Indian Monuments Trivia
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6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Indian Monuments trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
India's monuments were raised by emperors, queens, sultans, nawabs and a colonial government, and nearly every one carries a second story: a stepwell printed on a banknote, a tower abandoned after its first storey, a statue whose cladding was cast abroad, a prison built like the spokes of a wheel. These 49 questions cover the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort, the Qutb complex and the caves of Ajanta and Ellora, Hampi, Khajuraho, Konark and Sanchi, the palaces of Mysore and Jaipur, the hill forts of Rajasthan, the great temples of the south, and the newer landmarks of Delhi, Mumbai and the Narmada: who built them, when, why, and what they are made of. Most are pitched for a pub table or a classroom, with a handful for people who have walked the ramparts themselves. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a quiz night, a history class or a trip.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Mumbai waterfront landmark saw the last British troops leave the country in 1948?
Gateway of India
The Gateway of India was built to welcome the empire in and ended up waving it out: the Somerset Light Infantry marched out through it on 28 February 1948. Its design was approved only in 1914, and it was finished in 1924.
Q 02Who was meant to watch Jaipur's streets unseen through the Hawa Mahal's latticed windows?
Women of the royal household
Women of the royal household watched festivals and street life from behind the lattice without being seen. The screen of small windows also keeps a breeze moving through the rooms, which is why it is called the Palace of Winds.
Q 03Delhi's Lotus Temple, built from 27 marble-clad petals grouped into nine sides, serves which faith?
Baha'i
Baha'i houses of worship are open to people of every religion and allow no sermons or ritual, so the Lotus Temple's hall hosts only prayers and readings from scripture. Iranian architect Fariborz Sahba designed it.
Q 04Whose statue filled India Gate's canopy in 2022, empty since George V's was removed in 1968?
Subhas Chandra Bose
Subhas Chandra Bose first appeared there as a hologram in January 2022, and the granite statue followed that September. The marble George V had been moved to Coronation Park in 1968, so the canopy stood empty for 54 years.
Q 05The Charminar, built in 1591 at the heart of Hyderabad, sits on the official emblem of which state?
Telangana
Telangana put the Charminar on its emblem beside the Kakatiya Kala Thoranam when the new state was carved out of Andhra Pradesh in 2014. The monument is widely held to commemorate the end of a plague.
Q 06Which Indian banknote carries Konark's temple, the stone chariot of Odisha, on its reverse?
₹10
₹10 notes of the current series show the temple, which European sailors once called the Black Pagoda and steered by as a landmark on the run up the coast to Calcutta.
Q 07What was British officer John Smith doing in 1819 when shown the entrance to Ajanta's Cave 10?
Hunting a tiger
Hunting a tiger led Smith of the 28th Cavalry to the caves on 28 April 1819, and he scratched his name and the date inside Cave 10, where they can still be read.
Q 08Where were the bronze panels that clad the 182-metre Statue of Unity cast?
China
China cast the bronze panels because no foundry in India could handle a job that size, although the statue was designed and built in India. It was inaugurated on 31 October 2018, Patel's birth anniversary.
Q 09What is the 27-metre Samrat Yantra at Jaipur's Jantar Mantar, said to tell local time to within seconds?
A sundial
A sundial on this scale exists because Jai Singh II found the astronomical tables of his day no longer matched the sky, so he built giant masonry instruments to correct them. UNESCO listed the observatory in 2010.
Q 10What studs the walls and ceiling of Amer Fort's most famous hall so it glitters under candlelight?
Convex mirrors
Convex mirrors cover the hall so thickly that a couple of candles are thrown back from every surface like stars, which is why it is known as the Sheesh Mahal, the mirror palace.
Q 11Which building stands opposite the Taj Mahal's mosque purely to keep the complex symmetrical?
The Jawab
The Jawab, literally 'answer', mirrors the red sandstone mosque across the platform purely for balance: it has no mihrab, the niche that shows the direction of Mecca, so it is no mosque.
Q 12Which poet pictured the Taj Mahal as a teardrop on the cheek of time?
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore wrote that it rises above the riverbank like a solitary tear suspended on the cheek of time, a line since condensed into the teardrop of guidebooks and book titles.
Q 13Which city gives its name to the Red Fort gate the prime minister speaks from every 15 August?
Lahore
Q 21Which material did the Vidisha craftsmen named in a Sanchi gateway inscription normally work?
Ivory
Ivory workers from nearby Vidisha are named in an inscription on the southern gateway, which has led scholars to suggest that the finely cut stone reliefs carry an ivory-carving tradition over into stone.
Q 22Which stories predominate in the ancient murals of the Ajanta caves?
Jataka
Jataka tales recount the Buddha's earlier lives as humans and animals. Major Robert Gill spent years copying the murals on canvas, only for most of his copies to burn in the Crystal Palace fire of 1866.
Q 23Which Ellora temple, Cave 16, was cut from a single rock and is credited to the Rashtrakuta king Krishna I?
Kailasa
Lahore gives its name to the Lahori Gate, the fort's main entrance, where Nehru raised the national flag in August 1947; the prime minister has addressed the country from its ramparts each Independence Day since.
Q 14Which sultan began a tower by the Qutb Minar meant to be twice its height, abandoned at one storey?
Alauddin Khalji
Alauddin Khalji meant his Alai Minar to dwarf the Qutb Minar, but work stopped at the first storey around his death in 1316 and no successor took it up. The rubble stump still stands in the complex.
Q 15Which sultan rebuilt the Qutb Minar's top after a lightning strike, turning one storey into two?
Firuz Shah Tughlaq
Firuz Shah Tughlaq replaced the damaged fourth storey with a smaller one and added a fifth, which is why the minaret has five storeys today, the top two partly faced in white marble above three of sandstone.
Q 16Which 7th-century Hampi shrine to Shiva stayed in worship after the city was destroyed in 1565?
Virupaksha
Virupaksha's history runs unbroken from about the 7th century CE, so it outlived the empire that enlarged it and is still an active place of worship among the ruins. It stands on the bank of the Tungabhadra.
Q 17Which avatar of Vishnu does Hampi's 6.7-metre monolith, carved seated in a yoga posture, depict?
Narasimha
Narasimha, Vishnu's man-lion form, sits 6.7 metres tall in a yoga posture, and the damage done to the monolith still shows. Vishnu took that shape to kill the demon Hiranyakashipu, who could be slain by neither man nor beast.
Q 18Which dynasty built the Khajuraho temples, famed for their erotic carvings, about a thousand years ago?
Chandela
Chandela kings built the temples at their first capital, then shifted to hill forts such as Kalinjar in the late 11th century and left Khajuraho to fade. The largest survivor is the Kandariya Mahadeva.
Q 19What had hidden Khajuraho's temples from the outside world until a British army captain was led to them in 1838?
Thick jungle
Thick jungle grew over the temples once their builders had moved away, and that remoteness probably saved them from later conquerors. Of about 85 temples, only 20 or so survive.
Q 20Sanchi's Great Stupa, begun by Ashoka in the 3rd century BCE, is in which state's Raisen district?
Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh holds the stupa on a hilltop near Bhopal. The site lay abandoned for about 600 years until a British officer recorded it in 1818, and Buddhist pilgrims have since returned to it.
Kailasa was excavated rather than built: carvers started at the top of the rock and worked downward, so the finished temple stands free inside its own quarry.
Q 24Ellora's 34 caves were cut by followers of Buddhism, Hinduism and which third faith?
Jainism
Jainism claims the last five caves, numbers 30 to 34, after 12 Buddhist and 17 Hindu ones. Three faiths cutting shrines side by side is why UNESCO reads Ellora as a record of ancient India's religious tolerance.
Q 25Which dynasty ruled the Kingdom of Mysore from the palace Henry Irwin completed in 1912?
Wadiyar
Wadiyar kings spent decades as figureheads while Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan held real power, and were put back on the throne by the British after Tipu fell in 1799.
Q 26What destroyed the old palace at Mysore in 1897, prompting Henry Irwin's replacement?
A fire after a wedding
A fire after a wedding, the ceremony of Princess Jayalakshmi Ammanni, gutted much of the old palace, and the royal family moved into the nearby Jaganmohan Palace until the new one was finished in 1912.
Q 27Which fifth ruler of Hyderabad's founding dynasty built the Charminar in 1591, said to mark a plague's end?
Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah
Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah had just moved his capital from the old fortress to his new city of Hyderabad, and the Charminar went up as the centrepiece around which the city was laid out.
Q 28Which architect of New Delhi designed India Gate, inscribed with more than 13,000 names of the war dead?
Edwin Lutyens
Edwin Lutyens modelled the gate on Roman triumphal arches, though it mourns rather than celebrates: it was built as the All India War Memorial for soldiers who died in the First World War and the Third Anglo-Afghan War.
Q 29Which sculptor, long known for his statues of Gandhi, designed the Statue of Unity inaugurated in 2018?
Ram V. Sutar
Ram V. Sutar's design was built partly with iron from used farm tools that farmers across India were asked to donate, fitting for a statue of Vallabhbhai Patel, the unifier nicknamed the Iron Man of India.
Q 30Which short-lived Mughal capital, said to have run dry, holds the towering Buland Darwaza gateway?
Fatehpur Sikri
Fatehpur Sikri was Akbar's 'City of Victory', his capital for little more than a decade; the failure of its water supply is the reason usually given for the court's move away in the 1580s.