NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 2 The Pot Maker (prose) — Critical Reflection

(i) Option A — “The process of pot making is quite tiresome and long, and one hardly earns much.”

Test each half of A against the extract. Tiresome: “is also tedious”, “out of sheer exhaustion”. Long: “It takes months to bring out a batch of pots”. Hardly earns much: “And the reward? A few rupees.” All three are in the extract. Option B fails on one word: satisfaction. Nothing in the extract offers any satisfaction — Arenla’s only comment on how the work feels is that “it has brought no joy to me”.

(ii) Because, in Arenla’s judgement, weaving would give her daughter a better life than pottery ever gave her. The extract gives four reasons in her own words: “she can make much more money”; it provides “enough cloth for the family”; it “is not messy like pot making and can be done indoors in all seasons”; and “the time spent on weaving one shawl is much less and the return is handsome.” Underneath all four lies the real motive — she has carried clay up a sheer drop for a pittance, and does not want her daughter’s back to ache the same way.

(iii) Weaving can be done indoors in all seasons, whereas pot making is messy and depends on the weather — “Weaving is not messy like pot making and can be done indoors in all seasons.” (Any one of these is equally correct, if quoted: it earns much more money; it takes far less time per article; the return is handsome; it also clothes the family.)

(iv) Option B — “They will make a handsome profit selling this property.”

In the extract, “the return is handsome” means the money earned is large and generous in amount. Sentence B uses ‘handsome’ in exactly that sense, of a profit. Sentence A uses the far commoner sense — good-looking — which has nothing to do with money. The clue is the noun each adjective attaches to: profit and return belong together; man does not.

(v) The question mark turns a statement into a rhetorical question, and its purpose is to make the reader feel the disappointment instead of merely being told about it.

Three effects follow. First, it creates a short silence between the effort and the payment, so the gap between them becomes audible. Second, it pulls the listener in — Arenla is speaking to her husband at night, and the question makes him supply the answer in his own mind before she gives it. Third, the flat two-word answer that follows lands as bitter irony: the word ‘reward’ has already promised something generous, and “A few rupees” withdraws it.

(i) …because Sentila is too tense, and her nervousness passes straight into her hands, so the clay “seemed unable or unwilling to yield the right shape”.

The extract gives the reason itself, in order: Onula “noticed that Sentila was too tense. As a result, the clay seemed unable or unwilling to yield the right shape.” The clumsiness is a symptom, not the disease. Pot making needs a loose, rhythmic hand — Sentila is gripping.

(ii) Option C — thoughtful and generous.

So the two options containing ‘forgiving’ go first, and between A and C, ‘thoughtful’ is what the endearment and the reassurance actually demonstrate.

(iii) Option A — “As a result, the clay seemed unable or unwilling to yield the right shape.”

The phrase “As a result” is the signpost: it marks whatever follows as an effect. The cause is in the sentence before it — “Sentila was too tense”. Option B is simply something Onula observed; nothing in the extract makes it the outcome of anything.

(iv) ‘Fashioned’ here means created. Onula begins with a shapeless lump and brings a whole pot into being — that is making, not decorating. ‘Styled’ would mean giving a finish or a look to something that already exists, which is not what happens. (Fresh example: The children fashioned a boat out of newspaper.)

(v) She would have felt defeated, ashamed and close to giving up — but also stubbornly unwilling to stop.

The adverb the author chooses is the clue: she “wearily” let the lump fall. Not angrily, not carelessly — wearily, the word of someone whose strength has run out. It echoes the earlier failure with her mother, when she “hung her head in shame and frustration”. And there is humiliation in the timing: everyone else has gone to the musical evening, and she has crept out her clay in secret, only to fail again with nobody to blame. Yet notice she had carried the clay and the implements to the dormitory in the first place — the despair is real, but so is the refusal to abandon the craft.

Sentila watches the whole cycle, from the riverbank to the fired pot. In order:

1. Digging and carrying the clay. The grey and red clay is dug from a riverbank sixteen kilometres away with a dao, loaded on to a carrying basket and hauled uphill to the village.
2. Soaking and pounding. The clay is soaked in a trough in the work shed, then stuffed into bamboo cylinders “in the right proportion” and pounded until it becomes “malleable dough”. Sentila sees the potters mix it “with water and pounded” it.
3. Shaping. This is the part she watches most closely: “how careful they were when they pushed their left hand into a lump of the softened clay and how deftly they rotated the lump as they started giving shape to the rotating clay with a spatula held in the right hand.” The left hand supports from inside; the right hand beats and shapes from outside; the lump turns continuously.
4. Making the mouth and rim. The potter “slackened the rhythm when fashioning the mouth of the pots”, and “a strip of elongated dough was added to the mouth to make the rim”.
5. Touching up. “After two or three days, the pots would be given a final touch up to retain the required shape and to test the consistency.”
6. Drying. Only then are they “taken out to dry in the sun”. This is why Arenla worries about having “enough days of sunshine”.
7. Firing. They are “loaded on to a kiln in a uniform pattern on a bed of hay and dried bamboo and covered with another layer of the same materials, and then the kiln would be fired”.
8. Tending the fire. “One had to tend the fire carefully as over firing or under firing would ruin the entire batch.”

