Uttarakhand, in which the image of the goddess Nanda Devi is carried on a journey of some two hundred and eighty kilometres to Homkund, led by a four horned ram; it belongs to the Garhwali and Kumaoni Hindu communities of the Himalaya, and has nothing to do with the Gonds, who are a central Indian tribal people of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra and Telangana.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched. The Wari or Warkari pilgrimage is the Maharashtrian Vaishnava tradition of walking to Pandharpur to Vitthal, carrying the palkhis of Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram, and belongs to the Varkari sampradaya of Maharashtra, not to the Santhals, who are a tribal people of Jharkhand, West Bengal and Odisha with an entirely distinct ritual calendar. Both wrong pairs are constructed by the same method, taking a well known regional tradition and attaching it to a tribal community from a different part of India. Rejecting either pair 2 or pair 3 eliminates (b) and (c), leaving (a) against (d), which pair 1 then settles. Governing principle: check the geography of the tradition against the geography of the community; here neither the Gonds nor the Santhals lives anywhere near the region to which the named tradition belongs.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Chapchar Kut is the spring festival of the Mizos, celebrated in March after the clearing of the jhum plots and before sowing, and is the best known festival of Mizoram.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. Khongjom Parba is a Manipuri ballad form, a narrative sung to the dholak that commemorates the battle of Khongjom of 1891 between the Manipuri forces and the British, and it grew into a distinct performance genre.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched. Thang Ta, from thang for sword and ta for spear, is the martial art of Manipur, performed in ritual and stage forms; it is not from Sikkim. Elimination sequence matters here. Recognising that Thang Ta belongs to Manipur removes options (c) and (d), which leaves (a) and (b), and the question then turns entirely on whether Khongjom Parba is placed in Manipur.
• Pair 2 is therefore the decisive pair, and a candidate who knows only that Thang Ta is Manipuri cannot get past two options. Hence (b). Useful pattern: this item packs three different genres, a festival, a ballad and a martial dance, into one set, and two of the three belong to Manipur, so the examiner is testing whether the candidate over generalises from the single Sikkim distractor.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. Tyagaraja was a devotee of Rama, and the overwhelming majority of his kritis are addressed to Rama, including the five Pancharatna kritis and the Utsava Sampradaya and Divya Nama Sankirtanas; his two musical dramas are the Prahlada Bhakti Vijayam and the Nauka Charitram, the latter alone being on a Krishna theme.
• Statement 2 is correct. Tyagaraja composed in ragas he himself brought into use, among them Kharaharapriya, Harikambhoji and Devagandhari as commonly cited, and he is credited with establishing the kriti as the principal form of Carnatic concert music in its three part structure of pallavi, anupallavi and charanam.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is the sharpest elimination in the question, because the two composers are separated by roughly three centuries. Annamacharya, or Annamayya, belongs to the fifteenth century and died in 1503; Tyagaraja lived from 1767 to 1847.
• Statement 4 is correct. Annamacharya was attached to the temple at Tirumala and his sankirtanas are addressed to Venkateshwara, thousands of them inscribed on copper plates preserved there. So statements 2 and 4 are correct and the answer is (b). Elimination route: rejecting the contemporaneity in statement 3 removes options (a), (c) and (d) at a stroke, leaving (b) without any need to assess the remaining statements. The chronological anchor is worth carrying, since Annamacharya precedes the Carnatic trinity of Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar and Syama Sastri by some three hundred years.

Hence (b).

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. The puthukuli is the embroidered shawl of the Toda community of the Nilgiri hills in Tamil Nadu, worked in red and black on a coarse white cotton ground in a distinctive counted thread technique that is reversible, and Toda embroidery carries a geographical indication registered to Tamil Nadu.
• Pair 2 is incorrectly matched. Sujni embroidery belongs to Bihar, principally the Muzaffarpur area, where old cloth is layered and quilted with running stitch and figurative motifs; it holds a geographical indication for Bihar, not Maharashtra.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched. Uppada is a coastal village in East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, and the Uppada Jamdani sari, woven in the jamdani technique in which the motif is inserted by hand during weaving rather than added afterwards, is an Andhra Pradesh craft, not a Karnataka one. Only pair 1 is correct, so the answer is (a). This is a difficult item because there is no reasoning route at all; each pair must be known independently and the options are constructed so that no single rejection settles the answer. Recognising Uppada as Andhra removes options (c) and (d) but still leaves (a) against (b), which turns on Sujni. The one usable heuristic is that jamdani weaving in India is associated with Bengal and with the Andhra coast rather than with the Karnataka silk tradition, which runs to Mysore silk and Ilkal.

Hence (a).

The question asks which statement is not correct.

• Option (b) is correct as a statement of fact. Tansen composed dhrupads on Hindu deities, including compositions on Shiva and on Krishna, and dhrupad remained a devotional form even at the Mughal court.
• Option (c) is correct. He composed songs in praise of his patrons, both Raja Ramchandra Singh of Rewa and Akbar, and court panegyric in musical form was ordinary practice.
• Option (d) is correct. Tansen is credited with a number of ragas, among them Miyan ki Malhar, Miyan ki Todi, Darbari Kanada and Miyan ka Sarang, and the prefix Miyan in these names records the attribution.
• Option (a) is the statement that fails, and is therefore the answer. The title conferred by Akbar was Miyan, which is why he is known as Mian Tansen. The name Tansen itself is generally traced to his earlier years and to the patronage of Raja Vikramjit of Gwalior, not to Akbar. The item turns entirely on separating the honorific Miyan from the name Tansen, and the very form of the name Mian Tansen used in the stem is the internal clue.

Garba of Gujarat was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2023, at the eighteenth session of the Intergovernmental Committee held in Kasane, Botswana, making it India's fifteenth element and the most recent at the time of the examination.

• Option (a) is wrong because Chhau dance was inscribed in 2010, alongside the Kalbelia folk songs and dances of Rajasthan and Mudiyettu of Kerala.
• Option (b) is wrong because Durga Puja in Kolkata was inscribed in 2021, the immediately preceding Indian entry and the likely intended distractor.
• Option (d) is wrong because Kumbh Mela was inscribed in 2017. The question tests the ordering of recent inscriptions rather than mere listing, so a candidate must hold the sequence Kumbh Mela 2017, Durga Puja 2021, Garba 2023.

Vishnu Digambar Paluskar founded the first Gandharva Mahavidyalaya at Lahore in 1901, giving (d). His significance lies in taking Hindustani classical music out of the closed gharana and hereditary patronage system and placing it in a public institutional setting with a published notation system, fees, examinations and open admission, including for students outside traditional musician families. He later established a branch in Bombay in 1908.

• Option (a), Delhi, is where the institution came to have a prominent later presence, which is the likely source of confusion, but not the site of the first school.
• Option (b), Gwalior, is a major gharana centre and Paluskar's own training lineage connects to that tradition, but the school was not founded there.
• Option (c), Ujjain, has no association with the institution. A related figure worth distinguishing is Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, who worked on the classification of ragas into thaats and on notation, and is often conflated with Paluskar in memory.