Practice: Painting and Handicrafts

(d) The Chawand Ragamala, 1605. Painted by Nisardin, also given as Nasiruddin, at Chawand.

Why not the others: (a) Sahibdin's 1628 Ragamala marks the mature Mewar style, not the earliest dated set. Twenty-three years and two painters separate them.

(a) Maharana Pratap's later capital. Established after he recovered western Mewar following 1579.

Why not the others: The founding document of Rajasthani painting was produced in a wartime capital, by a painter with a Muslim name, for a Rajput house at its most embattled — and its subject was a set on musical modes.

(b) Probably Rana Pratap Singh or his son Amar Singh. The sources say probably, and this page does not harden it.

Why not the others: (a) is what preparation material generally gives. The date, the painter and the place are secure; the patron is not, and knowing which part is contested is the examinable skill.

(c) Marwar. Marwar also covers Jodhpur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Nagaur and Ajmer.

Why not the others: Placing a famous centre in the wrong school is the commonest error in this topic. Nathdwara is Mewar; Jhalawar is a Hadoti sub-style, not a school; Uniara is Dhundhar.

(d) Nihal Chand. 1710-1782, for Raja Savant Singh, whose works are widely held to be the finest of all Rajasthani miniatures.

Why not the others: (a) Savant Singh is the patron, and himself a poet — writing as Nagari Das. Patron and painter are the pair being tested.

(a) Nagari Das. He was a follower of the Vallabhacharya sect and a worshipper of Krishna, and retired with Bani Thani to Vrindavan in 1757.

Why not the others: A question giving Nagari Das as a separate poet is testing whether you know they are the same man.

(b) Its Vallabhite patron had himself and Bani Thani painted as Krishna and Radha. The religious idiom and the personal one are the same idiom, which is why the style is unmistakable and unlike the hunting scenes of Kota.

Why not the others: This is a question about why rather than what, and it is the chapter's argument about how patronage shapes style.

(c) Bundi, Kota and the Jhalawar sub-style. Bundi ran from the 17th to the end of the 19th century and was initially influenced by Mewar; Kota is known for hunting scenes.

Why not the others: The political fact underneath is that Kota was partitioned out of Bundi in 1631 by Shah Jahan. A school splits into two styles because a state split into two states.

(d) A cloth scroll unrolled for a Bhopa's narrative performance. Painted by the Joshi families of Shahpura, in Bhilwara; Shree Lal Joshi is the best-known modern name.

Why not the others: (b) describes a pichwai, and the pair is the question. Both traditions are defined by use rather than by style.

(a) Back and hanging. They are hung behind the image of Shrinathji, at Nathdwara, in Rajsamand district.

Why not the others: The name explains the object, and its subject and size follow from that function.

(b) Kota Doria, application 12, registered in 2005-06 — the first Rajasthan entry in the register, and among the earliest Indian GIs of any kind.

Why not the others: The other three years are all correct for their crafts, which is what makes this an ordering question rather than a recall one. Learn the sequence and every individual year comes with it: Kota Doria, then the 2008-09 trio of Blue Pottery, Molela and Kathputli, then Sanganeri, Bikaneri Bhujia, Bagru, Thewa, Makrana.

(c). Blue Pottery of Jaipur holds application 66 for the word (2008-09) and application 540 for the logo (2016-17). Kota Doria, Molela Clay Work and Kathputlis of Rajasthan are each registered twice in the same way.

Why not the others: (b) is the tempting answer and it is wrong — both sources can be reading the register correctly and citing different rows. Answer with the word-mark year unless the question says logo.

(d) Contains no clay, being worked from quartz and glass. It is associated with a nineteenth-century origin and a revival through the Jaipur School of Art.

Why not the others: It is a chemistry question as much as a craft one, which is exactly why it is asked. Thewa is the other technique worth knowing: gold work on coloured glass, held exclusively by the Soni families of Pratapgarh.

