Indian History Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Indian History trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Indian history runs five thousand years without a gap: planned brick cities on the Indus before the pyramids were finished, an emperor who renounced war after winning one, a sultanate ruled by a woman in the 1230s, Mughal emperors who could not read but kept 24,000 books, and a trading company that ended up governing 300 million people. Then, in a single generation, a salt march, a famine, a world war and a border drawn in five weeks. These 50 questions follow that arc in order of surprise rather than chronology: the Indus cities and the Mauryas, the Delhi sultans and the Mughals, the Portuguese and the East India Company, 1857, the reformers and the Congress, Gandhi's campaigns, the revolutionaries, partition and the making of the republic. Every stem carries a clue you can reason from, and every answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds the fact the textbook left out. Use it as a syllabus check before an exam, a round for a family or pub quiz, or a printable set for a classroom.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Mughal emperor ended his days a prisoner of his own son in Agra Fort?
Shah Jahan
Shah Jahan was locked in Agra Fort from July 1658 until his death in January 1666, within sight of the Taj Mahal he had built for his wife.
Q 02Which diamond did the boy Maharaja Duleep Singh surrender to Queen Victoria when Britain annexed Punjab?
Koh-i-Noor
The Koh-i-Noor now sits in the Queen Mother's crown, which was placed on her coffin at her 2002 funeral, and both India and Pakistan have demanded its return.
Q 03Which village did Gandhi's 24-day, 240-mile march reach in 1930 to break the British salt law?
Dandi
Dandi's handful of salt on 6 April 1930 set off civil disobedience across India, and over 60,000 people were jailed as a result.
Q 04Which Hindu nationalist shot Gandhi three times at a Delhi prayer meeting on 30 January 1948?
Nathuram Godse
Nathuram Godse was seized on the spot by an American vice-consul, Herbert Reiner, and hanged at Ambala jail in November 1949.
Q 05Which Indus Valley city in Sindh held some 40,000 people and a brick Great Bath?
Mohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro was unknown until the 1920s, when an archaeologist noticed what he took for a Buddhist stupa on top of the site; it lies in Sindh, Pakistan.
Q 06Which 1757 battle did Clive win after bribing Bengal commander Mir Jafar to keep his troops idle?
Plassey
Plassey was over in about eleven hours; Clive then saluted Mir Jafar as Nawab of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, and the East India Company's rule of India began.
Q 07Which general ordered troops to fire on an unarmed crowd at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in 1919?
Reginald Dyer
Reginald Dyer's men fired 1,650 rounds in about ten minutes; 21 years later a survivor shot Michael O'Dwyer, the Punjab governor who had backed him, in London.
Q 08Which Mauryan emperor embraced Buddhism after his Kalinga conquest, in which 100,000 were killed?
Ashoka
Ashoka's lion capital at Sarnath became the emblem of the Republic of India, and his wheel, the Ashoka Chakra, sits at the centre of the national flag.
Q 09Which Portuguese navigator landed near Calicut in 1498 on the first sea voyage from Europe to India?
Vasco da Gama
Vasco da Gama died of malaria in Cochin on Christmas Eve 1524, three months into his term as Portugal's viceroy of India.
Q 10Which Bengali poet wrote the anthems of both India and Bangladesh and renounced his knighthood?
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, and he gave back his knighthood in protest at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Q 11Which Mughal emperor could not read, yet kept a 24,000-volume library and founded Din-i Ilahi?
Akbar
Akbar is believed to have been dyslexic; he was read to every evening, and Hindu, Christian and Zoroastrian ideas all fed into his Din-i Ilahi creed.
Q 12Which descendant of Timur founded the Mughal Empire by beating Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat with cannon?
Babur
Babur was first buried at Agra, but at his own wish his body was moved to Kabul, where his garden tomb, the Bagh-e Babur, still stands.
Q 13Which ruler of Mysore, killed defending his capital in 1799, pioneered iron-cased war rockets?
Tipu Sultan
Tipu Sultan's mechanical organ of a tiger mauling a European soldier, Tipu's Tiger, was looted from his palace and has sat in London's V&A museum since 1880.
Q 21Which adviser to the first Mauryan emperor is credited with the Arthashastra, a treatise on statecraft?
Chanakya
Chanakya is traditionally identified with Kautilya, the Arthashastra's named author, though modern scholars doubt it; the text was thought lost until a manuscript surfaced in 1905.
