NCERT Solutions for Class 7th Social Science Chapter 14 End-of-chapter exercise — Questions and activities

A maritime neighbour is “a country connected to another by a shared sea or ocean, even without a direct land border”. That is the chapter's own definition. The two countries need not touch on land at all; the water between them is what joins them.

The chapter adds why this counts as neighbourliness: “The ocean acts as a vital link, facilitating centuries of trade, cultural exchange, and historical ties.”

Two examples

Buddhism began in India and travelled outward to almost every neighbour — so today India is the homeland and place of pilgrimage for people across the whole region. The chapter shows this happening in three ways: people travelled, schools of the religion spread, and monuments and gifts were exchanged.

1. People travelled — in both directions

• China: Buddhism reached China around the 1st century CE via trade and pilgrimage routes. Chinese monks like Faxian and Xuanzang came to Indian centres of learning, while Indian monks such as Bodhidharma, Dharmakṣhema and Kumārajīva carried Buddhist teachings to China, “creating deep spiritual and intellectual ties”.
• Sri Lanka: Buddhism was introduced in the 3rd century BCE by Mahendra and Sanghamitrā, the son and daughter of Emperor Aśhoka.
• Bhutan: Guru Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche) introduced the Vajrayāna school in the 8th century CE; it “remains central to Bhutan's religious identity”. Bhutanese pilgrims still visit Bodh Gaya, Rajgir, Nalanda, Udayagiri and Sikkim.
• Myanmar: “As the birthplace of Buddhism, India holds special spiritual significance for the people of Myanmar, many of whom visit India during pilgrimages.”

2. Three schools spread to different neighbours

All three, the chapter adds, “are still followed in some parts of India, especially in the Himalayan states”.

3. Monuments and gifts still keep the link alive

• India helped restore the Ananda temple at Bagan, Myanmar, damaged by earthquakes, and gifted a 16-foot replica of the Sarnath statue of the Buddha to the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon.
• The Borobudur Stūpa in Indonesia (8th–9th centuries CE) — the world's largest Buddhist monument, with over 500 statues of the Buddha and a plan shaped like a mandala.
• Collaborations between India's ancient university of Nālandā and Indonesia's Muara Jambi temple complex.
• In Singapore, Buddhism is currently the most widely practised religion.

An ‘open border’ is “when people from two countries can travel across the border without a visa or passport”. That is the chapter's definition. Between India and Nepal it rests on the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which “provides for open borders, free movement of people and goods, and cooperation in areas such as defence and foreign policy”. The border itself runs across Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Sikkim.

How it changes daily life along the border

• Families stay together. Relatives on the two sides can visit each other freely, so a border running between two villages does not cut a family in half.
• Work is available on both sides. People cross for employment without paperwork, which matters most for daily-wage and seasonal work.
• Education and healthcare are within reach. A student or a patient can go to whichever school or hospital is nearer, even if it is in the other country.
• Markets and trade thrive. “Daily life in many border towns reflects this close interdependence, with vibrant markets and thriving trade.” India is Nepal's largest trading partner, supplying petroleum, medicines, food items and manufactured products, while Nepal sends agricultural produce, handicrafts and garments.
• Pilgrimage is easy. Pilgrims from both countries “regularly visit sacred sites across the border” — thousands of Indians go to the Paśhupatinātha temple in Kathmandu each year, and festivals such as Daśhain (Daśhaharā), Tihar (Dīpāvalī) and Holi are kept with equal enthusiasm on both sides.
• It has to be looked after. The chapter adds a careful line: “India and Nepal work together to ensure the open border remains safe and is not misused; it is a symbol of trust and friendship between the two countries.”

It means that what makes two countries neighbours is what they share and do together, not only how close they happen to lie. The chapter's own sentence continues: “being good neighbours is not just about borders, but also about working together for the benefit of everyone in the region” — and it gives that a name, regionalism.

The clearest example: Afghanistan

Afghanistan “once shared a direct land border with India”, but “the creation of Pakistan in 1947 has complicated access between the two countries”. Geographically, the two are no longer joined at all. Yet the chapter still treats Afghanistan as a neighbour, because:

• the Uttarāpatha trade route linked the Ganga plains to Central Asia through Afghanistan for centuries, carrying goods, religion and ideas;
• before Islam spread there in the 7th century CE, Afghanistan “was a thriving centre of Buddhist and Hindu culture”, and kingdoms like Kapiśha and Zābul mirrored Indian systems of governance;
• the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan stood as symbols of Mahāyāna Buddhism's reach from India, until they were destroyed in 2001;
• in recent decades India has supported education, healthcare and infrastructure there, including the Afghan Parliament building and the Zaranj–Delaram highway.