(a). The figure is embellished with glass, beads, cowry, stone pieces, feathers, cloth, lacquer and flower petals, and worshipped for the whole fortnight. Sanjhi is an incarnation of Parvati, worshipped with a wish for a virtuous husband of a good family, and is also called Sanjhuli, Sinjhi, Sanjh ke Hanji and Hanjya.

Why not the others: (c) and (d) belong to Phad. The examinable part of Sanjhi is that the ten-day sequence is fixed: day 1 the sun, moon and stars · day 2 five flowers · day 3 a feather · day 4 an elephant rider · day 5 a chaupad · day 6 a swastika · day 7 ghewar · day 8 drums · day 9 a bandanwar · day 10 a date palm — and over the last five days a much larger figure is made, the Sanjhya kot, with the goddess at its centre.

(b) The purpose is double, and that is the whole point of the entry. Mandana is drawn on walls, doorsills, doorways, chabutaras, the courtyard and the puja sthal, in white and red ochre, using triangle, square, hexagon, octagon and circle.

Why not the others: The motifs are occasion-specific and that is where a matching question is set: marriage — footprints of Ganesh and Lakshmi, swastika, peacock and peahen, flower-pots; childbirth — galeecha, flowers, swastika; Rakshabandhan — Shrawan Kumar; Gangaur — galeecha, flowers, bageecha; return from pilgrimage — Pushkar Pedi and Pathwari.

(c) Blue. Black is for devils; white or yellow for sages.

Why not the others: The colour code is a system, not a decoration. Every colour represents a quality — vermilion or red symbolises valour — and the central character or deity is depicted far larger than every other figure. Size is rank and colour is character, which is the grammar of the form in one sentence, and it is what an option about a "larger figure in the middle" is really testing.

(d) The Chhipa caste, at Shahpura in Bhilwara, traditional artists of the form for the last two centuries; Shree Lal Joshi is named as a well-known present-day artist.

Why not the others: (b) The Bhopas are the performers, not the painters — they carry the phad rolled on a wooden staff from village to village and narrate the deeds of the deities to the tunes of the Ravan Hattha or the Jantar. Painter and narrator are different communities, and the board is explicit that phad narration is a unique combination of folk theatre, folk vocal and instrumental music, folk lore, folk painting and folk religion — five forms in one performance.

(a). The cloth is thick, prepared with starch of wheat or rice mixed with gum, and then burnished.

Why not the others: Six or seven colours are used — bright orange, red, yellow, black, blue, green and brown — made from stones and minerals, so (c) describes something real that is not this word. Human bodies are painted in mellow red, clothes in green, architectural objects in red-brown, and only the outlines in black, which is (b).

(b). Paane are pictures on paper, installed at festivals to perform the ritual — Ganesh, Lakshmi, Ramdevji, Gogaji, Shrawan Kumar, Tejaji, Ram, Krishna, Shiv-Parvati, Dharmraj, Devnarayanji, Shrinathji and Nrisingh.

Why not the others: The board gives an economic reason for a change in a religious art form, which is the sort of causal statement worth quoting. And one superlative goes with it: the paana of Shrinathji is the most artistic of them all, painted in twenty-four ornamentations — chaubis ornamentations.

(c), prepared in the reign of Tej Singh — early Mewar painting taking the form of illustrations accompanying Pothi texts.

Why not the others: (a) is the trap, and it is what this site's own section 2 says — correctly, but about a different noun. The Chawand Ragamala of 1605 is the earliest dated set of Rajasthani miniatures; it is not the earliest Rajasthani painting. A superlative survives only with its noun attached. (b) 1423, written at Delwara, is the next example; (d) Dhola Maru, 1592, is from Chavand and is conserved in the National Archives, New Delhi.

(d). Akbar held them in such esteem that he gave the Usta artists an honourable position in his court.

Why not the others: (a) is the Matheran family, and swapping the two families is exactly how this is set. The school began when Rao Rai Singh, impressed by Mughal artists, brought Ustad Ali Raza and Ustad Hamid Ruknuddin to Bikaner; its pure form appears under Anup Singh; and its unique motif is the crane-couple, saras-mithun, under raining clouds. Gold work on camel hide is a court painting style and a Bikaner handicraft at once — the line between "school" and "handicraft" here is administrative, not real.

