NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 15 – 249End of chapter — Questions and activities

Book page 248 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.

What is the path to mokṣha that became popular in the period from the 13th to 17th centuries?

Answer

The bhakti mārga — the path of devotion.

The chapter defines it precisely, and each part of the definition matters:

It is one of the multiple paths to mokṣha — the realisation of Truth, or release from the cycle of death and rebirth. It was never claimed to be the only one.
It does not require rituals or priests. Devotion is offered directly.
It was not new. The bhakti tradition had crystallised by the 6th century; what happened in these centuries was a renewed popularity.

Why it became popular again just then: the chapter gives the reason plainly — this renewal “reflected cultural continuity and society’s search for spiritual resilience amid political and religious upheaval”. When rulers and institutions were unstable, a path that needed no institution at all was exactly the one people could still walk. And because its verses and songs were composed in local languages and sung at gatherings anyone could join, it reached across the whole of society rather than a learned few.

Q2.

Name three bhakti saints from different regions of India and identify the key messages they promoted.

Answer

Any three from different regions. The chapter names ten; here are five with the message it actually attributes to each.

Saint	Region and time	Key message
Kabirdas (Kabir)	North India, present-day Uttar Pradesh; 15th century; presumably raised by a weaver couple	One god — and a rejection of ritual as the road to him. His compositions “decry the rituals of both Hinduism and Islam”, and his dohā on wheat and flour says the difference between Ram and Rahim dissolves in that one reality
Ravidas	North India; early 16th century; born in a family of leather-workers	The equality and oneness of all people — poetry aimed at “breaking down the rigid walls that had developed around varṇa and jāti”
Guru Nanak	He journeyed across regions	One God and the equality of all people. His teachings, along with the hymns of several Hindu saints, are preserved in the Guru Granth Sāhib, the sacred text of the Sikhs
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu	The east — Bengal; 16th century	Devotion expressed through collective singing and dancing (Fig. 8.7). He shaped 16th-century Bengali literature, including a new style of folk song, the Dhāmāli, on Kṛiṣhṇa and episodes from his life
Purandaradasa	The south — the Vijayanagara empire; 15th–16th century	Devotion to Kṛiṣhṇa carried through music open to everyone. He gave up his diamond business, may have composed as many as 4,75,000 kīrtanās, and is called the father of Carnatic music

The chapter also names Mirabai in Rajasthan, Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar and Namdev in the west, and Kanakadasa in the south. It says of them all that “they continued the traditions that had begun a few hundred years prior” — so if you name one of these, describe them in the terms the chapter gives rather than inventing a doctrine for them.

The common thread: two ideas recur across every region — the oneness of god and the equality of people — and one method: composing in the local language and singing in the open. Kabir and Ravidas came from working households, and their poetry reached working households. That is why a spiritual movement had social consequences.

Q3.

Kabir’s doha compares wheat being ground into flour with the unity of Ram and Rahim. Why do you think he used this everyday example?

Answer

Because the people he wanted to convince were not scholars, and an argument they could not check would have been useless to them. Four reasons, in order of strength.

Everybody already knew the image. Grinding wheat happened in every household in north India. Kabir needed no library and no learned audience; the proof of his claim was in the listener’s own kitchen. A verse citing scripture would have reached only those who had the scripture.
The image itself carries the argument. This is the clever part. Grinding is irreversible — once wheat is flour you cannot pick the grains apart again. So the couplet is not saying that Ram and Rahim should get along; it is saying that at the level of realisation the distinction cannot even be reconstructed. An abstract statement of oneness would have been easy to nod at and forget. This one shows why the oneness is final.
It fits his teaching about ritual. His compositions decry the rituals of both Hinduism and Islam. A man who says truth is not reached through elaborate rites cannot then reach for an elaborate metaphor. The homeliness of the image is part of the message.
It was made to be sung and remembered. A dohā is two lines; concrete images survive in memory where abstractions do not. This is how a message travelled in a society where very few could read — and it worked, because these compositions are still sung.

Notice the ending too. The couplet closes with Kabir sitting down to eat. The reward for the realisation is not power or glory but an ordinary, peaceful meal — an ending pitched at exactly the same everyday level as the image itself.

Q4.

The chapter mentions that while major universities like Nalanda were destroyed, education continued through decentralised systems like gurukulas, temple schools, and apprenticeships. What advantages might these smaller, local systems have had in surviving political turmoil?

Answer

Their advantage was that there was nothing central to capture. Five specific reasons.