A second example, the other way round: Indonesia

Indonesia is separated from India by the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea — no shared land at all — yet the chapter calls the two “close maritime neighbours”, with trade going back over 2,000 years, Garuḍa on the Indonesian currency, the Borobudur Stūpa, and joint work today on maritime security, defence and disaster relief.

India's help falls into five kinds — emergency relief, building things, energy, training and joint institutions. Every example below is from this chapter.

A challenge becomes an opportunity when it is bigger than any one country — because then working together stops being a kindness and becomes the only method that works. Yes, the chapter gives several clear examples.

1. The 2004 tsunami → an ocean-wide warning system

On 26 December 2004 an earthquake under the Indian Ocean near Indonesia triggered a tsunami. In India alone “some 15,000 people lost their lives, especially in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands”; across the whole region “more than 200,000 people were killed”. The chapter says plainly what followed: “This disaster exposed the urgent need for better early warning systems. India thus joined hands with Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and other Indian Ocean countries to set up a network of sensors, satellites, and communication links.” The Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre in Hyderabad now alerts neighbouring countries too.

2. Rising seas → shared work on climate and solar energy

The Maldives faces a sea-level rise that “could reach 1 metre by the end of the century, partly submerging many of its islands”; in 2009 its president and cabinet held a meeting 4 m underwater to draw attention to the danger. Bangladesh faces rising seas and more intense cyclones, with many people likely to lose homes or livelihoods. The response has been cooperative: the Maldives is a member of the International Solar Alliance, an Indian initiative, “another example of the long-term relationship between the two countries”.

3. A shared forest → joint protection

The Sundarban National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has “its protection and management coordinated by the two neighbours”, India and Bangladesh. About two-thirds of the forest lies in Bangladesh and the rest in India. It shelters the Bengal tiger, matters for biodiversity, and “serves as a barrier to cyclones” — so protecting it protects both countries.

4. Seas that must be kept safe → maritime security partnerships

India and Indonesia have “shared concerns about piracy, climate change, and the protection of sea lanes, which makes their partnership especially important”. India and Malaysia work “closely on regional security and maritime stability”. Oman is India's closest defence partner in the Gulf and the first country in the region where India holds joint exercises with all three armed forces; the two “work together on Indian Ocean maritime security”.

Method for this question. It asks you to imagine, but the imagining must be built on the chapter's evidence. Do it in three steps: (1) pick the cultural links the chapter actually names — language, religion, festivals, food, script, place names, trade; (2) group countries that share them; (3) describe how the map would change, and then say honestly what such a map would lose. A good answer names at least four or five specific links from the chapter and does not simply say “everything would be one country”.

Sample answer:

The map would have no sharp lines at all. It would look more like a set of overlapping patches of colour, because cultures do not stop where states do — they fade into one another.

• A Bangla patch would cover West Bengal and Bangladesh together, since “Bangla is a language common to Bangladesh and India's state of West Bengal”, and the Sundarban would sit whole inside it instead of being split two-thirds and one-third.
• A Himalayan patch would join Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, the Himalayan states of India and Tibet — shared festivals such as Daśhain, Tihar and Holi, shared pilgrimage to Paśhupatinātha and to Bodh Gaya, and shared schools of Buddhism.
• A Tamil patch would stretch across the sea from Tamil Nadu to northern Sri Lanka, to the Maldives (whose Boduberu dance echoes Tamil folk rhythms and whose language borrows from Tamil and Malayalam), to Malaysia and to Singapore, where Tamil is an official language and 9 per cent of residents are of Indian origin.
• A Buddhist arc would run from Sri Lanka through Myanmar and Thailand to Indonesia, and northward through Bhutan and Tibet to China, Korea and Japan — the paths of Theravāda, Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna.
• A Persianate patch would link Iran, Afghanistan and northern India, where Persian was a court language under the Mughals and where the Parsis remain “a living link with the ancient Persian culture”.
• And the Punjab would not be divided at all — the Katas Raj temple complex and Gurdwara Darbar Sahib at Kartarpur would need no corridor and no permit.