(a) — the painting studio among the thirty-six.

Why not the others: (c) reverses the direction: Sawai Ishwari Singh shifted the Suratkhana FROM Amber TO Jaipur, which follows the move of the capital itself. (d) is the Maharaja School of Arts and Crafts, established by Sawai Ram Singh in 1857, now the Maharaja School of Arts — a different institution a century later. Under Sawai Pratap Singh more than fifty painters worked in the Suratkhana.

(b). Lime is ground to a fine smooth powder, plastered on the wall, and painted on while wet with colour dissolved in water, so that the wet lime absorbs the colour and the painting becomes an integral part of the wall.

Why not the others: (a) is the Manikuttim technique, used under Sawai Madho Singh I — pearls, lacquer and other material with a binder instead of colour. (c) is ghotana, from the phad. (d) is the Usta style. Note the transmission: the method was first used in Rajasthan by artists of the Jaipur school at Amber, and its import was a result of Kachchhawa-Mughal relations.

(c) Jaisalmer, developed mainly under Maharawal Harraj, Akhai Singh and Mulraj.

Why not the others: This is the one style in the board's whole chapter defined by what did NOT reach it, which is why it is worth remembering — every other entry is described by an influence it absorbed. (a) Nagaur was itself influenced by the Marwar style, and its specialities are paintings depicting old age and transparent attire. (d) Bikaner shows Mughal and Deccan impact both.

(d). Artists of the House of Painting Studio, the musavvirkhana, painted group-hunting scenes on walls and large canvases, so (b) is wrong twice over.

Why not the others: This is the best single line in the chapter for an interview. The style most associated with the shikar is also the one that puts women in it — a concrete answer to a question about the depiction of women in Rajput art that would otherwise be met with generalities. Kota was established as an independent genre by Maharao Ram Singh (1661-1705) and reached its zenith under Ummed Singh.

(a). Paintings on the palace walls of Jhalawar depicting Shrinath-ji, Radhakrishna lila, Ramlila and royal splendour have been found, but the style itself is not demonstrated.

Why not the others: (c) Jhalawar is Hadoti, not Dhundhar — and it is the standard misplacement. But the reason to know this question is the epistemic point: a sub-style the state's own textbook says is not yet demonstrated should not be asserted as one, and this page follows the board rather than the coaching summaries in declining to describe it.

(b). From the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th, the businessmen of the region built magnificent havelis at Nawalgarh, Ramgarh, Fatehpur, Laxmangarh, Mukundgarh, Mandawa and Bisau, and the art was deeply influenced by the Jaipur School. Colours: catechu, blue and pink.

Why not the others: (d) The Rangmahal, world-famous for its murals (Bhitti Chitra), was constructed by Rao Shatrushal (Chhatrasal) at Bundi. Carry one contemporary fact from the same passage: the murals are facing erosion and badly in need of restoration, and the board commends the restoration work of Nadine Le Prince, a French conservationist.

(a) R is the evidence for A. Chawand was established during a war of recovery, not in a settled court.

(c) A overstates: the sources say probably Rana Pratap or his son Amar Singh. R is true, and does not settle the patron.

(a) R is the instance that supports A. Schools follow courts, so when a state divides, so does its painting.

(d) R is true and A false. They are distinguished by USE, not style — which is the chapter's general point about folk painting.

(a) R explains A. A GI protects a place-based monopoly; a guild protected it by secrecy.

(a) The four schools are Mewar, Marwar, Hadoti and Dhundhar. Getting a famous centre into the right one is most of this topic.

(a) C and D are painter and patron of the same works, which is the pairing most often merged.

(a), and all four years are from the GI Registry's own register. Molela is the surprise — at 2008-09 it is one of the earliest, not one of the latest, and it is widely misquoted as 2015. Bikaner Usta Kala is genuinely recent, registered in 2023-24 alongside four other Rajasthan crafts.

Note the change. An earlier version of this question gave 2015 for Thewa and Molela and 2019 for Usta, following secondary compilations. The register does not support those years and this question has been rebuilt on it.

(c) A colophon page giving the place, the year and the artist's name. That single page is the whole basis of the 1605 date, and it is strong evidence because a colophon is the painters' own statement rather than a later attribution.

Why not the others: (a) is the Maru Ragini of 1628, which carries its evidence on the painting. (b) is the Bundi Ragamala of 1591, whose painters call themselves pupils of Mir Sayyid Ali and Khwaja Abdus Samad. (d) is Bikaner, where the bahis record the commission. Four schools, four different kinds of evidence, and knowing which is which is the difference between a remembered date and a defensible one.

(d). Samvat 1685 is 1628 CE, and the line gives artist, patron, place and date together, which is the highest grade of evidence this topic offers and the reason 1628 is not negotiable the way most dates here are.

Why not the others: Jagat Singh I is dated 1628-1652, the same span as Sahibdin's dated works, and the reign and the output are one event. Chawand and Nisardin belong to the 1605 set, whose evidence is a colophon page, not an inscription on the painting.

(a) Manohar. Two Mewar names belong beside Sahibdin's: Manohar's Bal Kanda of 1649 and Jagannath's Bihari Satsai of 1719.

Why not the others: (b) is the standard error, because Sahibdin has a Bhagavata Purana of 1648 and a Yuddha Kanda of 1652, and the years sit either side of 1649. A painter with several dated works attracts the works of his contemporaries, which is exactly how this option is set.

(b). The text is Dhundhar; the famous illustrated set is Mewar.

Why not the others: (a) is the trap, and it is a reasonable-sounding one, because a text composed at one court and painted at another sounds like the exception when it is the ordinary case. Ask where the painting was made, not where the poem was written, and the option stops working.

(c) A title, conferred for her unparalleled beauty and elegance. She was an attendant of Raj Singh's wife and a gifted poetess, singer and dancer, and the painting is in the National Museum, New Delhi.

Why not the others: (a) is the version that circulates, and a personal name is precisely what the record does not carry — no birth name is given with any confidence, which is why every list supplying one should be treated with suspicion. (b) names a real thing wrongly: the poem is the Bihari Jas Chandrika, and it is the poem that became the basis for Nihal Chand's painting. The painting is a painting of a poem about a person, in that order.

(d) He abdicated. Abdication is an end of reign, so 1757 is both the retirement and the close of the reign, and the reign runs 1748 to 1757. Raj Singh's reign is 1706-1748 and Nihal Chand worked for Sawant Singh between 1735 and 1757, which is what fixes the span at both ends.

Why not the others: (b) is the widely printed version, built on a closing year of 1764, and 1764 cannot be a reign-end on these dates. What 1764 most likely is, is a death year, a third fact again, and this page does not assert it as one either. The retirement to Vrindavan was not a devotional gesture chosen at leisure: it was a man losing a succession war and leaving.

(a). A school's signature face is traced to one woman's face, and the Bani Thani itself adds deeply curved eyes, an exaggerated arch of the eyebrows, a pointed nose, a serpentine curl of hair spiralling down the cheek, thin lips and a pronounced chin.

Why not the others: (b) Bundi women are petite and round-faced, with receding foreheads, sharp noses, full cheeks, sharply pencilled eyebrows and a "pinched" waist. (c) the double-lid eye and marked shading are Kota's marker, and elephant drawing is unsurpassed in both Bundi and Kota. Physiognomy is the most reliable instrument in this topic, and the one an option is likeliest to swap.

(b). The reason given is bravery "in defending him against his son Prince Khurram's (Shah Jahan) rebellion in Deccan".

