BPSC 70th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 67 of 143

Correct — A, Kozhikode. Kozhikode, the old port of Calicut on the Malabar coast of Kerala, entered the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the Literature category in 2023, and it is the only Indian city on the Literature list — which is what makes it India's first UNESCO City of Literature. The designation was announced by UNESCO on World Cities Day, 31 October 2023, when 55 cities joined the network in all its creative fields; the formal declaration and public celebration were held in Kozhikode itself on 23 June 2024, which is the 'June 2024' the question is dating from. Both dates are real and both appear in reporting, so a candidate who remembers October 2023 for the designation has not misremembered anything — the stem is pointing at the ceremony, not at the UNESCO announcement. The city's claim rests on a dense Malayalam literary ecosystem: it is the home ground of writers such as S. K. Pottekkatt and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who spent his later life at Beypore within the city's limits, and it hosts the Kerala Literature Festival on its beach each year. The same 2023 cycle also brought Gwalior into the network — but under Music, not Literature, which is the detail that trips up candidates who remember only that 'two Indian cities joined UNESCO's creative list'.

• (b)Delhi — The default guess for any 'India's first' question, and wrong here: Delhi holds no UNESCO Creative City designation in the Literature field. Its UNESCO connections are of a different kind altogether — the Qutub Minar complex, Humayun's Tomb and the Red Fort complex are World Heritage Sites, which is a separate UNESCO programme with separate criteria.
• (c)Hyderabad — Hyderabad is genuinely a UNESCO Creative City, which is what makes this the sharpest decoy — but it joined in 2019 in the Gastronomy category, cited for Hyderabadi cuisine, not for literature. A candidate who recalls 'Hyderabad is on some UNESCO city list' will fall for it; the category is the whole question.
• (d)Varanasi — Also a real UNESCO Creative City, and also in the wrong field: Varanasi joined in 2015 as a City of Music, on the strength of its Hindustani classical tradition. Its literary reputation — Kabir, Tulsidas, Bharatendu Harishchandra, Premchand — makes the wrong answer feel right, but UNESCO's designation for it is Music.

The UNESCO Creative Cities Network was launched in 2004 to link cities that treat culture and creativity as drivers of sustainable urban development. A city applies in exactly one of the network's creative fields — Crafts and Folk Arts, Design, Film, Gastronomy, Literature, Media Arts or Music (Architecture was added later) — and membership is reviewed periodically through monitoring reports. This is a different programme from the World Heritage List, which protects places, and from the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which recognises living practices; confusing the three is the commonest error in this part of the syllabus. Edinburgh became the first City of Literature in 2004, the year the network began, and the Literature list has since grown to more than fifty cities across six continents.

This question is decided by knowing which Indian city sits in which UNESCO creative field, because three of the four options are or feel like UNESCO cities. Build the Indian list once and it will answer several questions: Jaipur — Crafts and Folk Arts (2015); Varanasi — Music (2015); Chennai — Music (2017); Mumbai — Film (2019); Hyderabad — Gastronomy (2019); Srinagar — Crafts and Folk Arts (2021); Kozhikode — Literature (2023); Gwalior — Music (2023); Lucknow — Gastronomy (2025). Read down that list and only one entry is in Literature. The second discriminator is regional: Kerala's public culture is built around reading rooms, libraries and a literacy rate that is the highest of any Indian state, so a Malayalam city is where a Literature designation would naturally land.

• Kozhikode joined the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the Literature category in 2023 and remains the only Indian city on that list
• UNESCO announced the intake on World Cities Day, 31 October 2023, when 55 cities were added across all creative fields; Kozhikode's formal declaration event was held on 23 June 2024
• Gwalior joined in the same 2023 cycle but in the Music category, alongside earlier Indian entries Varanasi (Music, 2015) and Chennai (Music, 2017)
• The Creative Cities Network was launched in 2004; Edinburgh was the first City of Literature that same year, and the Literature list now runs past fifty cities
• Kozhikode is the former Calicut, seat of the Zamorin, where Vasco da Gama landed at nearby Kappad in 1498 — the origin of the fabric name 'calico'

• Matching a city to UNESCO but not to the right creative field — Hyderabad is Gastronomy and Varanasi is Music, not Literature
• Confusing the Creative Cities Network with the World Heritage List or the Intangible Cultural Heritage list; they are three separate UNESCO instruments
• Being thrown by the date — UNESCO announced the designation in October 2023 while the city's formal declaration was in June 2024, and current-affairs questions may key on either

BPSC asks current affairs as a single dated 'which city/who/what' recall, usually pulled from a headline of the six months before the paper, and expects nothing beyond the name. UPSC takes the same UNESCO material and asks which inscription was the most recent, or which of several sites is on a given list, so the field and the sequence matter more there than the headline.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which Indian city is designated a UNESCO Creative City in the Gastronomy category ?

  • (a)Kozhikode
  • (b)Hyderabad
  • (c)Jaipur
  • (d)Srinagar

  Answer(b) Hyderabad — designated in 2019 for Hyderabadi cuisine; Jaipur and Srinagar are Crafts and Folk Arts cities and Kozhikode is the Literature city.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which city was the world's first UNESCO City of Literature, designated in 2004 ?

  • (a)Dublin
  • (b)Melbourne
  • (c)Edinburgh
  • (d)Iowa City

  Answer(c) Edinburgh — named in 2004, the year the Creative Cities Network itself was launched; Iowa City followed in 2008, Melbourne in 2008 and Dublin in 2010.