In June 2024, which city was named India’s “First UNESCO City of Literature” ?

Question

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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'.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) 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 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2024 Q67 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q67 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer