Indian Independence Day Trivia
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49 free Indian Independence Day trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
India's independence arrived at an odd hour and an odd date. The last Viceroy chose 15 August for a wartime anniversary of his own, the ceremony was held as one day turned into the next, and the border that split the subcontinent was not published until the flags had already gone up. Nehru's speech that night is still quoted; Gandhi, who had led the struggle, was hundreds of miles away and did not celebrate at all. These 49 questions follow the whole story: the deadline London set and how Mountbatten brought it forward, the plan that divided the provinces, the Radcliffe award and the princely states, the flag the Constituent Assembly adopted that July, the anthem and the national song, and the traditions that have grown up since, from the Red Fort address to the rooftops of Delhi. Along the way are the milestones of the freedom struggle, from the 1919 protests to the salt march, Quit India and the mutiny of 1946. Use it for a school or college 15 August quiz, a family round on the holiday, or a printable set for a classroom or office.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mountbatten picked 15 August 1947 for the handover because it was the second anniversary of which wartime event?
Japan's surrender
Japan's surrender of 15 August 1945 was personal for Mountbatten, who as Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia took the formal Japanese capitulation at Singapore that September.
Q 02Which other country holds a liberation day on 15 August, marking the 1945 end of 35 years of colonial rule?
South Korea
South Korea calls the day Gwangbokjeol, 'restoration of light', and its government traditionally issues special pardons on it; the North marks the same date.
Q 03How did Gandhi mark 15 August 1947, having stayed away from Delhi's celebrations to calm communal violence?
Fasting for 24 hours
Fasting for 24 hours, Gandhi spoke to a Calcutta crowd urging peace between Hindus and Muslims while Delhi celebrated, and his presence there is credited with keeping the east far calmer than the west.
Q 04Which Booker-winning novel's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is born at the exact moment India becomes a free country?
Midnight's Children
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie's 1981 novel, went on to win the Booker of Bookers in 1993 and the Best of the Booker in 2008, the prize's two anniversary awards.
Q 05Which territory stayed under European rule until a 36-hour Indian military operation in December 1961?
Goa
Goa fell to Operation Vijay, which ended 451 years of Portuguese rule, fourteen years after the rest of India had become free.
Q 06Until 2021, Indian law allowed a national flag to be made only from which cloth, with any other fabric risking prison?
Khadi
Khadi was the only lawful material, and a flag of anything else carried up to three years in prison; the code was amended in December 2021 to allow polyester and machine-made flags.
Q 07Complete Nehru's line of 14 August 1947: 'when the world sleeps, India will awake to…'?
life and freedom
'Life and freedom' closes the most quoted sentence of 'Tryst with Destiny', which Nehru spoke to the Constituent Assembly in Parliament House as the clocks approached twelve.
Q 08Which British prime minister announced on 20 February 1947 that Britain would quit India within sixteen months?
Clement Attlee
Clement Attlee had sat on the Simon Commission in 1927 and argued by 1933 that British rule was alien to India; his announcement also named Mountbatten as the last viceroy.
Q 09Who became Pakistan's first Governor-General in August 1947, a post Mountbatten had hoped to hold for both dominions?
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Muhammad Ali Jinnah refused a large salary in the post, fixing it at one rupee a month, and died in office thirteen months later.
Q 10From which ashram near Ahmedabad did Gandhi set out on 12 March 1930 with 78 marchers to break the salt law?
Sabarmati
Sabarmati was 385 km from the coast at Dandi, a 24-day walk that drew 100,000 people onto the road out of Ahmedabad on its first morning.
Q 11Who designed the spinning-wheel Swaraj flag that Gandhi commissioned and Congress carried through the 1920s?
Pingali Venkayya
Pingali Venkayya had already submitted thirty designs in a 1916 booklet funded by Madras High Court members before Gandhi asked him for a red-and-green banner with the wheel at its centre.
Q 12Who hoists the tricolour in each state capital on 15 August, a right won only in 1974 after a Tamil Nadu campaign?
The Chief Minister
The Chief Minister has done it only since 1974, when Tamil Nadu's M. Karunanidhi pressed Indira Gandhi for the same honour the Prime Minister enjoys at the Red Fort.
Q 13Through which seafront arch, built to mark a king's 1911 landing, did the last British troops depart in February 1948?
Q 21Which two provinces, each only narrowly Muslim-majority, did the boundary commissions split between the two dominions?
