Assam Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Assam trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Assam is the India most visitors never reach: a valley carved by a river with a masculine name, a floodplain park where the one-horned rhino made its last stand, and tea gardens so vast they keep their own clock. Its Ahom kings held off the Mughals for six centuries, its temple on a Guwahati hill draws Tantric pilgrims every June, and its silks shimmer with a natural gold. These 50 questions move across that ground: the river and its islands, Kaziranga and the wildlife of Manas, the tea story from the first wild bush to the modern estate, the three Bihus, the Ahom kingdom from its founder to its fall, Kamakhya, Guwahati, the weaving towns, the state symbols and the singers, sprinters, writers and politicians who put Assam on the map. Most are pitched for a general pub table, with a handful for people who know the northeast well. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print the set for a classroom, a quiz night or a Bihu gathering.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tea gardens in parts of Assam keep 'bagan time', a local clock set how far from Indian Standard Time?
One hour ahead
One hour ahead is 'bagan time', tea garden time, in the corner of India that sees daybreak first. In 2014 Assam's chief minister urged the whole state to adopt a clock an hour ahead of IST to save energy.
Q 02Whose 1904 visit to Kaziranga set off the first moves to protect it as a reserve forest?
The Viceroy's wife
The Viceroy's wife, Mary Curzon, toured Kaziranga hoping to see its famous rhinos and saw none, so she pressed her husband to protect them; officials proposed a reserve forest there the next year.
Q 03Rongali Bihu, the Assamese New Year when village cattle are washed in rivers, falls in which month?
April
April, because the Assamese year begins when the sun enters Aries, the same solar reckoning that puts Thailand's Songkran and Punjab's Vaisakhi in the middle of the month.
Q 04Majuli is Guinness's largest river island, but Britannica picks Bananal Island in which country?
Brazil
Brazil's Bananal Island, where the Araguaia River splits into two branches for 320 km, is Britannica's pick. Guinness backs Majuli, a title under threat: the Brahmaputra's floods keep eroding the island.
Q 05Which golden wild silk of Assam, spun by larvae fed on som and sualu leaves, holds a GI tag?
Muga
Muga is the silk that washing improves: its golden lustre is said to grow with every hand wash. The silkworm that spins it has never been fully domesticated.
Q 06Assam's Ahom dynasty traced its founder to Möng Mao, a Tai principality whose core lay in which modern country?
China
China's Yunnan, around today's Ruili, was Möng Mao's core. The Ahoms who came from there took on their new home's ways: their Tai language fell out of use, and their descendants speak Assamese.
Q 07Which Assamese singer, a Columbia PhD and Paul Robeson's friend, got the Bharat Ratna in 2019?
Bhupen Hazarika
Bhupen Hazarika met Robeson in New York and reworked his 'Ol' Man River' as the Assamese song 'Bistirno Parore', with the Brahmaputra in the Mississippi's place; the Bharat Ratna came after his death.
Q 08Which Assamese sprinter won India's first World U20 track gold, the 400 m at Tampere in 2018?
Hima Das
Hima Das, a farmer's daughter from a village near Dhing, was talked into sprinting by a school PE teacher who spotted her at a camp; in Tampere she ran 51.46 s to win.
Q 09Which 1826 agreement, ending the First Anglo-Burmese War, handed Assam to the East India Company?
Treaty of Yandabo
The Treaty of Yandabo was Burma's to sign because its armies had overrun the Ahom kingdom a few years earlier; defeat also cost it Arakan, Tenasserim and an indemnity of a million pounds.
Q 10Which Ahom general won the 1671 naval battle of Saraighat near Guwahati, halting a Mughal invasion?
Lachit Borphukan
Lachit Borphukan's side spun out sham peace talks to buy time; then, with the Mughal boats driving the Ahoms back, he arrived with more ships, beat their fleet and forced the invaders to retreat.
Q 11Which June festival at Guwahati's Kamakhya temple celebrates the goddess's yearly menstruation?
Ambubachi Mela
Ambubachi Mela shuts the temple for three days, when the goddess is believed to be menstruating; the sanctum she rests in holds no idol, only a yoni-shaped cleft in the rock fed by a natural spring.
Q 12Which temple islet at Guwahati is called the world's smallest inhabited river island?
Umananda
Umananda, or Peacock Island to the British, carries a legend: Shiva, disturbed at his meditation here by Kamadeva, the god of love, is said to have burnt him to ashes, which gave its hill the name Bhasmachal.
Q 13Which Dima Hasao village is infamous for birds plunging from the sky on foggy monsoon-end nights?
Jatinga
Q 21Which Ahom royal pavilion, often called one of Asia's oldest surviving amphitheatres, let kings watch buffalo fights?
Rang Ghar
Rang Ghar is said to have begun as a bamboo and timber stand; Pramatta Singha rebuilt it in brick in the 1740s as a permanent royal box for the animal fights on the field at Rangpur.
