Q1.
What are the traditions of story-telling in your region? Explore, with your teachers and parents, the possibility of inviting practitioners to your school for a talk and demonstration.
Answer
This is a field task, so the marks are in the method. Here is how to do it properly, what a good written report must contain, and one model answer to adapt.
Method
- Ask three generations — a grandparent, a parent and a teacher — the same question: “Who told stories here, and when?” Weddings, harvests, temple festivals, Ramlila and long journeys are where the answers usually hide.
- Write down, for each tradition: its name, the language it uses, who performs it, what the stories are about, what accompanies it (instrument, scroll, puppet, painted cloth), and when it is performed.
- Find a living practitioner through your local cultural centre, temple or Akademi. Ask your teacher to write the invitation; agree a date, a fee or an honorarium, and what they need — a space, a mat, power for a mic.
- Prepare five questions in advance and record the session (with permission). One question must be: “Who taught you, and whom are you teaching?” — that is the answer that tells you whether the tradition will survive.
What a good answer must contain — at least two named local traditions, one first-hand source (a person you actually spoke to), the accompaniment and language, and an honest line on whether it is still being performed and who is learning it.
Sample answer: “In our district of Odisha the oldest storytelling form is paṭṭachitra — paṭṭa means cloth and chitra means picture. Painters of Raghurajpur paint scenes from the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata and the Puraṇās on treated cloth, and the singer unrolls the scroll while singing the episode. My grandmother says travelling bards used to bring these to village gatherings; today the paintings are sold to visitors more often than they are sung. We also have Pala, in which a lead singer with a chāmara, a drummer and two chorus singers perform a long verse story overnight during festivals. We invited Shri —, a paṭṭachitra painter from Raghurajpur, to school. He said he learnt from his father, that the colours are still made from stone, shell and lamp-black, and that his daughter is learning the painting but that no one in the family now sings with the scroll.”
Why the chapter sets this task: its whole argument is that culture survived because it lived in ordinary hands, not only in courts. Puppetry in Rajasthan and paṭṭachitra in Odisha, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh are the examples it gives; your region has its own, and finding it is how you test the chapter’s claim instead of merely believing it.