Why not the others: The state books give 1631 and Shah Jahan, and this page carries both accounts. They are not simply rival dates; they describe two different acts — a grant of territory to a loyal son under Jahangir, and a formal constitution of a separate state under Shah Jahan, five or six years apart. Carry 1625 with Jahangir and Madhu Singh, and 1631 with Shah Jahan, and say which you mean. What both agree on is that Kota was created as a reward in a Mughal succession war, and the painting school followed the state.

(c). Bhoj Singh (1585-1607) and his father Rao Surjan Singh maintained a palace at Chunar, and the set's Persian inscription has its three painters identify themselves as pupils of Mir Sayyid Ali and Khwaja Abdus Samad of the Mughal court. Surviving folios include the raginis Khambavati, Bilaval, Malashri, Bhairavi and Patmanjari, and Raga Dipak.

Why not the others: Bundi's earliest phase was not painted in Bundi. That single set does three things at once: it puts the school's beginning at 1591, fourteen years before Chawand; it puts that beginning outside Rajasthan; and it makes the Mughal debt concrete, because the painters name their teachers instead of leaving "Mughal influence" as an adjective.

(d) Kota's Umed Singh, 1770-1819. The regent governed while keeping the boy amused with hunting, so the court's most famous subject began as a way of occupying a child king.

Why not the others: (a) is Bundi's Umed Singh, in whose reign Bundi painting is at its most refined and minute and Deccani brightness enters. The dates separate the two: Bundi's ends in 1771, Kota's begins in 1770, and an option pairing the name with the wrong state is the standard trap. (c) Jagat Singh is the ruler under whom the Kota school commences in the 1660s. One more pairing worth holding: the Bundi palace chitrashala was decorated with murals in the reign of Ram Singh (1821-1889), decades after the reign usually credited with building it, so do not assert a single name for both the gallery and its walls.

(a). The chase is the pretext; the jungle is the picture. That is a sharper claim than "Kota is the hunting school", and it is the one to carry into a Mains answer.

Why not the others: (b) is Bikaner. (c) and (d) are Jaipur — life-size portraits, large formats and lavish gold by the early nineteenth century, and copies produced by tracing and pouncing, which is the honest reason so many near-identical Jaipur folios survive.

(b). The published book is Rajput Painting, singular, in two volumes, 1916, Oxford University Press. On Coomaraswamy's reading the term stood for "the indigenous tradition of painting prevalent in the mainland before the conquest by the Mughals", most of its patrons being Rajputs.

Why not the others: (a) garbles a name and a title that are both easy to check, and it circulates in exactly that form. (c) belongs to a different book and a different decade — Barrett's Painting of India is 1963. The classification this whole topic uses has an author and a date, and naming them is worth more in an answer than naming another school.

(c) Basil Gray. Barrett and Gray are the pair behind the view that Mewar is the place of origin of the Chourpanchashika style.

Why not the others: (a) is a misspelling in wide circulation, carried into preparation material out of a printed textbook, and it is the option likeliest to be offered beside the right one. A one-letter difference in a scholar's name is a real question, because the two forms cannot both be right and only one of them is a person.

(d). Usta kaam is the two techniques together: the thick manoti paste is laid in relief on the leather mould, allowed to harden, and only then painted. The embossing is what gives the work its lift, and it is why a piece of Usta work does not read as a miniature even when it shows the same scenes.

Why not the others: (a) is the widely printed equation "Usta art = Manoti art", and it is wrong — manoti is one half of it. (b) is naqqashi. (c) is taarabandi; the other named pattern type is naqqashi, flowers and motifs. Usta comes from the Persian ustad, master, and the most elaborate surviving example is the Anup Mahal in Junagarh Fort.

(a) The Dapgar community, who prepare the untreated hide and mould it to shape; the Ustas work on the finished mould. Two castes, one object, which is the ordinary structure of Rajasthani craft and worth saying because most accounts collapse it into a single name.

Why not the others: (c) the Bhats are the puppeteers and (d) the Khairadiyas are named for the Kavad of Bassi. The Usta artists do not tan the hide, and an option saying they do is testing whether you have read past the craft's famous half.

