NCERT Solutions Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents 13th to 17th Centuries

F R E E S T U D Y M AT E R I A L F O R E V E R Y S T U D E N T

CLASS 8 · SOCIAL SCIENCE

NCERT Solutions

Chapter 15: Cultural Currents:
13th to 17th Centuries

NCERT Textbook — Exploring Society: India And Beyond

BOOK PAGES SECTIONS QUESTIONS MEDIUM

Part II, 215 – 249 16 26 English

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

CLASS 8 · SOCIAL SCIENCE · EXPLORING SOCIETY: INDIA AND BEYOND

NCERT Solutions — Chapter 15: Cultural Currents: 13th
to 17th Centuries
Between the 13th and 17th centuries India’s politics was repeatedly broken and remade — and its culture did
not break with it. This chapter asks why. Its answer has three parts: traditions that were already embedded
in ordinary life, patronage from rulers of very different backgrounds, and participation by people across all
sections of society. The clearest case is the bhakti and Sufi poetry of these centuries — sung, not read; in
the local language, not a learned one; and therefore able to travel where books could not.

TEXTBOOK BOOK PAGES

Exploring Society: India and Beyond (Class 8) Part II, 215 – 249

SECTIONS QUESTIONS

16 26

MEDIUM

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The Big Questions — Page 215
Chapter opener

THE BIG QUESTIONS

Q1 How did Indian culture endure and continue to grow richer during this period
despite invasions and an unstable political context?

Because the culture did not live only where the fighting was. Political power changed hands at
courts and forts; culture lived in homes, temples, workshops, village melas and the songs people
already knew. The chapter names three patterns that run through the whole period, and each of
them explains a different part of the survival.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

1. Continuation of traditional practices in Indian communities.

Before the 13th-century invasions the Purāṇas and the two great epics were already

embedded in local culture — in poetry, drama, puppetry, painting, dance and sculpture, and
in daily life through temple visits and festivals. A tradition carried by that many people, in

that many forms, has no single point that can be captured.

2. Patronage from rulers of various backgrounds in the arts, languages, literature and

philosophy. Raja Mansingh Tomar developed dhrupad; Akbar drew Tansen into his court and

ran an atelier of painters; Krishnadevaraya invited Purandaradasa; the Gajapati kings of

Odisha fostered literary and spiritual thought. Rulers who disagreed about almost everything

else all wanted poets, painters and musicians.

3. Active participation by people across all sections of society. This is the decisive one.

Bhajan gatherings were open to everyone, weaving skills passed from master to apprentice,

village pāṭhaśhālās and temple maṇḍapas kept teaching. As the chapter puts it, patronage

“may have enabled these developments”, but it was the participation of the people that led

to their thriving.

Why it grew richer, not merely survived: because Indian culture “has always been
open to, and has adopted, or adapted the best of external cultural currents”. New
techniques, instruments, motifs, foods and words arrived with Persian, Arabic and
Central Asian visitors — and were absorbed rather than merely copied. Tansen was
influenced by a Sufi saint of the time and still went on composing in praise of
Kṛiṣhṇa and Śhiva. That is the chapter’s own example of “the ability of Indian culture
to accept influences and enrich itself while retaining its core”.

Be honest about the cost: the chapter does not pretend the period was gentle.
Invaders who wanted to annihilate the ‘infidels’ plundered and destroyed some of
the oldest and most sacred sites and temples; Nālandā and Vikramaśhilā were
destroyed; women and children were sold as slaves in the markets of West and
Central Asia. Endurance is a fact about what came after, not a claim that nothing was
lost.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Q2 What were the major cultural trends and movements of the time?

Six broad currents run through these centuries. Each one shows the same shape: an old Indian
tradition continuing, and a new element being taken in.

FIELD WHAT WAS CONTINUING WHAT WAS NEW

Belief and The bhakti mārga, already crystallised A renewed wave of sant-poets — Kabirdas,
devotion by the 6th century; the Ālvārs’ Divya Ravidas, Guru Nanak, Mirabai, Chaitanya
Prabandham and the Nāyanārs’ Mahaprabhu, Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar,
Tiruvāchakam recited in Tamil homes Namdev, Purandaradasa, Kanakadasa — and,
and temples alongside them, Sufism

Music and The Nātyaśhāstra framework; temple Dhrupad raised to new heights; two classical
dance and village performance; puppetry, streams, Hindustani and Carnatic; the qawwālī;
paṭṭachitra, storytelling by travelling modern forms of the sitar and tabla
bards

Painting The Rajput tradition and its Hindu Mughal miniature painting, shaped by Persian
themes, thriving from the 15th to the influence and secular in subject — and then
late 19th century exchange in both directions