Q 22The Assam–Tibet earthquake of 1950 struck on which Indian national day?
Independence Day
Independence Day, 15 August. The shaking sent landslides across the hill rivers, and when one of those natural dams burst days later, the flood drowned hundreds of people downstream.
Q 23Purandar Singha, the last Ahom king, ruled Upper Assam as a British tributary from 1833 to 1838 from which town?
Jorhat
Jatinga's 'bird suicides' are no such thing, researchers say: on foggy, windy nights the birds, mostly young ones, are drawn down to the village lights, where people kill them with bamboo poles.
Q 14Which bird, known locally as the deohanh, is Assam's state bird?
White-winged wood duck
The white-winged wood duck has proved hard to save in captivity: flocks bred from birds caught in Assam around 1970 grew fast, then were cut down by avian tuberculosis, to which the species is unusually prone.
Q 15Which bloom, the kopou phul worn by Bihu dancers, is Assam's state flower?
Foxtail orchid
The foxtail orchid flowers on the treetops just as the festival comes round, so dancers wind its flowering sprays around their hair; as a symbol of love it turns up at Assamese weddings too.
Q 16Which cetacean, called shihu in Assamese, is the official animal of the city of Guwahati?
Ganges river dolphin
The Ganges river dolphin, also India's National Aquatic Animal, is nearly blind: living in silty water, it finds its way and its prey by echolocation rather than sight.
Q 17Which fleeing leader did Assam Rifles soldiers meet at the border in 1959 and escort on towards Tezpur?
The Dalai Lama
The Dalai Lama slipped out of Lhasa by night in March 1959. Nehru sent an Assam Rifles detachment to meet him at the frontier near Tawang, and a month after his escape he reached Tezpur in Assam.
Q 18In Bangladesh, the Brahmaputra's main channel takes which name before it joins the Ganges?
Jamuna
The Jamuna was only a minor side channel until the late 1700s, when the Brahmaputra began to abandon its old bed past Mymensingh; that former main course survives as the Old Brahmaputra.
Q 19Asom Divas, 2 December, marks the 1228 arrival of which Tai prince who founded the Ahom kingdom?
Sukaphaa
Sukaphaa is said to have left his homeland in 1215 with some 9,000 followers and spent thirteen years crossing the Patkai hills, raiding as he went, before he came down into the Brahmaputra valley.
Q 20What are the pyramid-like burial mounds of Ahom royalty at Charaideo, a UNESCO site, called?
Maidams
Maidams are earth mounds raised over hollow vaults. Kings were laid in them with grave goods that could include horses and elephants and, in the early centuries, servants buried to attend them.
Jorhat was his capital for five years. He owed the British 50,000 rupees a year, fell behind, and in 1838 they deposed him and took Upper Assam for themselves, ending six centuries of Ahom rule.
Q 24Which Mughal governor of Bengal led a war fleet up the Brahmaputra in 1662 to seize the Ahom capital?
Mir Jumla II
Mir Jumla II took the capital within weeks, but the rains then cut his garrisons off amid Ahom raids and an epidemic; he came to terms, fell ill and died just before his ship reached Dhaka.
Q 25Ram Singh of Amber led the Mughal army beaten at Saraighat in 1671 on the orders of which emperor?
Aurangzeb
Aurangzeb sent him east the year after Shivaji escaped from Agra while in the raja's custody, and defeat completed the fall: Ram Singh was recalled and lost rank and standing at court.
Q 26What name is given to the Ahom chronicles first written in the Tai Ahom language on sanchi bark?
Buranjis
Buranjis were kept by Ahom priests and leading families, who brought them up to date and handed them down from father to son; their accounts of the Mughal wars tally with the Mughals' own chronicles.
Q 27Koch general Sukladhwaja earned the name Chilarai for moving troops as fast as which bird?
Kite
A kite, 'chila', gave Chilarai his name; fighting for his brother Naranarayan he helped subdue the whole Brahmaputra valley, Ahoms included, and went on to invade Sylhet.
Q 28By a legendary curse, members of which royal family avert their gaze when passing Kamakhya temple?
Cooch Behar
Cooch Behar's Koch kings rebuilt the temple in 1565. In one widespread story their king then demanded to see the goddess for himself, and she cursed him and his descendants never to visit her shrine.
Q 29Guwahati's site was Pragjyotishpura, capital of which early kingdom that Xuanzang visited in the 640s?
Kamarupa
Kamarupa's king Bhaskaravarman, an ally of the emperor Harsha, sent an invitation to bring the Buddhist pilgrim to his court, though he was not a Buddhist himself.
Q 30Guwahati takes its name from 'guwa', the Assamese word (from Sanskrit guvaka) for which crop?
Areca nut
Areca nut, chewed with betel leaf as tamul-paan, is traditionally offered to guests in Assam as a mark of respect.