(b) Karan Singh. Ruknuddin, "whose ancestors came from the Mughal court", was the master artist in the reign of Anup Singh, painting the Ramayana, Rasikapriya and Durga Saptasati, with Ibrahim, Nathu, Sahibdin and Isa in his atelier.

Why not the others: (a) is the board's version, and it compresses three reigns into one sentence. Rai Singh (1541-1612) invited the Usta community to settle in Bikaner, and that part holds; the two named painters worked two and three reigns later. Community and painter are separate facts with separate dates, and merging them is what produces the error.

(c) Sawai Jai Singh (1699-1743). He reorganised the Suratkhana, brought Mughal painters from Delhi, invited craftsmen to settle in his new city, and, drawn to Vaishnavism, commissioned Radha-Krishna sets in which the hero's figure strikingly resembles the king.

Why not the others: (a) is a near-pair that will be used against you. A Shah Muhammad appears in Bikaner lists as a painter brought from Lahore — the same two words in the other order — and that Bikaner figure is not verified on this page. Muhammad Shah is the Jaipur painter; read the word order before you read the option.

(d) The Bhat community, who wandered performing for royal families and have since settled in different parts of Rajasthan. The institution to name with them is the Bhartiya Lok Kala Mandal, Udaipur, established in 1952 by Padma Shri Devilal Samar, which runs a puppet unit and a touring ensemble of twenty-five artists. This is the one folk form in the chapter with a named institution behind it, and it answers any question about preserving Rajasthani puppetry.

Why not the others: (a) is the Kavad, (b) the Phad and (c) Thewa — three communities from three different crafts, which is how this option set is built. And the repertoire is not only the Singhasan Battisi: the most popular story is that of King Amar Singh Rathore, who lived around the time of Shah Jahan, and modern performances carry social messages on dowry, women's empowerment, illiteracy, poverty, unemployment and cleanliness. A form that survives by changing its script is a better example of living heritage than one that survives by repeating it.

(a). The register runs to 724 registrations through the section headed April 2025 to March 2026, and a full-text search for "Sangri" and for "Ker" returns nothing. The only Rajasthan entry in that financial year is Nagori Ashwagandha, application 1143.

Why not the others: (b) is the claim in wide circulation, and its own chronology refutes it. Down To Earth, dated 10 July 2025, two months after the supposed grant, reports the application as filed in December 2024 and still awaiting approval, with approval expected to take up to two years. A source published after the claimed event says the event has not happened, which overrides every undated compilation repeating it. Filing is not registration, and an announcement is not either.

(b) The weavers had come from Mysore, which is how the Handloom Export Promotion Council, under the Ministry of Textiles, puts it.

Why not the others: (a) is the Mansooria story, and it is the one in wider circulation, but it turns up only in secondary compilations. Mysore gives Masuria; Mansoor gives Mansooria; only one of them is on a Ministry of Textiles page. (d) the check is called khat, made by combining a thicker and a thinner yarn in a silk-and-cotton cloth woven at Kaithoon on traditional pit looms, where weavers began with turbans on eight-inch looms before moving to broader looms for saris, and where a genuine piece carries the GI mark woven into one corner.

(c). Sawai Jai Singh established the new capital city of Jaipur in 1727 and shifted from Amer; Man Singh I was Akbar's most trusted general, and Akbar died in 1605. A general of Akbar's cannot have brought anything to a city founded a hundred and twenty-two years after Akbar's death. When a question offers both, Amber is the answer, and that is the form the RPSC answer key itself uses.

Why not the others: The craft is real and Jaipur is its centre, but meenakari is a named stage inside the kundan sequence rather than a separate craft: ghaat the framework, paadh the wax moulding, khudai the setting of stones, minakari the refining that defines the design, pakai the attaching of gold foil, chillai the polish. Note too that Jaipur's World Crafts Council title of 2015 names no craft at all, so pairing that designation with meenakari adds something the citation does not contain.

(d) Copper oxide and cobalt oxide. The blue is a metal oxide, which is why the colour is stable and why the ware is fired rather than painted.

Why not the others: The Persian connection in (c) is real, but it belongs to the craft's route rather than its recipe: blue pottery is recorded as an art form introduced by the Mughals, which came to Jaipur from Persia and Afghanistan, and is worked in quartz rather than clay. Route and recipe are two separate answers, and an option can be built out of either.

(a) Kripal Singh Shekhawat. He studied painting at Santiniketan, went in 1951 to the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts for two years' training in traditional oriental painting and decoration, and served as director of the Sawai Ram Singh Shilpa Kala Mandir in Jaipur — the institution this chapter already dates to 1857 under its later name, so the Maharaja's art school and the revival are one institutional thread.

Why not the others: (b) belongs to the Bhartiya Lok Kala Mandal, (c) to Thewa and (d) to the Shekhawati murals. The biography repays reading for what it actually says: a Rajasthani craft was revived by a man trained in Bengal and in Japan, not through an unbroken village lineage, which is a more interesting Mains point than the craft's Persian origin.

(b) Without any moulds. A votive plaque made without a mould cannot be identical to the next one, which is why Molela is a craft rather than a manufacture, and why a GI is the right legal instrument for it. The rest of the sequence: two clays, Nada and Alu, mixed with sifted cow dung, kneaded and levelled with water and wooden implements, dried seven to nine days in shade and two days in the sun, then kiln-fired. The village is in Rajsamand, on the banks of the Banas.

Why not the others: (c) carries the trap. No firing temperature is published for Molela, so an option offering a precise temperature is quoting a compilation rather than a source. Write the process without a temperature and you have still answered the question. The dung is disputed as well — cow dung in the Union ministry's account, donkey dung in the state textbook — and neither reading is settled here.

(c) Setting. The name is the technique: gold beaten into thin sheets and set into glass or mirror objects. The craft is traced to Nathu Lal Sonewal, who first presented it to the Prince of Mewar and received the title Raj-Soni from Maharaja Sumant Singh of Pratapgarh, the title and the heritage passing to his descendants.

Why not the others: (d) is ustad, from which Usta takes its name. Note also what cannot be answered: the same government page calls Thewa "a 400-year-old art work" and places its founder in the eighteenth century, two centuries apart, so do not quote an age for Thewa — quote the founder, the title and the place. Mahesh Raj Soni's Padma Shri of 2015 is on the government's own list, entered under "Art", which does not name the craft.

(a) R is the reason for A, and it is why Bikaner is called one of the best documented schools of painting. Two neighbouring schools, and one of them can be dated from the object while the other cannot — that difference explains most of what is firmly known and firmly unknown in this whole topic.

(a) R explains A. The specific categories Rajasthani and Pahari are used instead. A term coined to separate Rajput work from Mughal work turned out to be doing ethnography rather than art history, and the name of this topic is the outcome of that argument.

(d) R is true and A is false. The Rajasthan Board gives the wood as ardu or aadu and the Ministry of Tourism gives mango, and the two are not reconcilable. Two official answers make a bad question, so recognise both rather than betting on one: if an option offers aadu, that is the state textbook; if it offers mango, that is the Union ministry.

(a). Gudarayi literally means to lift, which is why it names the finishing touch and not the repair. Portraits of the artists themselves are unique to Bikaner, inscribed with their ancestry, and the artists are called Ustas or Ustad. No other Rajasthani school gives you a working vocabulary for its studio, which is exactly why this set gets asked.

(a). Carry one fact with each reign and the order stays put: Jai Singh founded Jaipur in 1727 and had Sahibram and Muhammad Shah in his atelier; Ishwari Singh's paintings record leisure — elephant rides, boar and tiger hunts, elephant fights; Madho Singh's record incidents of court life; and Pratap Singh's reign is the second thriving period, with around fifty artists employed. Pratap Singh is the one to argue from, because under him the predominant Mughal influence receded and a recognisably Jaipur idiom emerged; he was himself a scholar, poet and follower of Krishna.