Having accepted his explanation, the elders let Mesoba go — but not without a caution. They told him to remind Arenla that it was her duty to teach her daughter the skill, and they gave him the principle behind that duty.

• The skill was one “that was handed down from generation to generation” — so it came to Arenla as a trust, not as a private possession.
• Skills such as pot making “not only catered to the needs of the people but also symbolised the tradition and history of the people”, and therefore “did not ‘belong’ to any individual”.
• Consequently, “experts were obliged to pass on their skills not only to their own children but also to anyone who wished to learn”.

Behind the warning lies a real fear, stated a few lines earlier: the villagers “were worried that if all pot makers followed suit, then there would be no expert potters to take their place.” One woman’s refusal, repeated, would end the craft.

She felt humiliated and defeated — “Sentila hung her head in shame and frustration”.

Two details sharpen that shame. First, the failure is basic: “when she tried her hand at the shaping of the lump into a pot, she could not even hold the lump of dough properly” — this from a girl who had already learnt the hard preparatory work and had “turned the clay into malleable dough” easily. Second, she has an audience. “The mother simply sat in a corner and watched the girl try again and again” — and then, without a word, “took over the job, and transformed the lump into a beautiful pot.” Each effortless pot her mother makes is a measure of her own failure.

There is frustration as well as shame, because the wish is unchanged. She has wanted this since childhood, the obstacle of her mother’s refusal has finally been removed, and still nothing comes. That is why the failure lasts “almost a year” without her walking away from it.

Onula has stepped into the work shed on the morning Arenla’s body is being carried out, and has found “two neat rows of newly-made pots… She could find nothing to tell one batch from the other.” The sentence records the moment she understands what that means — and understanding takes time, which is why she stands still.

Work out what she is seeing:

• Two batches, made on the same day, indistinguishable. “She was sure that it was not the handiwork of one person alone.”
• One batch is Arenla’s — a master of thirty years. The other must be Sentila’s, the girl who a year ago “could not even hold the lump of dough properly”.
• Onula alone knows how to read this, because she alone had heard Sentila cry, “Mother, I did not wish it to happen this way; it simply came to me.” The others “did not understand what she meant”.

So the ‘new phenomenon’ is not the pots. It is the fact that a skill has passed whole from one person to another at the very moment the first person died — that the mother’s dexterity did not go into the grave with her. The word ‘absorb’ is exact: this is too large to grasp at a glance, like news that has to be taken in slowly. That is why the narrator calls the shed “this place of wonder” and says she “believed that she had just witnessed a profound revelation”.

It symbolises the idea that a traditional craft is the collective memory of a community, held in trust by the person who practises it — never owned by them.

The council spells out the reasoning: skills such as pot making “not only catered to the needs of the people but also symbolised the tradition and history of the people”. A pot is therefore two things at once. As an object it holds water; as an inheritance it holds the community’s history — its shapes, its clay, its way of doing things, unchanged across generations that left no written record. Break the chain of teaching and that history is simply gone; there are no books to recover it from.

Three consequences follow, and the story shows each one:

• The expert is a custodian, not a proprietor. Hence: “experts were obliged to pass on their skills not only to their own children but also to anyone who wished to learn.”
• Refusing to teach is a public matter, not a private one. That is why a family disagreement ends up before the village council at all.
• The individual is temporary; the craft is not. Arenla dies on the last day of the story. The craft does not — “A new pot maker was born.”

It is a birth announcement placed immediately after a death — and that placing is the whole meaning of the story.

Take the line apart:

• ‘Born’, not ‘made’ or ‘trained’. Birth is something that happens to you; it comes from outside. This matches Sentila’s own bewildered words: “I did not wish it to happen this way; it simply came to me.” She did not seize the skill; she received it.
• ‘A new pot maker’ — the community’s answer to its own fear. The villagers had worried that “there would be no expert potters to take their place.” One short sentence closes that worry.
• The tense and the placing. Arenla lies dead; the last thing the reader is told is not that a woman has died but that a potter has come into being. The tradition survives the person, exactly as the elders had argued it must.

Why it is a separate one-line paragraph. Temsula Ao gives it no explanation and no adjectives. It reads like a formal proclamation to the village, and its bareness makes the claim final. Any sentence after it would weaken it.

Perseverance is what keeps a dream alive through the long stretch in which there is no evidence that it will ever work — and Sentila’s story is almost entirely made of that stretch.

Count what she absorbs without stopping:

Two things are worth noticing about how the story defines perseverance, because they are what lift it above “never give up”.

• Perseverance here is patient, not loud. Sentila never argues with her mother and never demands to be taught. Her persistence takes the form of attention — years of watching hands, rhythms and rims.
• Perseverance needed help to pay off. A year of trying alone produced nothing; one evening with Onula produced a pot. Effort put her in a position to be helped; it did not replace the help. That is an honest lesson, and the story is careful about it.

The reward, when it comes, is sudden and total: “like a sprinter who had suddenly found momentum, she continued making pot after pot with the same speed and dexterity that she had noticed in her mother’s hands.” The simile matters — a sprinter’s speed looks instant, but it rests on years of running.