Winds of Change: Class 9 Kaveri · Chapter 3

This unit pairs two very different texts. Winds of Change is a factual essay about the pankha, the hand fan that Indian craftspeople have woven, stitched and painted for centuries. Canvas of Soil is a short poem that looks at a garden through a painter's eyes. Around both texts sit language tasks: word pairs, fixed expressions, collocations, the present perfect tense, listening, speaking and two kinds of writing.

Keep your Kaveri textbook open beside this page. Read each text there first. Here you will find summaries, explanations, practice and model answers, all in our own words.

3.1 Before you read: hand fans around us

Think of the last power cut on a sticky summer afternoon. Someone probably reached for a hand fan: a round one of woven bamboo, a folded palm leaf, or a square of stitched cloth that turns on its stick. In Hindi it is a पंखा (pankha). Many Bengali homes call it a haat-pakha, and in Tamil it is a visiri. What is it called in your language, and what is the one in your home made of?

Hand fans look different from place to place because people make them from what grows or is made nearby. The shape also decides how a fan is used: most are waved, but some are spun on their handle. Fig. 3.1 shows four common shapes.

3.1.1 Words to know before you read

Six useful words appear in the essay. Meet them first in a new setting.

Last summer the pond in my grandparents' village almost dried up. A group of industrious farmers decided not to wait for help. Their first initiative was to clear the old channels that once fed the pond. They chose an indigenous method, lining the banks with local stone as their ancestors had done, but added an innovative touch: a small solar pump. The map they drew of the channels was intricate, with dozens of tiny branches. When the monsoon filled the pond again, the sight invoked my grandmother's memories of swimming there as a girl.

3.2 Reading for meaning: the essay explained

Winds of Change is an informative essay, not a story. It has no characters or plot. Instead, it moves like a guided tour. It starts with the history of the word pankha, visits the fans of different regions, and ends with the trouble the craft faces today and what could save it. Your textbook does not name an author.

Read the essay once for the big picture. Then use Fig. 3.2 and the summaries below to fix its five parts in your mind.

3.2.1 The name and the oldest pankhas

The essay begins with a word history. Pankha comes from pankh, a bird's feather. The link is easy to picture, because a fan beats the air much as a wing does. In ancient India a small fan trimmed with feathers was called a pankhi, while pankha became the name for fans of every kind.

How old is the hand fan? The writer offers evidence from art. Pankhis appear in the Buddhist wall paintings of the Ajanta caves in Maharashtra.11Your textbook dates these paintings to the 2nd century CE. The Ajanta caves were cut and painted over several centuries, from about the 2nd century BCE to the late 5th century CE. Fans also show up in old sculptures, carvings and embroidery.

Early fans were not only about comfort. Temple priests used them in worship, and attendants kept rulers cool in royal courts. Some fans were small enough to hide in a fist; others were so big that swinging them was hard physical work.

3.2.2 From trade to local styles

The second idea is trade. Merchants took pankhas to faraway markets, where buyers prized them much as people today prize a designer label. A simple cooling tool had become a sign of style and culture.

Notice the contrast the writer draws: the use of fans was shared across India, but their look was local. What set one town's fans apart from the next village's was the material and the decoration. A region's choice depended on three things. These were its land (what grew or was found nearby), its culture (what people found beautiful) and its rituals (how fans were used in worship). That explains the long list of materials: plant fibres such as palm leaf, cane and bamboo; costly silver and silk; and sturdy leather and brass, sometimes set with beads or stones.

Today, the essay notes, the hand fan is mostly something to display or to buy as a traditional craft. This leads to the writer's central claim: the way a fan is made reveals the culture of the region that makes it. The tour that follows is the evidence.

3.2.3 A tour of India's pankhas

The longest part of the essay travels from state to state. You need not memorise every detail, but exam questions often ask for examples. Table 3.2 collects them in one place.

Look for patterns rather than single facts. Rajasthan's fans range from gold embroidery to engraved temple brass. Gujarat's are known for mirrors, beads and fine needlework. Bengal's are light and practical, made from palm leaves and sola pith. Tribal fans use bamboo, grass and bold geometric designs. Each fan carries a region's resources, skills and beliefs, which is exactly the writer's claim. Their age and scarcity, the essay adds, have made the fans of Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and Bihar famous nationwide.

3.2.4 Winds of change: decline and revival

The mood shifts in the last part of the essay. Machines now cool our homes, and the writer sees change cutting both ways.

