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NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 9 Introduction to the chapter — LET’S EXPLORE

Book page 38 Updated on2026-09-05

Q1.
Talk to your grandparents or elderly family members and find out what they remember or heard about India’s freedom struggle. Note which leaders or methods people supported. Discuss in class how, despite sharing the same goal of freedom, people followed different paths.
Answer

How to do it. Fix a time when the person is free, and take a notebook — memory is a source, and a source must be recorded carefully.

  1. Ask open questions, not yes/no ones: “What did people in your village talk about in 1947?” rather than “Did people like Gandhi?”
  2. Ask what they saw or heard themselves, and separate it from what they were told later. Both are worth writing down, but they are different kinds of evidence.
  3. Write the person’s name, age, and the place their family lived at the time. A memory without a place and a date is hard to use.
  4. Note their exact words for the important bits. Do not smooth them out.

Questions that usually open a conversation: Was anyone in the family in jail, in a procession, or in the army? Did the family stop buying foreign cloth? Was there a khadi spinning wheel at home? What songs were sung? What did people say when they heard about Gandhi, or Bhagat Singh, or Subhas Chandra Bose? What happened in your area on 15 August 1947? Did anyone in the family move because of Partition?

What a good answer must contain: (i) who you interviewed and where their family lived; (ii) at least two specific memories, with names or places; (iii) which leader or method they say people around them supported; (iv) one honest line about what they were not sure of.

Sample answer: “I spoke to my grandmother, Kamla Devi, aged 84, whose family lived in a village near Ballia in eastern Uttar Pradesh. She did not see 1942 herself — she was born in 1941 — but her father used to say that during Quit India the young men of the village cut down telegraph poles and that the police came twice and beat people in the fields. Her father was a Congress supporter and kept a charkha; her uncle admired Subhas Chandra Bose and used to argue that ‘spinning will not send them home’. She remembers that on Independence Day sweets were distributed at the school and someone hoisted a flag on a bamboo pole. She was not sure whether her uncle ever actually joined anything, or only talked.”
What the class discussion should conclude: Almost every family will produce a different mixture — one household admired Gandhi, another Bose, another a local leader nobody outside the district remembers. That is exactly the chapter’s point: “although all those who fought for India’s freedom shared the same objective, they often differed in the ways to achieve it.” Disagreement about method is not disloyalty to the goal.
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