No single point of failure. Nālandā was one place; a village pāṭhaśhālā was one of thousands. Destroy a temple school and the tradition loses a school. Destroy Nālandā and it loses the institution, the library and the community of scholars together.
They were not targets. A great university was famous, wealthy and visible — worth attacking for plunder as well as for its symbolism. A priest’s house or a temple maṇḍapa where a few boys gathered was worth nothing to an army. The chapter says these systems “were not affected by political turmoil, except in cases where whole cities and towns were devastated.”
They were locally funded and locally embedded. A gurukula, a maṭha or a guild workshop lived on village land, temple endowments and the fees or labour of the households around it. It did not depend on one ruler’s grant, so a change of dynasty did not close it. Vijayanagara’s rulers went further — guided by pūrvamaryade, ‘following previously established practices of dharma and social norms’, they kept supporting temples and maṭhas so that education continued.
The knowledge lived in people, and in many copies. Texts were memorised and recited as well as written, and manuscripts were copied in many places at once. A single fire could not take a text out of the world.
The teaching unit could be rebuilt anywhere. One teacher and a few students, or one master and his apprentices, is a complete system. A scholar who fled could start again in another village the same year — which is exactly what a large institution could not do.

And the cost of that resilience: decentralisation buys survival and gives up concentration. Small local schools could keep grammar, astronomy, law, medicine, sacred texts and craft skills alive, but none of them could assemble hundreds of specialists in one place for decades — which is what advanced, cutting-edge work needs. That is why the chapter calls the destruction “an immense cultural loss to humanity” even while saying that education continued.

Try this: compare the two designs the way an engineer would. A network with many small nodes is robust — hard to kill. A network with one huge node is powerful — able to do things no small node can. India kept the robustness and lost the power.

Q5.

Women’s roles changed differently across regions during this period. What factors mentioned in the chapter might explain why the same historical events affected women differently in different regions?

Answer

Because the events themselves did not reach every region equally, and each region already had its own norms for the events to act on. The chapter names five factors.

Where the invasions and campaigns actually happened. “The invasions and military campaigns from the 12th century onwards impacted the status of women. Women and children were imprisoned and sold as slaves in the markets of West and Central Asia.” That danger was concentrated in the north and north-west. The chapter’s explanation for what followed is protective: “it was only natural that attempts would be made to protect them from this fate. Women’s public appearance and engagement declined.”
Where the new ruling class was settled. Purdah is Persian for curtain or veil, and it was the practice of the Muslim aristocracy. It became more widespread in the regions they governed most closely — “this system of veiling was largely confined to north India; we do not see much evidence of this practice elsewhere.”
Imitation of elite status. “Some scholars also surmise that it was a symbol of nobility since the ruling class, i.e., the Muslim aristocracy, practised it.” A practice spreads faster when it also signals rank — which explains why it was adopted by families who were under no threat at all.
What the region’s existing norms were. In the south, “the societal norms of the past continued to rule their lives.” Elite women went on exercising power, issuing grants and influencing political decisions; the Hampi wall engravings show women in public activities, and Fernão Nunes found women employed as wrestlers, astrologers, accountants, auditors and musicians at the Vijayanagara court.
Class, cutting across region. This is the factor students most often miss. “Women in the royal Muslim households were generally secluded and followed the purdah. However, a few of them did participate in political, educational and other public activities” — Razia Sultan and Nur Jahan. A woman’s position depended on her household as much as on her province.

The historian’s lesson underneath: a national event is never experienced nationally. It travels through the routes armies took, the places a new elite settled, and the customs it met when it got there. That is why “the status of women in this period” has no single answer — and why the chapter’s section is titled “Contextual Variations in Their Role and Status”.

Where historians disagree: the chapter offers a protective explanation for the spread of veiling and reports a second, status-based one with the honest words “some scholars also surmise”. Both are argued for. The evidence itself is mixed — practices of seclusion existed in some elite Indian households before the 13th century too, and they became far more widespread afterwards. The strongest position is that the protective motive and the status motive reinforced each other: what began in insecurity was kept up as a mark of rank long after the insecurity had passed.

Q6.

The chapter describes how Indian culture sometimes “adopted or adapted” external influences. Why do you think adaptation (changing something to fit local tastes) might be more successful for cultural survival than simply copying or completely rejecting new ideas?

Answer

Compare the three responses on the same test — does the culture still have the new thing in two hundred years, and is it still itself?