• What is being lost. With electric fans, coolers and air conditioners everywhere, few people need a hand fan. The skills, designs and customs around pankhas could quietly disappear.
• What has been gained. Fan-making is no longer only a family habit; it is a business. It gives many artisans at least some income, and fresh designs have even nudged demand up a little.

How can the craft be protected? The writer's answer works like a chain:

1. People celebrate pankhas: they learn the stories behind them and admire the skill.
2. Makers get a stage to show their work, and the craft wins back fans of its own.
3. Sales give makers a dependable income, what the essay calls a sustainable livelihood.
4. Workshops, both at craft exhibitions and away from them, carry the message to new people.

3.2.5 Themes, message and the title

• Craft as identity. A region's fan reveals its land, its beliefs and its taste.
• Change over time. Fans moved from temples and courts to homes, and from homes to walls and shop shelves.
• Heritage at risk. New technology can push old skills aside without anyone noticing.
• Hope through action. Celebration, workshops and fairs can keep both the craft and its makers alive.

The title works on two levels. Literally, a pankha makes wind. Figuratively, winds of change is an idiom for forces that transform the way people live. The essay shows both: the breeze of the fan, and the changes (technology, trade, new designs) that are reshaping the craft and the lives of the people who make it.

3.3 Vocabulary and structures in context

Four language points grow out of the essay: pairs of words joined by and, fixed expressions, collocations and the present perfect tense.

3.3.1 Word pairs joined by 'and'

Writers often join two related words with and to make a description fuller. The essay is full of such pairs: look for them as you reread. Most pairs fall into groups. Some describe appearance, some name places and some list materials.

Most of these pairs can be reversed without harm: silk and cotton is as correct as cotton and silk. The next group cannot.

3.3.2 Fixed expressions

Some pairs are frozen. Their order never changes, and together they often mean something you cannot guess from the two words. We say bread and butter, never butter and bread. These are fixed expressions. A handy tendency: the shorter word usually comes first, as in salt and pepper or safe and sound.

3.3.3 Collocations

A collocation is a group of words that speakers naturally use together. Grammar does not forbid do a photo, but English speakers say take a photo. The essay has examples such as sustainable livelihood (adjective + noun), aesthetically pleasing (adverb + adjective) and appreciating the culture (verb + noun).

3.3.4 The present perfect tense

Look at this sentence: Artisans have kept the craft alive for centuries. The keeping began long ago, but its result (a living craft) matters now. This is the present perfect tense. It links a past action to the present.

Form: has or have + the past participle (the third form of the verb). Regular verbs add -ed (craft → crafted, evolve → evolved). Irregular verbs must be learnt: make → made, weave → woven, sell → sold, see → seen, go → gone, teach → taught.

When to use it:

1. A past action whose result matters now: I have painted the fan, so do not touch it.
2. A just-finished action, often with just, already or yet: The weaver has just finished the border.
3. Life experience, often with ever or never: Have you ever seen a sola fan?
4. Something that began in the past and is still true, with for or since: My aunt has made bamboo fans since 2015.

Do not use it with a finished time such as yesterday, last week or in 2010. Say I saw the craft fair yesterday, not I have seen the craft fair yesterday. Fig. 3.3 shows the difference on a timeline.

3.4 Listening, speaking and writing

3.4.1 Listen and respond: choosing a gift

In class, your teacher will play or read a conversation in which two young people choose a pankha as a gift. The skill is listening for detail: who says what, and what they finally decide. Practise with the conversation below. Ask a friend or family member to read it aloud with you while you keep your eyes off the text, then answer the questions.

3.4.2 Speaking: if I were a fan

Work in a group of four. Each person becomes one kind of fan: a hand fan, a ceiling fan, a table fan or a small battery-run handheld fan. Speak for about a minute as that fan ("I am…"), following this plan:

1. Opening: who you are.
2. Body: what you look like (shape, size, material) and how you work.
3. Strengths: what you are proud of.
4. Honesty: one weakness.
5. Closing: what makes you special.

3.4.3 Writing: a factual description of an artefact

The writing task asks you to describe an artefact, an object made by hand, that you made in a craft class or learnt to make from someone. A factual description reports only what is true and can be checked. It leaves out opinions and feelings such as beautiful, amazing or I love it.

1. Title: the name of the object.
2. Introduction: what the object is, who made it, and when or where.
3. Features: shape, size (with units), colour, texture and parts.
4. Materials: what it is made of.
5. Process: the main steps in order, with sequence words (first, next, finally). The passive voice often helps: The clay was kneaded…
6. Use and care: what it is used for and how to look after it.

