NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 3 Winds of Change (prose) — Critical Reflection

(i) True.

The extract gives two pieces of evidence, and both point the same way. First, pankhas “became significant cultural goods distributed through trade routes” — a thing that travels along trade routes is, by definition, an item of commerce, and “significant” tells you it mattered in that trade. Second, “They were considered exotic and stylish” — that is the language of desirability, and desirable goods sell. Put together, the extract supports the statement.

(ii) Because these pankhas were not new or invented designs — they were the long-established, inherited pattern of a particular place, made the same way over generations. The extract says “different villages and towns developed their own varieties”, each with “distinct materials” and its own “intricate designs”. A design that belongs to a place, is passed down in it, and is repeated by every maker in it, is by definition traditional. The word also quietly separates these fans from the “innovative creations” that appear later in the chapter and threaten them.

(iii) …because it records what people thought of pankhas — a judgement of taste that cannot be measured, tested or proved, and that would differ from one person to another. The verb itself gives it away: “they were considered” means somebody held this view. Set the two sentences side by side and the difference is plain — “distributed through trade routes” can be checked against records and can be shown true or false; “exotic and stylish” cannot.

(iv) Because the need was the same everywhere: most of India is hot for most of the year, and before electricity the only way an ordinary household could move air was by hand. A common climate and a common need produced a common object.

(v) A. Each kind of pankha could be distinguished from the other.

Test each option against the reason. The reason offers two facts — indigenous materials unique to the region and elaborate designs. Both are marks of difference, and the extract draws exactly that conclusion in its last line: distinct materials and intricate designs “set them apart from one another”. So A follows.

B does not. That pankhas were made of local materials with fine designs says nothing about how many people used them; widespread use is asserted elsewhere in the extract (“substantial commonality in their use across India”) and has a different cause altogether. A reason must lead to its assertion, and this one leads only to A.

(i) Technology has produced the electric fan, the cooler and the air-conditioner, which do the pankha’s work without a hand to move them. So the pankha has lost its everyday users, and with them the reason for the craft to exist: “the beautiful culture of pankhas runs the risk of slowly losing its presence among Indians.” If nobody needs a pankha, nobody learns to make one, and a skill carried for centuries can disappear in a generation.

(ii) …because a pankha carries far more than the breeze it makes: it carries the materials of its region, its inherited designs, the ritual and household customs it belongs to, the stories told about it and the skill handed down through generations of a family. The chapter has already shown this — the fan fanned deities in temples and kings in courts, and “The structure of each fan reflects the cultural core of the region that crafts it.” An object can be bought, replaced or thrown away; a culture is a way of life, and that is what is at risk. Calling it a culture is also what makes the loss matter — you cannot mourn the disappearance of a tool, but you can mourn the disappearance of a tradition.

(iii) “Once made for personal use, over time this handicraft has transformed into a commercial business and now provides some form of livelihood to India’s artisans.”

(iv) A steady demand gives artisans a regular and sustainable income from the craft itself. When orders come in through the year, a family no longer has to treat pankha-making as a spare-time occupation or abandon it for daily-wage work, and the skill can be passed on to the next generation instead of being dropped. (The chapter puts the same idea in the following paragraph: a commercial platform helps artisans “create a sustainable livelihood”.)

(v) B. economic demand.

The extract makes the chain explicit: the handicraft “has transformed into a commercial business and now provides some form of livelihood”, and “The slight increase in popularity and demand…”. Commercialisation is what happens when an object acquires buyers; buyers are demand.

• A — cultural preservation is a consequence that the writer hopes for in the next paragraph, not the cause of commercialisation.
• C — technological advancements is named in this very extract as the threat to pankhas, the force pushing them out of daily use. It is the opposite of the answer.
• D — artisan initiative is not mentioned in the extract at all; the initiatives the chapter names later are workshops and exhibitions, and they come after commercialisation.

The title works on two levels at once, and that double action is exactly what makes it right for this chapter.

Literally, a pankha exists to make wind. Every object in the chapter — the two-inch pankhi, the appliqué fan, the brass temple fan with its long handle, the huge one “requiring a person’s full arm strength” — is a machine for moving air. So the first word of the title names the subject itself.

Idiomatically, “winds of change” means a shift in circumstances that cannot be resisted. And a shift is precisely what the chapter describes:

• from sacred and royal use — pankhas “used in temples to fan deities” and “in royal courts to fan kings” — to ordinary household use;
• from a useful object to a decorative one: “In modern times, the use of pankhas has been restricted to decorative purposes, and they have become traditional craft items in India”;
• from something “made for personal use” to “a commercial business” that “now provides some form of livelihood to India’s artisans”;
• and from a living habit to something that “runs the risk of slowly losing its presence among Indians”.

The chapter states the claim outright — “The structure of each fan reflects the cultural core of the region that crafts it” — and then proves it region by region. Two examples make the point clearly.

Example 1 — Rajasthan and its embroidery and temple traditions. Rajasthan does not have one pankha; it has four, and each one is a different part of the state’s identity. The zardozi hand fan is made with “glittering ornate and encrusted gold threadwork” — zardozi is the courtly embroidery of the region, so the fan carries the taste of the old princely courts on its face. Beside it stand the temple hand fans, “made by engraving brass” and given “a long handle”, and the painted hand fan, “a cardboard pankha featuring various images… usually offered to gods”. The long handle is not decoration; it exists because a temple fan must be waved over a deity by an attendant standing at a distance. Structure follows ritual, and ritual is culture.

