Q1.
I. Does anyone in your family use a hand fan? What do you call it in your language? What is it made of?
Answer
This is a personal question, so the marks lie in the three parts the question actually asks — who uses it, what you call it, and what it is made of. Answer all three, and name a real material.
What a good answer needs:
- A named person and an occasion — “my grandmother, during power cuts / while sitting on the verandah in the evening”.
- The word in your language, with the English in brackets: pankha (Hindi/Urdu), bijna (Bhojpuri), visanakol (Tamil), bīsaṇige (Kannada), hatpakha (Bengali), pankho (Gujarati), haatpankha (Marathi), viśari (Malayalam).
- The material — palm leaf, bamboo or cane strips, khus, moonj grass, cloth over cardboard, sandalwood, or plastic if that is the honest answer.
Sample answer: Yes — my grandmother uses a hand fan every summer evening when she sits on the verandah, and the whole family reaches for it whenever the power goes. We call it a pankha; my grandmother, who grew up in a village near Patna, calls it a bijna. Ours is made of thin bamboo strips woven over a split-bamboo frame, with a red cotton border stitched round the edge so that the woven ends do not fray. It is very light, and the border makes it stiff enough to move a good deal of air.
Why the question is asked here: the chapter’s whole argument is that a pankha carries the identity of the place it comes from — “The structure of each fan reflects the cultural core of the region that crafts it.” By starting from the fan in your own house, and its name in your own language, the book makes you notice that you already own a piece of the evidence.