Indian States Trivia
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100 free Indian States trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
India's map has never stopped moving. States have been carved out of older ones along language lines, hill districts have been promoted from territory to statehood, cities have swapped names, and the count of union territories shifted twice in a single year. Each change left a date, an act of Parliament and a capital behind it, and those details are what this quiz is built from. The 100 questions treat India's 28 states and its union territories as political units: when each was created and from what, which city governs it, which languages it recognises, and the animals, birds, dances and festivals it has chosen as its symbols. More than 30 states and territories get a question, and none gets more than three. Rivers, peaks and climate are left to the geography quizzes. It suits a school or college GK round, a pub quiz on the subcontinent, or anyone brushing up before a competitive exam. Play it on your phone with instant answers and short explanations, or print it for a table.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which state was officially called Madras State until it was renamed on 14 January 1969?
Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu, 'Tamil country', took its new name in 1969, yet its capital went on being called Madras for another 27 years and became Chennai only in 1996.
Q 02Which state, India's least populous, was the first to convert all its farmland to organic farming?
Sikkim
Sikkim decided in 2003 to go fully organic and finished the switch in 2016, the first Indian state to do so. With about 610,000 people at the 2011 census, it has fewer residents than many Indian cities.
Q 03Which state, the smallest by area, rose from union territory to India's 25th state in May 1987?
Goa
Goa stayed Portuguese for 14 years after the rest of India became independent, until Indian troops ended more than four centuries of colonial rule in December 1961. Statehood followed on 30 May 1987.
Q 04Which official name did Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, receive in 2024?
Sri Vijaya Puram
Sri Vijaya Puram became Port Blair's official name on 13 September 2024, a change the government framed as freeing the city from colonial imprints. It remains the territory's capital and largest city.
Q 05Which state, split from Punjab on linguistic lines in 1966, surrounds Delhi on three sides?
Haryana
Haryana came into being on 1 November 1966 under the Punjab Reorganisation Act. Because it wraps Delhi to the north, west and south, much of the state sits inside the National Capital Region.
Q 06Which big cat, surviving in the wild only around Gir National Park, is the state animal of Gujarat?
Asiatic lion
The Asiatic lion has been confined to Gir National Park and its surroundings since the turn of the 20th century, and its Indian population numbered just 411 in 2010 before rising steadily.
Q 07Which state, India's second most populous at the 2011 census, was created when Bombay State was split on 1 May 1960?
Maharashtra
Maharashtra was born on 1 May 1960 when the Bombay Reorganisation Act divided Bombay State between Marathi and Gujarati speakers, and the date is still kept as Maharashtra Day. Its 2011 population passed 112 million.
Q 08Which state, formed in 2014, celebrates Bathukamma, a nine-day festival in which Telugu women build towers of flowers?
Telangana
Telangana's women stack seasonal flowers into a cone, circle it singing, then set it afloat on a pond. The festival became a badge of the region's identity during the campaign for a separate state.
Q 09Which Uttar Pradesh city, founded by Akbar as Ilahabas, dropped the name Allahabad in October 2018?
Prayagraj
Prayagraj became the official name on 16 October 2018, restoring the ancient Prayag, 'place of sacrifice', at the river confluence where the Kumbh Mela gathers. Akbar had renamed it when he built his great fort there.
Q 10Which language did Nagaland's assembly declare the state's official language in 1967?
English
English has been the language of government and schooling since 1967 in a state whose 17 major tribes each have a tongue of their own, yet in the market nearly everyone falls back on Nagamese, an Assamese-based creole.
Q 11Which state, carved out of Bihar in November 2000, has a name meaning 'the land of forests'?
Jharkhand
Jharkhand, 'the land of forests', came into being on 15 November 2000, the birth anniversary of Birsa Munda, the tribal leader who rose against the British in the 1890s. Ranchi is its capital.
Q 12Which state, carved from Madhya Pradesh in 2000, is named, by popular theory, for thirty-six forts?
Chhattisgarh
Chhattisgarh gained statehood on 1 November 2000 with Raipur as its capital, and chhattis garh means thirty-six forts, though historians note that the 36 forts have never been identified.
Q 13Which species, the tallest of all flying birds, is the state bird of Uttar Pradesh?
Sarus crane
Q 21Which union territory of 36 islands, run as a single district, has its capital at Kavaratti?
Lakshadweep
Lakshadweep means 'a hundred thousand islands', a generous name for 36 specks of coral of which only ten are inhabited. The whole territory is run as one district from Kavaratti.
Q 22Which hill state, India's 18th, gained full statehood on 25 January 1971 with Shimla as its capital?
Himachal Pradesh
Himachal Pradesh took as its capital the hill town from which the British had once governed all India: from the 1860s the viceroy and his government moved up to Shimla every summer.
Q 23Which state, a kingdom until its 1949 merger with India, is credited with giving polo to Europeans?
Manipur
The sarus crane stands up to 1.8 m tall, and because many Indians hold it sacred and leave it unharmed, it lives at ease among farmers' flooded rice fields. Most of India's sarus cranes live in Uttar Pradesh's wetlands.
Q 14Which 'City of Lakes', the capital of Madhya Pradesh, suffered the Union Carbide gas leak of 1984?
Bhopal
Bhopal's Union Carbide plant leaked methyl isocyanate in December 1984, killing thousands. For most of the century before 1926 the princely state had been ruled by a line of women, the Begums of Bhopal.
Q 15Which capital of Bihar occupies the site of Pataliputra, seat of the Maurya and Gupta empires?
Patna
Patna began as Pataligrama, a riverside village that King Ajatashatru fortified to face his rivals across the Ganges. The stronghold grew into Pataliputra, from which the Maurya and Gupta emperors ruled.
Q 16Which union territory, formed from Leh and Kargil districts in late 2019, was set up without an elected assembly?
Ladakh
Ladakh is run by a centrally appointed Lieutenant Governor, with elected hill councils in Leh and Kargil but no assembly of its own. In September 2025 protests demanding statehood turned deadly in Leh.
Q 17Which capital of Uttar Pradesh, the 'City of Nawabs', became the seat of the rulers of Awadh?
Lucknow
Lucknow rose when the fourth Nawab moved his court there from Faizabad in 1775. The British annexed Awadh in 1856, and a year later the city became one of the main centres of the great uprising against them.
Q 18Which union territory of four former French enclaves keeps French as an official language?
Puducherry
Puducherry unites four unconnected coastal enclaves, Pondicherry, Karaikal, Mahe and Yanam, that France handed to India de facto in 1954 and formally in 1962. Tamil is official, with Telugu in Yanam and Malayalam in Mahe.
Q 19Which state, formed from two hill districts of Assam on 21 January 1972, took Shillong as its capital?
Meghalaya
Meghalaya, 'the abode of clouds', was formed from the united Khasi and Jaintia Hills and the Garo Hills, and Shillong, until then the capital of Assam, became its capital instead.
Q 20Which planned city replaced Ahmedabad as the capital of Gujarat in 1970?
Gandhinagar
Gandhinagar, 'Gandhi's city', was named in memory of Mahatma Gandhi, who was born in Gujarat. Built from scratch to take over from Ahmedabad, it was laid out by two Indian town planners who had trained under Le Corbusier.
Manipur's horseback game, sagol kangjei, was picked up in the 1850s by British tea planters in neighbouring Cachar, and from there it spread across British India and beyond. The kingdom's ruler signed the merger in 1949.
Q 24Which state, India's 23rd, won statehood in 1987 under a peace accord with Laldenga's rebel front?
Mizoram
Mizoram's rebel front began as a relief society during the famine of 1959, took up arms in 1966 and made peace twenty years later. Its leader, Laldenga, became the new state's first chief minister.
Q 25Which festival unique to Assam comes three times a year, in April, in autumn and in January?
Bihu
Bihu follows the rice year: the April festival greets the sowing season, the autumn one is the sombre, thrifty Bihu kept while stores run short, and January's is the harvest feast.
Q 26Which animal, whose Kaziranga population is the world's largest, is the state animal of Assam?
Indian rhinoceros
The Indian rhinoceros was hunted almost to extinction by the early 1900s, yet under protection Kaziranga's herd alone had grown to 2,413 by the 2018 census, about two-thirds of all those alive.
Q 27Which classical dance takes its name from a village in the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh?
Kuchipudi
Kuchipudi began as dance-drama staged by all-male troupes from its home village, with men taking the women's parts as well. Women were brought into it only in the 20th century.
Q 28Which two-day kite-flying festival fills Gujarat's skies each January around Makar Sankranti?
Uttarayan
Uttarayan turns Gujarat's rooftops into a battlefield: flyers coat their strings in glue and ground glass to slice rivals' kites out of the sky, a habit deadly enough that sales of the string have been banned.
Q 29Which city in the Kashmir Valley, famed for the houseboats of Dal Lake, serves as a summer capital?
Srinagar
Srinagar is capital only in summer: under the Darbar Move, a custom begun in the 1870s, the whole government shifts to Jammu for the winter and back, its files hauled in hundreds of trucks. Paused in 2021, it resumed in 2025.
Q 30Which union territory, stripped of its assembly in 1956, regained one under the 69th Amendment?
Delhi
Delhi lost its first assembly in 1956, when it came under direct central rule. The 69th Amendment gave it a new one, elected in 1993, but kept police, land and public order in the centre's hands.