Example 2 — Gujarat and its bead and mirror crafts. Gujarat’s fans are “elegant pure cotton-based fans embellished with mirror work”, and its beads hand fan is “covered with colourful beads and has a silver handle”. The chapter gives the reason in the very next sentence: “Gujarat is the centre for bead craft in India”. The fan is simply the state’s best-known skill applied to a new object. And in Kutch, where leather-working is the old trade, the fan changes material with the district — “hand-stitched leather hand fans decorated with thread and wool at its seams”.

Neither half of the pair can save the craft alone; the balance is what saves it.

Tradition alone preserves the object but loses the buyer. If artisans make only what was always made, for a use that no longer exists, the pankha becomes a museum piece. The chapter is blunt about the modern reality: “the use of pankhas has been restricted to decorative purposes.” Nobody today buys a fan to survive the summer. A craft that refuses to change waits for a market that has already gone.

Innovation alone keeps the buyer but loses the craft. If the fan is redesigned freely — printed on machine-made board, assembled from plastic, stripped of the appliqué or the mirror work because those take weeks — then what survives is the shape and not the skill. The very thing that made a pankha “testimony to the cultural identity of the region” disappears, and with it the reason anyone should want one rather than a printed souvenir.

Held together, each supplies what the other lacks. Tradition supplies the value — the zardozi stitch, the Kutch leather seam, the sola pith, the woven moonj — and innovation supplies the occasion to use it: fans redesigned as wall panels, table décor, wedding and festival gifts, packaging that protects a delicate sola fan in transit, a smaller lighter version that fits a handbag, online listings that reach buyers a village fair never could. The chapter itself records that this is already working: “The slight increase in popularity and demand is significantly factored by the different versions of the pankha being crafted.”

A workshop does four things at once that neither a shop nor a museum can do.

• It transmits the skill. Pankha-making is learnt by watching hands, not by reading. A workshop puts a learner beside a maker, which is the only way a craft has ever passed on — and it opens that transmission beyond the artisan’s own family, so the skill survives even where a son or daughter has taken up another trade.
• It creates informed buyers. Once you have tried to plait moonj or set a single mirror, you know what three weeks of work looks like, and you stop asking why a hand fan costs more than a plastic one. The chapter names this effect: workshops and exhibitions “help spread awareness about the beauty and importance of this craft in India’s culture.”
• It gives the artisan a platform and a price. Running a workshop is itself paid work, and it puts the maker in front of customers directly, without a middleman. The chapter says such initiatives allow “contemporary pankha makers to demonstrate their craft and regain its popularity” and “provide them with a commercial platform to create a sustainable livelihood.”
• It records the craft. A workshop forces the maker to break the process into teachable steps, and those steps — which materials, which season, which tool, which knot — are exactly the knowledge that is otherwise lost silently when an old artisan dies.

The writer’s exact words are worth holding on to: “One of the first steps to preserve the essence of the craft is by celebrating pankhas, and appreciating the culture, stories, and artistry that this handicraft invokes.” Notice what is being celebrated — not the object only, but the culture, stories and artistry behind it.

For the craft, celebration changes the pankha’s status. A thing that is celebrated is worth keeping; a thing that is merely used is thrown away when something better arrives. Festivals, exhibitions, displays and documentation move the pankha out of the category of “obsolete tool” and into the category of “heritage”, and heritage attracts attention, funding and protection. Celebration also preserves the stories — the Ajanta wall paintings, the temple fan offered to a god, the Bengali household where a Tal Patar Pankha is “perpetually kept as an article of possession”. Those stories are what a plastic fan can never compete with.

For artisans, the benefits are practical and immediate. Celebration gives them:

• Visibility — it “allows contemporary pankha makers to demonstrate their craft and regain its popularity”, so the maker is seen and named instead of being an anonymous supplier;
• A market and a fair price — “a commercial platform to create a sustainable livelihood”, since buyers who understand the labour pay for the labour;
• Dignity — public appreciation turns a poorly-paid occupation into a respected vocation, and that respect is often what persuades the next generation to continue rather than leave.

The pankha has moved from being an object of use to an object of display — and that single shift changes everything about where it lives, who owns it and what it means.

Then: the fan was in the hand. It fanned deities in temples and kings in royal courts, it lay in every Bengali household, and it was “made for personal use”. Its value came from what it did.

Now: the fan is on the wall. The chapter is exact: “In modern times, the use of pankhas has been restricted to decorative purposes, and they have become traditional craft items in India” — and Gujarat’s “dainty pankhas are commonly used as wall decorations”. Its value now comes from what it represents.

Three things follow from that change:

• The pankha has become a symbol of identity rather than a solution to heat. An electric fan has taken over the function; what the pankha keeps is the meaning — the region it comes from, the skill in it, the memory of the household it once belonged to.
• The audience has changed. A working fan was made for the family that owned it; a decorative one is made for a buyer, often a city buyer or a tourist. So the craft has shifted “into a commercial business”, and the artisan now works to somebody else’s taste.
• The knowledge is at risk even while the object survives. A decorative fan need not fan well. Once no one tests it in a hot afternoon, the practical parts of the skill — the weight, the balance, the spring of the cane, the set of the handle — are the first to be forgotten, even though the pattern on the face is kept.