NCERT Solutions for Class 9th English Chapter 2 The Pot Maker (prose) — Learning Beyond the Text
Book page 51–56 Updated on2026-09-19
Q1.
I. Pottery is practised in many parts of our country and each region has its unique style.
Find out about the different styles of indigenous pottery of your region and other regions of our country. Some notable styles include:
• Khurja pottery from Uttar Pradesh
• Blue pottery from Jaipur
• Terracotta from West Bengal
• Andretta pottery from Himachal Pradesh
• Karigari pottery from Tamil Nadu
• Longpi Black pottery from Manipur
1. Match the pictures with the pottery it represents.
1 (top left) A crowded roadside stall packed with brightly glazed ceramic ware — tall white and blue jars and vases covered in fine patterns, and, spread across the front, stacks of small bowls, cups, plates and lids in red, green, yellow, pink and blue.
2 (top middle) Against an orange brick wall, a group of deep cobalt-blue vessels: two tall long-necked vases, a large decorated plate, round bowls and a squat lidded pot, all painted with white, yellow and pale-blue floral motifs.
3 (top right) Rows of tall unglazed reddish-brown baked-clay figures standing outdoors against a building — horses with raised heads, elephants, standing human figures and slender votive columns, with no glaze or paint at all.
4 (bottom left) Studio ware on indoor shelves: a large round platter glazed a rich blue with a spiral pattern standing upright, deep blue bowls, brown bowls ringed with pale bands, and a dark tall jar behind.
5 (bottom middle) An enormous open-air heap of small unglazed red-clay pots, water pots and lamps — thousands of them spread over the ground in front of a shed.
6 (bottom right) A ground display of matte black stoneware: cooking pots with lids and cane handles, tall mugs and beakers, kettles, bowls and a wide shallow pan, all a dark charcoal grey.
The six pictures printed with this question on page 51 — they are photographs, described here; see the textbook for the pictures themselves.
Answer
Picture
What you can see on the page
The pottery
1 (top left)
A crowded shop display of brightly glazed ceramic ware — vases, cups, bowls and plates in blue, green, red and yellow, covered in fine floral patterns
Khurja pottery, Uttar Pradesh
2 (top middle)
Deep cobalt-blue vases and plates with white and yellow floral motifs, against an orange brick wall
Blue pottery, Jaipur
3 (top right)
Rows of unglazed reddish-brown figures — horses, elephants and human figurines — stacked outside a workshop
Terracotta, West Bengal
4 (bottom left)
A few large studio pieces on a shelf: a blue plate with a spiral pattern, and glazed bowls in blue and earth colours
Andretta pottery, Himachal Pradesh
5 (bottom middle)
An open yard covered with hundreds of small red clay pots laid out to dry
Karigari pottery, Tamil Nadu
6 (bottom right)
Matte black and grey vessels, kettles and cooking pots, one with a cane handle
Longpi Black pottery, Manipur
The clue in each case — this is what the matching is really testing:
Khurja: many colours at once, thick glaze, mass-produced crockery shapes. Khurja is called the ‘ceramic city’ of India.
Blue pottery: one dominant colour. It is made from a quartz-and-glass paste rather than ordinary clay, and is fired at a low temperature.
Terracotta: no glaze anywhere — plain fired earth. The horse shapes are the famous Bankura horses of West Bengal.
Andretta: a small studio pottery in the Kangra valley, so few pieces and individual, artist-made forms rather than a market stall.
Karigari: a Tamil Nadu tradition; the photograph shows the scale of an ordinary working pottery — hundreds of red clay pots drying in the sun, exactly the stage described in our story.
Longpi: unmistakable. It is made in Manipur from black serpentinite rock ground with weathered clay, shaped without a wheel, and finished with a cane weave.
Check it yourself: pictures 2, 3 and 6 can be named with certainty from a single feature — one colour, no glaze, black stone-clay. Pictures 1, 4 and 5 are best settled by elimination and by scale: a packed market stall (Khurja), a handful of studio pieces (Andretta), a drying yard (Karigari). For the research half of the question, add the local pottery of your own district, with the name of the clay, the shapes made and the nearest craft market.
Q2.
II. You must have read stories in English and in your own language about the value of handicrafts and art. Read the story ‘Quality’ by John Galsworthy. Write its review and make a presentation highlighting the decline of traditional crafts and skills vs. industrialisation and mass-produced goods.
(‘Quality’, in an abridged version, is printed on pages 52–56 of the book.)
Answer
Method for the review. A review is not a summary. Give it four parts: (1) what the story is and who wrote it; (2) the plot in three or four sentences, without the ending spoiled beyond the point the theme needs; (3) how it is written — narrator, character, symbols, dialect; (4) your judgement, with a reason and a recommendation. Two hundred and fifty words is plenty.
What your review must contain: the author and the central character named; at least two quotations; a comment on Gessler’s broken English, which Galsworthy spells out on the page (“Id is an ardt!”); and a link to the chapter’s theme of craft against mass production.
Sample answer — a review of ‘Quality’ by John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy’s ‘Quality’ is a short, quiet story about a German bootmaker in London, Mr Gessler, told by a customer who has known him since childhood. Almost nothing happens in it, and that is the point.
Gessler makes boots to order, one pair at a time, out of the best leather he can buy. He does not advertise, keeps no assistants and will let nobody else touch his work. The narrator visits him over many years and notices, slowly, that the shop is emptying — the elder brother dies, the sign disappears, and at last the old man himself is gone. The young Englishman who has taken over the shop explains it without malice: “poor old man starved himself… People won’t wait. He lost everybody… But look at the competition! He never advertised!”
The strength of the story is in its details. Galsworthy makes us hear Gessler before we understand him — “Id is an ardt!”, “What a beaudiful biece!” — and the accent, which could have been comic, becomes moving, because it belongs to a man who is completely certain about one thing in a world that has stopped caring about it. Entering the shop is “as one enters a church”; the boots have “some essence of the boot stitched into them”. The narrator’s guilt when he arrives once in factory-made boots — “Dose are nod my boods” — is the moral centre of the story.
Read beside ‘The Pot Maker’, ‘Quality’ is the darker half of the same argument. Temsula Ao shows a craft surviving because a community insists that it must be passed on. Galsworthy shows one dying because nobody insisted. Both stories agree that the maker and the making cannot be separated: Sentila becomes a pot maker, and Gessler is his boots. I would recommend it to anyone who has ever wondered why handmade things cost more — and it is worth reading twice, because the second time the narrator’s long absences read as neglect.
For the presentation (six to eight slides): 1. the question — why do traditional crafts decline? 2. what mass production offers: speed, low price, uniformity, advertising. 3. what craft offers: individuality, repairability, local materials, livelihoods, cultural memory. 4. Gessler’s own explanation — “Dey get id by advertisement, nod by work.” 5. an Indian example from your own district, with numbers if you can find them. 6. what is being done — GI tags, craft melas, e-commerce for artisans, cooperatives. 7. what students can do. Close on the sentence the customer repeats at the end: “he made good boots.”