But the map would also have new problems. Cultural patches overlap: a person in Sri Lanka may belong to a Tamil patch and a Theravāda patch at once, and Malaysia would belong to an Indic patch and an Islamic one together. Where would the line go then? Culture is not tidy, and it changes with time — Indonesia was Hindu-Buddhist, then Islam “travelled to Indonesia from the shores of India”. A map drawn on culture would need redrawing every century.

Method. This is a four-part map and scrapbook activity, so do it on four separate outline maps of Asia (or one map per part) rather than crowding everything onto one. Use the chapter's own maps as your source — Fig. 2.1 for the neighbourhood, Fig. 2.2 for the routes, and Figs. 2.3, 2.5, 2.7, 2.16 and 2.20 for the individual groups of countries. Give every map a title, a north arrow and a legend, and write only what you can support from the chapter.

What a good answer must contain

Sample answer:

Part 1 — labels. On my outline map I shaded India orange. I shaded the seven land neighbours green: Pakistan and Afghanistan in the northwest, China (marking Tibet inside it), Nepal and Bhutan in the north, Bangladesh and Myanmar in the east. I shaded the maritime neighbours blue: Sri Lanka across the Palk Strait, the Maldives southwest of Minicoy, and, further out, Iran, Oman, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. I wrote ARABIAN SEA to the west, BAY OF BENGAL to the east and INDIAN OCEAN to the south.

Part 2 — arrows I drew, and what I wrote on them.

• India → China: Buddhism, 1st century CE; China → India: the monks Faxian and Xuanzang.
• India → Sri Lanka: Buddhism, 3rd century BCE, Mahendra and Sanghamitrā; Sri Lanka → India: Tamil families during the civil war.
• India ↔ Nepal: Daśhain, Tihar and Holi; pilgrims to Paśhupatinātha; petroleum and medicines one way, handicrafts and garments the other.
• India → Bhutan: Vajrayāna Buddhism, Guru Padmasambhava, 8th century CE; Bhutan → India: rivers and hydroelectric power.
• India → the Maldives: roshi and coconut curries, the Boduberu dance, Dhivehi words, boat-building — and the Hindi word filmu.
• India → Thailand: Dvārakā → Dvāravatī, Ayodhyā → Ayutthayā, kings named Rāma, the samudra manthana at Suvarnabhumi Airport.
• India → Malaysia and Singapore: the Brāhmī-based script, the name Singapuram, Tamil, workers from south India.
• India → Indonesia: Nālandā and Muara Jambi, Garuḍa on the rupiah, the Rāmāyaṇa on stage — and Islam, which reached Indonesia from India's shores.
• India ↔ Iran: the Silk Route; the Avesta and the Ṛigveda; Persian as a court language; the Parsis.
• Oman ↔ India: copper ingots to the Harappan cities, 5,000 years ago.

Part 3 — my five borders of friendship. (1) The River Zone, around the Ganga–Brahmaputra systems shared by India and Bangladesh, enclosing the whole Sundarban. (2) The Himalayan Pilgrim Zone, joining Nepal, Bhutan and India's Himalayan states — one open border, one set of festivals. (3) The Bay of Bengal Trade Zone, following the old sea routes and the modern India–Myanmar–Thailand Trilateral Highway. (4) The Arabian Sea Zone, linking India's west coast with Oman and Iran along the copper and spice routes and on to Chabahar. (5) The Palk Strait Zone, joining Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka and the Maldives — 32 km and 130 km of water, and a shared language, food and dance.

Part 4 — flags: three observations.

• Wheels and dharma. India's flag carries the Aśhoka Chakra. Bhutan's flag carries the dragon which, the chapter says, symbolises “the thunderous voice of the Buddha's teachings”. Sri Lanka's flag has a lion and four pipal (bo) leaves — the tree the Buddha sat under. Buddhism shows up in several national flags of this region.
• Saffron, white and green recur. India, Sri Lanka and Myanmar all use saffron/orange, and India, Iran and Bangladesh all use green. Nepal's is the only non-rectangular national flag in the world, made of two joined pennants.
• A crescent marks several. Pakistan, the Maldives, Malaysia and Singapore carry a crescent — the mark of Islam, which the chapter tells us became predominant in Malaysia by the 15th century and reached Indonesia from India's shores.