NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 1 How I Taught My Grandmother to Read (prose) — Critical Reflection

(i) A. strong-willed. The phrase measures her by what she does not do — she does not break down even when circumstances are at their worst. That is endurance of the will. Bold (D) is the near miss: boldness is daring, a readiness to act or speak out, and the extract shows nothing daring — only self-control. Understanding (B) and considerate (C) describe how she treats others, and the phrase says nothing about others at all.

(ii) emotional. The extract gives the evidence twice over. She “nodded but did not reply” — she could manage a gesture but not speech, which is what strong feeling does to a person. And she is not tired: that same night she gets up after dinner, comes to the terrace and sits beside the narrator to talk. A tired woman sleeps; an overwhelmed one waits for the dark to speak.

(iii) Two clues, both inside the extract:

• “I used to call her Avva, which means mother in the Kannada spoken in north Karnataka.” A local dialect word used inside the family, and the custom of calling a grandmother “mother”, place the scene in a particular rural region rather than in a city.
• “we were sleeping in the open terrace of our house” on a summer night — sleeping on the terrace in the hot months is a village and small-town practice, and it is what allows a private conversation to happen at all.

(iv) The last two sentences: “Avva came and sat next to me. Her affectionate hands touched my forehead.” The tenderness is created by touch rather than by speech — nobody says anything, and the gesture is the one an adult uses to comfort a child, here used by the person who actually needs comfort. The setting adds to it: “It was a summer night and there was a full moon” gives a soft, quiet light in which the confession that follows becomes possible.

(v) C. the grandmother’s regret over her lack of education. Test each option against the printed lines. A is present — tears, a nod, no reply. B is present — “Avva”, the hands on the forehead. D is present — “Are you okay?”, “I was worried.” But nothing in this extract mentions school, reading or education; her regret is confessed later, on the following page. That is exactly why this option is the answer: it is true of the story but not of the extract.

(i) B. She desires self-sufficiency. Literacy (A) is only her method; the sentence names her goal, and the goal is to stop needing other people. The proof is elsewhere in the chapter — “We are well-off, but what use is money when I cannot be independent?” C is wrong because she is not addressing “others” at all; she never even told the village she could not read. D is the opposite of the truth: society had told her that education was not essential for girls, and she is now going against that.

(ii) age limit. Take the words from the extract itself. The narrator’s objection is “at this age of sixty-two”, and the grandmother’s reply is “For learning there is no age bar.” Gender bias and cultural barriers are real in the story — “In those days people never considered education essential for girls” — but that line is not in this extract, and this extract argues about age.

(iii) …because she is twelve years old and cannot imagine that learning belongs to anyone but the young. Her reasons are listed in the extract and every one of them is physical — “All your hair is grey, your hands are wrinkled, you wear spectacles and you work so much in the kitchen.” She measures ability by the body and by the daily role her grandmother occupies, and so treats the decision as a joke. She admits the judgement was worthless as soon as she reports it: “Childishly I made fun of the old lady.”

(iv) Two, with the words that show them:

• Determination. “I saw the determination on her face”; she fixes a subject, a date and a standard — read a novel on my own by Saraswati Puja day.
• Patience and composure. She is laughed at by a child and does not retort: “But she just smiled,” and answers with a principle rather than with anger.

(Self-respect and hard work would also be accepted: “I will work harder than anybody but I will do it.”)

(v) Because she decides what her grandmother can do without asking, testing or listening. Notice the structure of her outburst: she does not say “learning is difficult” or “the alphabet takes time” — she lists grey hair, wrinkled hands, spectacles and kitchen work, none of which has anything to do with the mind. She assumes that old age ends the capacity to learn, that a woman busy in the kitchen has no room for anything else, and that a person who has never studied cannot begin. The extract quietly marks all this as assumption by showing what the narrator can already see — “I saw the determination on her face. Yet I laughed at her.” The word “yet” admits that the evidence was in front of her and she ignored it.

Because asking would have made her illiteracy public in a village where she was a respected, well-off elder.

Inside the family, being read to was a shared pleasure — it looked like affection, not helplessness. Outside it, the same request would have announced that Krishtakka, the head of a comfortable household, could not read a magazine. She says both halves of this herself: “I could have asked somebody in this village but I was too embarrassed to do so. I felt very dependent and helpless.”

There is a second, sharper reason. She had spent her life being the one who provides — “always felt so much happiness in cooking and feeding all of you” — and had made sure her children and grandchildren studied well. To go to a neighbour as a supplicant would have reversed the position she had held for sixty years. That is why the embarrassment is not vanity; it is the moment she discovers what her illiteracy has cost her, and it is what drives the decision on the next page.

She laughs out of a child’s certainty, not out of unkindness. At twelve, school is the whole world of learning, and school belongs to children. A sixty-two-year-old sitting down to the alphabet strikes her as a comic mismatch, like an adult joining a game of hide and seek.