Response	What happens	Why it fails or works
Rejecting	The new technique, instrument, crop or word is refused	You lose a real gain for nothing. And rejection rarely holds: when the new thing arrives with the ruling power, refusing it isolates you from administration, trade and patronage without stopping the thing itself
Copying	The foreign form is reproduced exactly	It stays foreign. Its materials, taste and meaning belong somewhere else, so it needs continuous outside support — and when the patron who wanted it goes, it goes with him. Nobody local has a reason to keep making it
Adapting	The useful part is taken and reworked in local materials, tastes and meanings	The new form is now made by local craftspeople, funded by local buyers and understood by local people. It survives because it belongs to somebody — and the culture has gained a capability without losing its core

The chapter’s evidence, all pointing the same way:

The sambūseh’s meat, pistachio, almonds and walnuts became potatoes and peas — a court dish turned into food an ordinary household could afford and make. That is why the samosa is everywhere and the sambūseh is not.
The Persian charbagh reappeared at Amer Fort with its geometry intact but its water channels serving irrigation as well as beauty — a Kashmiri and Rajasthani answer to a Persian idea.
The Mughals introduced zarī, zardozī and brocade, and Banaras absorbed them into the silk sari, adding flora, fauna and geometric designs — and “the heritage has been kept alive through the same traditional training system.”
Tansen was influenced by a Sufi saint of the time “while he also continued to compose in praise of Kṛiṣhṇa and Śhiva” — which the chapter itself calls “an example of the ability of Indian culture to accept influences and enrich itself while retaining its core.”

The underlying principle: a culture survives by keeping its core — its meanings, stories and values — while letting its surface change. Adaptation changes the surface and protects the core; copying changes the surface and hollows the core; rejection protects the core and lets the surface stagnate. Only one of the three does both jobs at once.

Q7.

What are some examples of cultural interactions that led to the creation of new art forms?

Answer

Seven from the chapter. In each case something existed on both sides, and what came out of the meeting was a third thing.

New form	What met what	Detail from the chapter
Qawwālī	Indian, Persian and Arabic singing traditions	Amīr Khusro, an Indo-Persian Sufi poet and singer of the mid-13th to early 14th century, is credited with developing it. Sufi saints sang qawwālīs “fusing local classical musical styles with their own”
The modern sitar and tabla	Instrument makers and musicians from various backgrounds, experimenting	Their repertoires came from much older Indian instruments — the tabla’s from the ancient pakhāwaj. The chapter is careful: “exact origins remain debated by scholars”
Mughal miniature painting	Persian influence and the Indian workshop	A genre distinct from Rajput art, secular in subject, at its height in Akbar’s atelier where one artist drew the lines, another filled the colours and a third finished
*The Razmnama* folios**	The Sanskrit Mahābhārata and Persian book-painting	Fig. 8.17, from 1598, shows Yudhiṣhṭhira and Karṇa wrestling — a Hindu epic scene painted in the Mughal manner for a Persian translation commissioned by Akbar
The Bikaner blend in Rajput painting	Rajput and Mughal styles	Mughal court painters migrated to Bikaner; plants, gardens, animals and hunting scenes entered Rajput painting “based on the patrons’ taste and demand”
Urdu and Dakhini	Hindavi with Arabic and Persian; then Dakhini with Telugu and Marathi	Urdu grew in the Ganga-Yamuna plains; Amīr Khusro is known as the ‘father of Urdu literature’, though he wrote primarily in Hindavi, and also in Punjabi and Braj Bhasha
Dhāmāli and its entry into kathak	Bhakti devotion and Bengali folk song	Chaitanya Mahāprabhu influenced 16th-century Bengali literature, including this new style of folk song on Kṛiṣhṇa; “these also became part of kathak performances”

Beyond the arts proper, the same process produced the Banarasi brocade sari (Gujarati weaving expertise + Mughal zarī, in Banaras silk), the pashmina shawl with the Persian būtā woven from Ladakhi and Kashmiri cashmere, and the charbagh-inspired gardens at Amer Fort.

What made these fusions possible: mobility and patronage. Craftspeople and musicians moved — weavers from Gujarat to Banaras, painters from the Mughal court to Bikaner, Tansen from Gwalior to Akbar’s court, Purandaradasa to Krishnadevaraya’s — and patrons paid for what they wanted to hear and see. New art forms are made by people who have been in two places.

Q8.

Research one bhakti or Sufi saint mentioned in the chapter (Kabir, Mirabai, Ravidas, Tukaram, Chishti or others). Find one of their poems or bhajans in translation, and prepare a three-minute presentation where you: (a) Share the poem/song, (b) Explain its main message, (c) Describe why it might have appealed to common people during that time, and (d) Discuss whether its message is still relevant today.

Answer

Method. Choose a saint whose verses you can find in a reliable translation — a Sahitya Akademi volume, a state Akademi anthology, or the sant’s recognised collected works. Always note the translator’s name, and prefer a translation printed alongside the original. Three minutes is roughly 350–400 words, so plan about 45 seconds for each of the four parts and rehearse with a clock.

What a good presentation must contain — the verse in the original and in translation; the saint’s region and century; a message stated in one sentence, not a summary of the whole poem; at least one concrete reason for its appeal drawn from the conditions of the time; and an honest answer to (d), including the case against, if there is one.