3.4.4 Learning beyond the text

Present a craft from your region. Choose one art or craft item from your area (a toy, a textile, a pot, a painting style) and plan a short presentation. A six-slide plan keeps it organised:

1. Title slide: the object's name and a clear photo or drawing.
2. What it looks like: shape, size, colour and appearance.
3. Materials: what it is made of, and where these come from.
4. Making: the main steps, in order.
5. History: the region it belongs to, how it was used traditionally, any origin story, and how it has changed.
6. Today: how it can be used safely and well now, and how people can support its makers.

Make your own hand fan. In groups of four, make a simple paper fan, display it and explain how you made it. Use sequence words as you speak. Fig. 3.4 shows the method.

3.5 Before you read the poem: a garden and a painting

Picture a garden in full bloom: green lawns and hedges, red hibiscus by the gate, blue morning glories climbing a wall, yellow marigolds along the path. Now picture a painting of the same scene. What do the two share? Both are planned by someone, both use colour and shape, and both change how we feel.

Practise comparing them aloud. Useful patterns for comparison:

• Just as a gardener prepares the soil, so an artist prepares the canvas.
• Both flowerbeds and pictures bring many colours together in one frame.
• A garden needs careful planning; in the same way, a painting needs a sketch first.
• Like a quiet flowerbed, a good picture also calms a tired mind.

Three words from a painter's studio will help you read the poem. A palette is the board on which a painter mixes colours. A hue is a colour, or one particular shade of it. A canvas is the strong cloth a picture is painted on; in the poem the word also stands for the painting itself. Fig. 3.5 shows all three.

3.6 Reading for appreciation: the poem explained

Canvas of Soil is a short lyric by Maya Anthony: three stanzas of four lines each. It rests on one big comparison. A garden is a painting, and the gardener is its artist. Because this comparison runs through the whole poem, it is called an extended metaphor.

Read the poem aloud in your textbook two or three times. Listen for the rhyming pairs at the ends of lines, and notice how almost every image comes from an artist's studio. Fig. 3.6 maps the painter's world onto the garden's.

3.6.1 Stanza 1: a picture not yet painted

In the first stanza nothing is blooming yet. The garden exists only as rich soil, buried seeds and a gardener's hopes, just as a painting exists first as paint on a palette and a plan in the artist's head. Two metaphors carry this idea. The soil is a painter's palette ('Palette of earth'), deep and full of colours waiting to be used. The seeds are brushstrokes ('Brushstrokes of seeds'): each is placed with care, and together they will make a picture.

The phrase 'planted true' adds a sense of skill and honesty: the seeds are sown correctly, at the right depth, with no shortcuts. The stanza ends by looking ahead to spring, the season that will reveal the colours. Its mood is quiet hope and patient waiting.

3.6.2 Stanza 2: the picture comes alive

Spring has done its work. The flowers have opened, and the garden now looks like a finished painting. The poet gives the scene movement: the blossoms seem to dance in the early sunlight, which is personification ('Dancing in the morning light'). The repeated b sound in 'Blossoms bloom' is alliteration; it slows us down so that we notice the flowers.

The stanza names three colours, green, red and blue, to stand for the whole range of shades in a garden. It ends by praising nature as an artist whose work never grows stale: every season and every morning, the picture is new.

3.6.3 Stanza 3: where art and life meet

The last stanza widens the view. Every plot of land becomes a broad canvas ('Each plot, a canvas wide'), ready for whatever its gardener creates. In a garden, the poet says, art and life meet: the beauty is real and growing, not just painted. The closing lines give the credit to the people who work the soil, because in their hands gardens turn into paintings.

The final word, still, deserves a second look. It can mean 'even now' or 'always', so the gardens remain paintings. It also recalls a still life, a painting of flowers or objects, and it suggests calm. One small word holds all three ideas.

3.6.4 Poetic devices

Each stanza has two rhyming couplets: lines 1 and 2 rhyme (AA), then lines 3 and 4 (BB). In the first stanza, for example, deep rhymes with seep. The neat, regular pattern suits a poem about careful, orderly work.

3.6.5 The poem as an allegory

An allegory works on two levels: a surface meaning and a deeper meaning that the writer does not state openly. On the surface, Canvas of Soil is about a garden. Underneath, the garden can stand for bigger ideas about life and the world.