Her objections show the mistake exactly: “All your hair is grey, your hands are wrinkled, you wear spectacles and you work so much in the kitchen…” Every item is about the body or the daily routine; not one is about whether her grandmother can think, remember or work hard. Sudha Murty also lets the laugh be affectionate — the two are close enough to tease each other, and the grandmother does not take offence: “But she just smiled.”

In the grandmother’s life, Kashi Yatre is not entertainment — it is her own life told back to her. Triveni’s novel is about “an old lady and her ardent desire to go to Kashi or Varanasi”, a pilgrimage she never makes because she gives away all her savings for an orphan girl’s wedding. Krishtakka “too never went to Kashi, and she identified herself with the novel’s protagonist”, and she has spent her life giving to others in exactly the same way — cooking, feeding, and making sure her grandchildren studied. That is why she listens “with the greatest concentration”, repeats the whole text by heart, and argues about it with her friends in the temple courtyard.

In the story’s construction, the novel does three jobs:

• It creates the weekly ritual that binds grandmother and granddaughter — every Wednesday, a magazine and a reading.
• It causes the crisis. When the narrator is away, it is the picture accompanying Kashi Yatre that the grandmother stares at and cannot read. Her tears are about that page.
• It closes the story. The narrator secretly buys Kashi Yatre, “published as a novel by that time”, and the grandmother “opened it and read immediately the title Kashi Yatre by Triveni and the publisher’s name.” The book she could once only hear becomes the book she reads — the proof of what she has achieved.

It reflects a woman who refuses to accept dependence as a settled fact of her life.

• Self-respect. She is not learning to impress anyone — nobody in the village even knows she cannot read. The audience for this is herself: “I want to be independent.”
• Courage. Beginning at the beginning at sixty-two means being a beginner in front of a twelve-year-old, and being laughed at on the first day. She goes ahead anyway.
• Discipline. She turns a wish into a plan with a deadline — Saraswati Puja day — and then does the work: “The amount of homework she did was amazing. She would read, repeat, write, and recite.”
• Humility. She accepts a child as her teacher completely, and at the end insists on the full formality of the role by touching her feet.
• Clear-eyed judgement about her own past. She does not blame anyone for never having gone to school; she simply decides that the loss can still be repaired.

The gesture is deliberately shocking — the narrator calls it “unusual”, says she was “taken aback”, and notes that “Elders never touch the feet of youngsters… today the reverse had happened. It was not correct.” The grandmother then explains it, and the explanation carries the lessons.

• Respect is owed to a role, not to a person’s age. “I am touching the feet of a teacher, not my granddaughter.” She is not honouring a twelve-year-old girl; she is honouring the office of the teacher, which that girl happens to hold.
• Knowledge is what a tradition actually asks us to revere. “Is it not written in our scriptures that a teacher should be respected, irrespective of the gender and age?” She keeps the spirit of the custom by breaking its usual form — the sharper reading of the two.
• Gratitude should be expressed, not merely felt. She marks the day formally: the puja place, a stool, a gift of frock material, and then the namaskara.
• A true learner stays humble even in success. She has just achieved something remarkable, and her first act is to thank her teacher.

Note how the narrator answers: “I did return her namaskara to her by touching her feet and gave my gift to my first student.” Neither of them cancels the other’s respect. The lesson is not that the old should bow to the young, but that learning and teaching deserve honour wherever they are found.

It states the theme of the whole story in one sentence: determination, joined to a worthwhile purpose, defeats circumstance.

Read the sentence closely — it has two conditions, not one. “For a good cause” comes first: the will has to be pointed at something worth doing. “If you are determined” comes second: wanting is not enough, it must be sustained. Only then does the promise arrive — “you can overcome any obstacle.”

The story then tests the claim rather than merely asserting it. The obstacles are all named and none is imaginary: age sixty-two, grey hair, wrinkled hands, weak eyes, a full day of kitchen work, no schooling of any kind, and a teacher who begins by laughing at her. Against all that she puts one thing — hard work with a deadline — and by Dassara she reads a novel. The line is proved by the plot, not by argument.

Very effectively — chiefly because it dramatises the idea instead of stating it, and because it removes every easy explanation before it does so.

It shows dependence physically. The most powerful sentence in the story is not an argument but an image: “Many times I rubbed my hands over the pages wishing they could understand what was written.” A page that will not open to a person is the whole case for literacy, made in one line.

It rules out poverty as the cause. “We are well-off, but what use is money when I cannot be independent?” By making the grandmother comfortable, Sudha Murty prevents the reader from filing this under “problems of the poor”. What she lacks cannot be bought.

It makes independence measurable. The goal is precise — read a novel unaided; the deadline is fixed — Saraswati Puja day; and the result is demonstrated in public, not claimed: she “opened it and read immediately the title Kashi Yatre by Triveni and the publisher’s name.”

It shows the change in status, not only in skill. The proof that something real has altered is the reversed namaskara. A woman who a few months earlier was too embarrassed to ask a neighbour for help now stands as an equal — and, in the matter of gratitude, as the one who gives.