Q 22Which king lost to Alexander on the Jhelum in 326 BCE, yet was reinstated as ruler of his own lands?
Porus
Porus, asked how he wished to be treated, replied 'as a king would treat another king', and Alexander let him keep his territory as a satrap.
Q 23Which 5th-century astronomer, namesake of India's first satellite, said the Earth spins daily?
Aryabhata
Aryabhata put pi at 62,832/20,000, or 3.1416, accurate to two parts in a million, and called it an approximation, a hint he suspected it was irrational.
Q 14Which 72.5-metre tower did the Delhi Sultanate's founder begin beside a mosque made from 27 temples?
Qutb Minar
Qutb Minar is the tallest brick minaret in the world; Aibak finished only one storey, and his son-in-law Iltutmish added three more.
Q 15Who fled British surveillance in 1941 dressed as a Pathan and later led the Indian National Army?
Subhas Chandra Bose
Subhas Chandra Bose died of third-degree burns after his plane crashed in Japanese-held Taiwan on 18 August 1945, three days after Japan's surrender.
Q 16Which Dalit-born jurist chaired the drafting of India's constitution and embraced Buddhism in 1956?
B. R. Ambedkar
B. R. Ambedkar's public conversion at Nagpur on 14 October 1956 came less than two months before his death, and mass ceremonies still copy it today.
Q 17Which home minister folded over 550 princely states into India and sent the army into Hyderabad?
Sardar Patel
Sardar Patel, the 'Iron Man of India', is commemorated by the Statue of Unity in Gujarat, at 182 metres the tallest statue in the world.
Q 18Which revolutionary threw bombs into the Delhi assembly in 1929 and was hanged in Lahore aged 23?
Bhagat Singh
Bhagat Singh's hanging was brought forward by 11 hours to the evening of 23 March 1931; in jail he had staged a 116-day hunger strike.
Q 19Which British lawyer, never before east of Paris, drew the India–Pakistan border in five weeks?
Cyril Radcliffe
Cyril Radcliffe destroyed all his papers before leaving India; his line was announced two days after independence, and some 14 million people crossed it.
Q 20To which city was Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, exiled after the 1857 revolt?
Rangoon
Rangoon's exile was mirrored in reverse when Britain deposed Burma's last king, Thibaw, in 1885 and sent him to Ratnagiri in India.
Q 24Which monastery in Bihar, where the pilgrim Xuanzang studied, did Bakhtiyar Khalji burn down?
Nalanda
Nalanda's modern successor opened in nearby Rajgir in September 2014 with just 15 students, some 800 years after the original was torched.
Q 25Which daughter of Iltutmish ruled Delhi from 1236 to 1240, the only woman ever to sit on its throne?
Razia
Razia held open court dressed in a man's cloak and hat; deposed in 1240, she was killed within months, and her grave lies near Turkman Gate in Old Delhi.
Q 26Which Delhi ruler moved his capital to Daulatabad, then issued brass and copper coins worth silver?
Muhammad bin Tughluq
Muhammad bin Tughluq's coins were easy to forge, so households minted their own and paid their taxes in them; the experiment was abandoned by 1333.
Q 27Which Afghan ruler ousted Humayun in 1540, rebuilt the Grand Trunk Road and issued the first rupiya?
Sher Shah Suri
Sher Shah Suri's rupiya was a silver coin of a standard 178 grains, the direct ancestor of today's rupee, and he ruled Hindustan for only five years.
Q 28Which Persian ruler sacked Delhi in 1739, killing some 30,000, and carried off the Peacock Throne?
Nadir Shah
Nadir Shah's plunder was so vast that he suspended taxation in Persia for three years after returning home.
Q 29Which Maratha leader escaped Aurangzeb's custody at Agra and was crowned at Raigad Fort in 1674?
Shivaji
Shivaji met the Bijapur general Afzal Khan at a 1659 parley wearing armour under his clothes and a bagh nakh, a metal 'tiger claw', hidden on his left arm.
Q 30Which dynasty's golden age produced the poet Kalidasa and Delhi's rust-resistant iron pillar?
Gupta
The Gupta king Chandragupta II raised the 7.2-metre iron pillar, probably at Udayagiri, before it was moved to Delhi; phosphorus in its iron forms a film that resists rust.