Indian Heritage Art and Culture (For Civil Services Examination)

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For Civil Services Examination India’s vast and diverse cultural heritage makes for a compelling and fascinating study. From the ancient to the medieval, and finally to the modern, there runs a rich tapestry of cultural achievements that spans centuries. This book makes a sincere attempt to place these achievements in their proper context in an easy-to-read chronological order.

With the avowed aim of assisting aspirants for the civil services examination and other similar examinations, it aims to simplify and demystify India’s vast cultural history.

Why you should pick up this book?

• Gives a structured plan on now to approach and tackle this topic

• Events and issues in chronological order [Ancient to Modern]

• ‘Important Topics to Focus On’ at the end of each chapter

• Plenty of supportive illustrations

• Past years Prelims Questions and Practice questions with answer key

• Past years Main’s questions and practice model questions with answers

Word to the reader

The term ‘Culture’ is usually understood to be the collective values of the society manifested through to numerous institutions as well as in the dispositions, attitudes of its individual members. These in turn find expression in the various art forms—tangible and intangible, abstract ideas, beliefs and even in the material objects.

The Indian social landscape with its continuous and unbroken evolution of at least 5,000 years has offered sufficient space for Indian culture to evolve into enchanting diverse forms. One cannot help but marvel at the distinct cultural waves, which have sweep our country through the ages and their confluences which have bloomed into new forms of culture. Truly, it has been the strength of Indian culture to assimilate the influences rather than to annihilate it.

Thus, our culture and art forms as we see them today, are a heritage of centuries of cultural tradition and evolution. Even to capture a glimpse of it is a colossal task, albeit a satisfying one. This is what this book has endeavoured to do.

The various aspects of Indian culture, right from the Indus Valley and the Vedic culture to the post-independence and modern culture, have been captured in this book. Although, the subject of culture is wide, encompassing its numerous manifestations, the focus here has been on the need of the aspirant from the perspective of the civil-services examination. Considering that the scope of study of Indian culture is extremely diverse and a vast one, while the time of an average aspirant is limited, every effort has been made to capture, the essence of all topics relevant. Thus, conciseness and preciseness are the twin hallmarks of this book.

The book begins with a detailed analysis of the topics and their relevance from the perspective of the civil-services examination. It also brings out the relative importance of the topic of ‘Culture’ in the scheme of the Preliminary and the Main examination as well the significance of the various sub-topics. Understandably, all the topics/subtopics are not equally important [from the examination perspective] and the book therefore helps the aspirants to prioritise.

Another unique aspect of the book is that it incorporates sufficient number of model questions for the Preliminary and the Main examination. These are analogous to what one may expect in the examination itself. The Preliminary questions section [Appendix-I] contains 100 model objective type multiple choice questions while the section on questions fro the Main Examination [in Appendix 3] contains 20-20 questions each, which are fully solved or contain/indicate the important points to be covered. Relevant illustrations and photographs have also been provided at appropriate places to help the reader to grasp the nuances of the subject better.

Writing the book has been a long, enriching and satisfying journey for me and I thank the publishers for trusting me with this project and themselves putting in a lot of hard work.

I sincerely hope the book will kindle an avid interest in topic of Indian culture and also help the aspirants of civil-services in grasping the nuances of this topic and emerging with flying colours.