The temple at Deogarh near Jhansi and the sculptures in the temple at Garhwa near Allahabad are important remains of

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Correct — C, Gupta art. Both sites named in the stem belong to the Gupta period, and both are standard illustrations of it in every account of Indian art. The Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, in Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh near Jhansi, dates from the early sixth century CE and is the single most important surviving example of Gupta temple architecture. It is a stone temple raised on a high plinth with a flight of steps, and it carried a shikhara — a tower over the sanctum — which makes it one of the earliest structural temples to show the feature that would define the whole later Nagara style. Its sculpted panels on the three outer walls are as famous as the building: the Sheshashayi Vishnu, showing the god reclining on the coils of the serpent Ananta with Brahma seated on a lotus rising from his navel, together with the Nara-Narayana panel and the Gajendra-moksha panel, are among the finest reliefs of the period. Garhwa, near Prayagraj, is the second site the stem names — a walled enclosure with a group of Gupta-period sculptured panels and pillars, less complete than Deogarh but from the same tradition and the same centuries. What makes both unmistakably Gupta is the combination: structural stone temples rather than rock-cut caves, a sanctum with an image, restrained and idealised figure sculpture, and a Vaishnava iconography that had by then become fully worked out. Since (c) is correct, the escape option (d) cannot stand.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Eight centuries too early and a completely different repertoire. Mauryan art of the third century BCE means the monolithic sandstone pillars with their animal capitals and mirror polish, the rock-cut Barabar caves in Bihar granted to the Ajivikas, the rock-cut elephant at Dhauli and free-standing figures such as the Didarganj Yakshi from Patna. There are no structural stone temples of the Mauryan period at all.  (b) Wrong period and wrong region. The Rashtrakutas ruled the Deccan from the eighth to the tenth centuries, and their monument is the Kailasa temple at Ellora, cut downward out of a single hillside on the orders of Krishna I — a rock-cut monolith in Maharashtra, at the opposite end of the country from Deogarh and Garhwa and two to four centuries later.  (d) Fails because Gupta art is on the list and is exactly right for both sites. The escape option only wins when all three named alternatives can be shown to fail, and here the second of them is the standard attribution in every survey of Indian art history.

Concept: The Gupta period, roughly the fourth to sixth centuries CE, is where the Hindu temple as a building type takes shape. Before it, sacred architecture in India meant stupas and rock-cut caves; the Guptas produced free-standing structural temples in dressed stone, and the sequence of their development is a standard examination topic — from flat-roofed square shrines with a shallow porch, such as Temple 17 at Sanchi, to temples on a raised plinth with a covered ambulatory, to Deogarh with its tower. Gupta sculpture is equally distinctive: figures are idealised rather than individual, the modelling is restrained, drapery clings and is indicated by fine parallel lines rather than heavy folds, and the halo behind a head is elaborately carved. The Buddha images from Sarnath and Mathura are the type specimens. The same centuries produced the Ajanta murals in their finest phase, the Udayagiri caves near Vidisha with their great Varaha panel, and the iron pillar now at Delhi.

State PCS 2025 Q33 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q33 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer