NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 1 Bharat Our Land (poem)

Q1.

I. Search for poems or songs dedicated to India, your motherland, in your regional language. Share them with your classmates and explain their meaning too.

Answer

How to do it well. Choose one poem or song, not five. Find the original text, read it aloud in the original first, then give a line-by-line sense in English or Hindi, and finish by naming one device the poet uses — because that is what turns a recitation into an explanation.

Language	A well-known example	Poet / composer	What to point out
Tamil	Vande Mataram (Bharati’s Tamil songs on the motherland)	Subramania Bharati	The same poet as this chapter — compare how he praises Bharat here with how he does it there.
Bengali	Amar Sonar Bangla	Rabindranath Tagore	The land addressed as a mother; “sonar” (golden) is the same metaphor as Bharati’s “sunny golden land”.
Hindi	Jhansi ki Rani	Subhadra Kumari Chauhan	Patriotism through one heroic life instead of through landscape; note the drumbeat rhythm.
Kannada	Jaya Bharata Jananiya Tanujate (the state song)	Kuvempu	Karnataka addressed as a daughter of Mother India — a two-level patriotism, region inside nation.
Marathi	Jai Jai Maharashtra Majha	Raja Badhe	Geography used as praise — forts, the Sahyadri, the sea.

Sample answer (the shape of a two-minute presentation): I chose Kuvempu’s Jaya Bharata Jananiya Tanujate. The title means “Victory to you, daughter of Mother India” — Karnataka is not called a country but a daughter, which is the poem’s central idea. The first lines name the land’s beauty and then its people; the middle names the poets and saints who wrote in Kannada; and the last returns to “jaya he”, exactly as our National Anthem does. The device I want to point out is personification carried through the whole poem: because Karnataka is a daughter and India a mother, loving one cannot mean rejecting the other. Bharati does something very close in Bharat Our Land, where India is “she” and the Ganga is “her”.

Why this activity is set beside this poem: Bharati wrote in Tamil, and what you have read is a translation. Reading a patriotic poem in your own language shows you at once what a translation keeps — the images, the argument — and what it loses: the rhyme, the sound and the tune it was meant to be sung to.

Q2.

II. In groups of six, prepare an interdisciplinary project on India’s major geographical features. For each feature, describe the region, explain its importance in the lives of the people living there and mention the languages spoken in that region. Include one example of each of the following. • Mountains – Himalayas, Western Ghats, etc. • Rivers – Ganga, Yamuna, Krishna, Kaveri, Godavari, etc. • Deserts – Thar Desert, Rann of Kutch, etc. • Valleys – Kangra Valley, Nubra Valley, etc. • Islands – Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, etc. • Plateaus – Deccan, Malwa, Meghalaya, etc.

Answer

How to divide the work: six features, six students — one each. Every member answers the same three questions in the same order, so the six pages read as one project rather than six essays. Agree the format before anyone starts researching.

Feature	Example & region	Importance in people’s lives	Languages of the region
Mountains	Western Ghats — along the west coast, Gujarat to Kerala	They force the monsoon to rise and rain, feeding the Krishna, Kaveri and Godavari; they support coffee, tea, cardamom and pepper, and are one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.	Marathi, Konkani, Kannada, Tulu, Malayalam
Rivers	Kaveri — Kodagu to the Bay of Bengal	Irrigates the delta of Thanjavur, the “rice bowl of the south”; the Grand Anicut has diverted its water for nearly two thousand years; temple towns line its banks.	Kannada, Tamil
Deserts	Thar Desert — western Rajasthan	Pastoral herding, camel transport, the Indira Gandhi Canal, salt from the pans, and a craft economy of block-printing and mirror-work; also a major solar-power belt now.	Rajasthani (Marwari), Hindi, Sindhi
Valleys	Nubra Valley — Ladakh	High-altitude farming of apricots and barley in a cold desert; the historic route towards Central Asia; tourism and the double-humped Bactrian camel.	Ladakhi (Bhoti), Balti, Urdu, Hindi
Islands	Andaman and Nicobar Islands — Bay of Bengal	Fishing, coconut and tourism; home to the Great Andamanese, Onge, Jarawa, Sentinelese and Nicobarese; the site of the Cellular Jail.	Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Nicobarese and the Andamanese languages
Plateaus	Deccan Plateau — south of the Narmada	Black cotton soil supports cotton, jowar and pulses; rain-shadow makes it drought-prone; rich in basalt and in mineral belts at its edges.	Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Hindi

What makes it interdisciplinary, and how to show that:

Geography — a hand-drawn outline map of India with the six features marked. Do not print one; drawing it is where the learning happens.
Economics — one crop, craft or industry per feature, with the reason the land allows it.
Language — a map overlay showing where the language boundaries do and do not follow the physical ones. The Western Ghats hold four languages along one range; the Kaveri crosses a language border. That mismatch is the most interesting finding in the whole project.
Literature — one poem, song or proverb about each feature, in its own language, with a translation.

Tip: finish with a single closing slide that returns to the poem: Bharati named one mountain and one river and let them stand for the country. Ask your class which feature they would have chosen to stand for India, and why. That question is the point of the project.

NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 1 Bharat Our Land (poem) — Learning Beyond the Text