3.6.6 Themes and the title

• Nature as an artist: the garden is a painting that renews itself.
• Gardening as a creative art: sowing and tending are acts of design.
• Patience and hope: beauty comes only after waiting.
• Harmony in diversity: many colours together make the picture.
• Art and life together: real, living beauty can match any painting.

The title Canvas of Soil joins the painter's world (canvas) with the gardener's (soil). It tells us at once that the ground itself is the surface on which a picture is made, in seeds and flowers instead of paint. In three words it sums up the poem's extended metaphor.

3.7 Words, listening, speaking and writing

3.7.1 Shades of colour

The poem names only three colours, but every colour has dozens of shades. Naming a shade exactly, olive rather than just green, makes your writing sharper.

Link them to things you know: sky blue and a clear winter sky; denim and your jeans; navy and a school blazer; pistachio and pistachio kulfi; India green and the green band of the Tricolour; vermilion and sindoor; rusty red and an old iron gate.

Say them right: pistachio (pi-STA-shee-oh), salmon (SAM-un; the l is silent), vermilion (ver-MIL-yun), crimson (KRIM-zun), indigo (IN-di-go). With a partner, choose any two shades and name two things you link with each.

3.7.2 Painting words in context

Read this paragraph and work out each bold word from its context. Then check with the cards.

On Saturday the art club met in the school verandah. Each member set up an easel and clipped a fresh canvas to it. Our teacher, Ms Lalremruati, asked us to explore a wide tonal range, from the palest tints to the darkest shadows. Rehan began a portrait of his grandmother, working first on a thin, one-colour underpainting to fix the light and dark areas. Two seniors were painting a mural of the Brahmaputra on the long wall by the staircase. By evening the corridor smelt of paint, and every shade of blue had been used up.

Explain your guesses aloud with a frame such as I think ___ means ___, since the paragraph mentions ___. For example: I think mural means a wall painting, since the paragraph mentions a long wall.

3.7.3 Listen and respond: a school garden

The listening task in class is a girl describing her school garden. Practise with this original description: have someone read it aloud while you listen without looking, then answer.

3.7.4 Speaking: flower garden or vegetable garden?

State a preference with a reason, and notice the grammar each pattern needs:

• I prefer X to Y because… (prefer + noun or -ing form + to)
• I'd rather grow X than Y, as… (would rather + base verb + than)
• X suits me better than Y, since…
• Given the choice, I'd pick X over Y, because…

Model: I prefer a vegetable garden to a flower garden because my family could eat what we grow. If I had a choice, I'd rather have tomatoes and spinach than roses, as fresh vegetables taste better and save money. Still, I would keep a few marigolds along the edges, since gardeners say they keep some pests away.

3.7.5 Writing: describing a garden

The writing task asks for a descriptive piece of two or three paragraphs about a garden you have visited, with attention to colour. A good description makes the reader see the place.

1. Title that sets the scene.
2. Paragraph 1: where and when, and your first overall impression.
3. Paragraph 2: close-up details. Show how shades of red, blue and green sit side by side and create contrast, how petals and leaves feel, and how light changes the colours.
4. Paragraph 3: a closing image and the feeling it leaves you with.

Use exact shade names (crimson, olive, ice blue), sense words (velvety, rough, fragrant), and one or two similes or metaphors, not ten. Fig. 3.7 is a quick planner: jot two details under each heading before you write.

3.7.6 Learning beyond the text

The mini-project explores gardens through history, art and practice over a few weeks. Choose two tasks: one from tasks 1–2 and one from tasks 3–4.

• 1. Famous gardens: research any five famous gardens of India, focusing on their history, design and cultural importance, and present a short report. Starting points: Amrit Udyan at Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi; Brindavan Gardens below the Krishna Raja Sagara dam near Mysuru; Lalbagh Botanical Garden, Bengaluru; Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar; and the Pinjore (Yadavindra) Gardens in Haryana.
• 2. Gardens in art: find a painting or sculpture inspired by a garden, explain how the garden is shown, and create your own drawing, poem or paragraph in response.
• 3. Design a garden: plan a garden on paper or with a digital tool, using ideas from task 1 or 2, and explain your choices to the class.
• 4. Interview a gardener: prepare questions, talk to a local gardener or landscaper, and write a summary of what you learnt.

Sample interview questions: How did you start gardening? Which plants suit our climate and soil? What does a garden need in each season? How do you deal with pests without harmful chemicals? What part of your work do you enjoy most?