Sample answer — Kabirdas (15th century, present-day Uttar Pradesh)

(a) The verse. The chapter itself prints one, so it can be quoted exactly:

kābā phir kāsī bhayā, Ram bhayā re Rahīm
moṭ chūn maida bhayā baiṭhi Kabīrā jīm

“When wheat is ground into flour, all distinctions between individual grains disappear; they become one substance. Similarly, when one realises the divine, all differences between Ram and Rahim dissolve.” For Kabir, once everything becomes one — like flour — he peacefully “sits to eat”.

(b) Its main message. The divine is one, and the names, places and rituals by which people divide themselves are labels on that single reality. Once a person genuinely realises this, the difference between Ram and Rahim cannot be reassembled — any more than flour can be sorted back into grains.

(c) Why it appealed to common people then. Three reasons. It was in the spoken language, not a learned one, and set to a tune, so an unlettered listener could carry it away after one hearing. Its proof was an object in every home, so nobody needed a teacher to check it. And it arrived in a century of religious conflict, when a message that the quarrel rested on a mistake offered something no ruler was offering. Kabir was “presumably raised by a weaver couple”, and Ravidas was born in a family of leather-workers — these were poets from working households, speaking to working households, in a tradition that needed no priest.

(d) Is it still relevant? Yes, in its central claim — that the labels people fight over are shallower than what they share — and India still finds that worth saying. But it should be quoted honestly. Kabir was not asking anyone to give up their faith; he was criticising empty ritual in both traditions from inside a deeply religious life. The strongest case for its relevance is not that it makes religion unnecessary, but that it locates the test of religion in a person’s realisation rather than in their label — and six centuries on, that is still an uncomfortable and useful thing to say. The evidence that it kept its hold is simple: the bhajans of that time “continue to be sung today”.

If you choose a Sufi instead: the chapter gives you Rumi’s lines — “Why should I seek? I am the same as he. / His essence speaks through me. / I have been looking for myself!” — and the fact that Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti and Nizamuddin Auliya encouraged music as a way to connect with god. Describe Sufism as its own adherents describe it: a path of Islam focused on devotion and an inner, personal search for god, not a departure from it. Present each tradition in its own terms and do not rank them; the chapter’s own point is that they overlapped, not that one absorbed the other.

Q9.

Choose one aspect of culture from the chapter (architecture, clothing, food, music, education, or gardens) and create a group project to study how it appears in your region. Try to enquire into: What has changed and what has remained the same over time? What are your thoughts on why certain elements continued while others changed? You can present your report in any form — as an illustrated report, or digital presentation, or in any other creative way.

Answer

Method — run it in four stages, with the group split by stage.

Choose and narrow. “Food in my region” is too wide to finish. “Wedding food in my town, then and now” can be done well. Write your question in one sentence before you collect anything.
Collect three kinds of evidence. (i) Living — interview at least two people of different generations, with the same set of questions. (ii) Physical — photograph the building, garment, instrument, dish or garden yourself, and date it if you can. (iii) Recorded — a district gazetteer, an old photograph, a temple inscription, a museum label, a school or municipal record.
Sort every finding into two columns: CONTINUED and CHANGED. Do this before you write, and be strict — a thing can appear in both columns for different reasons, and those are your best findings.
Explain. For each row in CHANGED, name the cause: cost, new material, new technology, new work patterns, media, migration, law, or a change in who pays. For each row in CONTINUED, ask what protects it: ritual use, identity, climate, a training system, or a buyer who values handwork.

What a good report must contain — the question in one line; a named source for each claim; at least one photograph or sketch you made; a clear continuity/change table; and a conclusion that explains rather than lists.

Sample answer — “Temple music in our town: what has continued and what has changed”

Continued: the nāgasvaram and tavil are still played at the temple’s daily and festival rituals; the same families supply the players, and the boys still begin learning at about eight from a senior relative — the family apprenticeship the chapter describes for crafts and for musicians alike. The rāgas played at particular hours have not changed within living memory.

Changed: the players are amplified now, and a recording is used for the smallest daily services. Two of the four families we spoke to have no one in the next generation learning, because the income is uncertain. Several of the same musicians now also play at weddings and at school functions, which was rare a generation ago, and one has a channel where the temple’s festival music is uploaded.

Why: the ritual has protected the music, because a fixed ceremony fixes what must be played and when — that is the same reason the chapter gives for temple and festival traditions surviving political turmoil. What has changed is everything outside the ritual: the technology of sound, the sources of income, and who is willing to spend fifteen years learning. Our conclusion is that a tradition continues where it is needed for something, and changes wherever it merely competes.

Why this is the last exercise in the whole book: the chapter has argued that Indian culture endured because it was carried by ordinary people in ordinary places rather than only by courts. This project is that argument handed to you as a test you can actually run. Whatever you find — continuity, change, or a tradition quietly ending — you will have gathered the evidence yourself, which is what a historian does.

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