Punjab and Bengal
Punjab and Bengal were 55.7% and 54.4% Muslim, too close to hand either whole to Pakistan, so a separate five-member commission drew the line through each.
Q 22Whose 1882 novel Anandamath carried 'Vande Mataram', adopted by Congress in 1905 as its salute to the motherland?
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's poem was first sung to a Congress session by Tagore in 1896, and on 24 January 1950 it was given equal honour with the anthem as the national song.
Q 23Roughly how many people were displaced along religious lines when British India was divided in 1947?
Gateway of India
The Gateway of India saw the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry march out to a 21-gun salute on 28 February 1948, six months after the Raj had formally ended.
Q 14Which Maharashtrian leader, jailed six years in Mandalay, declared 'Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it'?
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
Bal Gangadhar Tilak took the slogan from his associate Kaka Baptista and, for all his talk of self-rule, never sought a complete break from the British Empire.
Q 15Which 'Nightingale of India' became the country's first woman governor, in the United Provinces in 1947?
Sarojini Naidu
Sarojini Naidu had already become the first Indian woman to preside over Congress, in 1925, and it was Gandhi who coined the nickname for the lyrical colour of her verse.
Q 16Which two-word slogan, the Indian National Army's salute, appeared on free India's first stamp in November 1947?
Jai Hind
Jai Hind went onto the 3½ anna flag stamp of 21 November 1947, free India's first stamp; Chempakaraman Pillai is credited with coining it, and Abid Hasan urged Bose's army to adopt it.
Q 17Which moderate Congress leader, Gandhi's political mentor, urged him to come home from South Africa?
Gopal Krishna Gokhale
Gopal Krishna Gokhale died on 19 February 1915, only six weeks after Gandhi landed back in Bombay at his urging.
Q 18Which 1919 law allowing jail without trial, damned as the 'Black Act', drew Gandhi's first all-India satyagraha?
Rowlatt Act
The Rowlatt Act was rushed through on 18 March 1919 against the united opposition of the council's Indian members, and the protests it provoked ended in the Jallianwala Bagh massacre weeks later.
Q 19In which language did Tagore write India's anthem, whose verses are sung in a heavily Sanskritised register?
Bengali
Bengali, in its literary Sadhu Bhasha form, is the anthem's language, and the song was first sung in public at the Calcutta Congress session on 27 December 1911.
Q 20In which language did Nehru deliver 'Tryst with Destiny' to the Constituent Assembly on 14 August 1947?
English
English was the language of the speech, now counted among the great addresses of the 20th century, given in Parliament House in the last minutes of British rule.
Around 15 million
Around 15 million sits at the centre of estimates that run from 12 to 20 million, while the death toll is still disputed anywhere between 200,000 and two million.
Q 24Which 2022 campaign asked Indians to display the national flag from 13 to 15 August and upload a selfie with it?
Har Ghar Tiranga
Har Ghar Tiranga marked 75 years since 1947 under the Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav umbrella.
Q 25Which pastime, practised from rooftops, is Delhi's own addition to the 15 August celebrations each year?
Kite flying
Kite flying adds to the occasion in Delhi and some other cities, in a sky where the airspace over the Red Fort is closed to aircraft for the day.
Q 26Which events did India's Supreme Court order to open with the national anthem in November 2016?
Film screenings
Film screenings had to open with the anthem until January 2018, when the court ruled that playing it in cinema halls was no longer mandatory.
Q 27Mountbatten's June 1947 partition plan put which province, run by a Congress ministry, to a referendum on joining Pakistan?
North-West Frontier
North-West Frontier Province voted for Pakistan after Khan Sahib's government, Abdul Ghaffar Khan's Khudai Khidmatgars and Congress boycotted a vote offering no Pashtun state.
Q 28Which British law, given royal assent on 18 July 1947, created two dominions from 15 August?
Indian Independence Act
The Indian Independence Act let one person serve as Governor-General of both dominions and divided the armed forces and joint property between them.
Q 29When India's Constituent Assembly adopted the tricolour in July 1947, what replaced the spinning wheel at its centre?
Ashoka Chakra
The Ashoka Chakra, a 24-spoke wheel borrowed from Ashoka's Lion Capital, took the place of the charkha that had marked the Congress party's flag.
Q 30Which British lawyer, who had never been to India, was given about five weeks to draw the partition borders?
Cyril Radcliffe
Cyril Radcliffe's border was only published on 17 August 1947, two days after India and Pakistan had become independent.