Language Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Odia, Persian as the language of administration; two-
and Bengali, Marathi flourishing; bhakti way translation; Urdu growing out of Hindavi,
literature poetry spreading ideas through and Dakhini in the Deccan
accessible song

Knowledge Gurukulas, maṭhas, temple schools, Madrasās; the Kerala School’s work on infinite
and science vihāras, Jain pallis, pāṭhaśhālās; the jāti series; Nilakantha Somayaji’s planetary model
and śhreṇi system of apprenticeship (1500); pure zinc by distillation

Everyday life The sari and its regional variations; The jama, pyjama and angrakha; naan, samosa
Indian spices and cooking; gardens and jalebi; the charbagh garden
around temples with a pond or tank

Why these count as “movements”, not just changes: bhakti and Sufism spread by
attracting people, not by being imposed. Nobody ordered villagers to gather and
sing bhajans. That is what makes them movements — they grew from below, across
caste and community lines, and they outlived every dynasty of the period.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Two cautions worth keeping: (i) mingling was not the whole story — temples were
destroyed and Dara Shikoh, who argued hardest for harmony, was executed for
heresy by his own brother; (ii) not everything mixed. Carnatic music “continued to
develop independently, largely unaffected by Persian and Arabic influences”. A good
historian notices both the meeting points and the places where there was no
meeting.

In-text Questions — Page 218
Belief Systems

Q1 What was it about the culture of India that enabled society to weather that stormy
time, and for multiple diverse groups of people to continue to coexist in the
subcontinent?

Four features of the culture, which the chapter goes on to demonstrate one by one.

It was already everywhere. The Purāṇas and the two epics were embedded in poetry,
drama, puppetry, painting, dance and sculpture, and in daily life through temple visits and
festivals. A culture spread that thinly across that many households cannot be removed by
capturing a capital.
It had more than one path. Indian belief already contained “several schools of thought and
no single holy book”. The bhakti mārga was one of the multiple paths to mokṣha, and it
needed no rituals and no priests. A tradition with many doors is very hard to shut.
It could absorb. India had long received merchants, scholars, diplomats and the persecuted
from Greece, Persia, Central Asia and East Asia, and had assimilated them “benefiting both”.
The habit of taking in what was useful was old practice, not a new emergency measure.
It found a shared idea. Some bhajans reinforced the oneness of god — a concept the
Upaniṣhads discussed — which connected with the idea of one god espoused by Islam.
Where a shared idea exists, coexistence has somewhere to stand.

Why this is the chapter’s hinge: the question is asked at the end of a paragraph
about destruction, and the very next heading is “The power of the bhakti tradition”.
That placement is the argument. The chapter is claiming that the strongest thing
India had in that century was not an army but a form of devotion that ordinary
people could join without permission from anyone.

LET’S EXPLORE — Page 220

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Regional saints and their messages

LET’S EXPLORE

Q1 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”. What is the message of this dohā or
couplet?

That the divine is one, and the names and places we divide ourselves by are only labels on
that one reality — so once a person truly realises it, the quarrel between them simply has
nothing left to be about.
Read the couplet in order and the argument is complete in two lines:

Line 1 — kābā phir kāsī bhayā, Ram bhayā re Rahīm

The Kaaba has become Kashi; Ram has become Rahim. The holiest place of one faith and

the holiest city of the other turn out to be the same place; the name of god in Hinduism and

the name of god in Islam turn out to name the same god.

Line 2 — moṭ chūn maida bhayā baiṭhi Kabīrā jīm

The coarse grain has been ground into fine flour — and Kabir sits down to eat. The grinding

is the image of realisation; the eating is the peace that follows it.

Three things the dohā is saying, and one it is not:

Oneness, not compromise. Kabir is not asking Ram and Rahim to be polite to each other. He
is saying the difference was never real at the level that matters. Ground flour cannot be
sorted back into separate grains, and that irreversibility is the point.
Realisation, not ritual. This fits everything else the chapter says about him: his
compositions “decry the rituals of both Hinduism and Islam”. The couplet locates truth in an
inner realisation available to anyone, not in a rite performed by a specialist.
Peace as the result. “Sits to eat” is a deliberately ordinary ending. The reward of the insight
is not ecstasy or power but a person who can finally settle down — and eat food that has
itself been made by the grinding.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Why the image is chosen so well: flour is the one substance in every house in
north India, made by a work every listener has done or watched. Kabir takes the
biggest claim available — that two religions point to one god — and proves it with
the chakki. No scripture is needed to check him; you only need to have ground
wheat.

Did you know? The chapter’s margin note explains that Ram and Rahim are names
of god in Hinduism and Islam respectively. Kabir is “presumably raised by a weaver
couple” — a working household — and his compositions “became popular” precisely
because they spoke in this register.

THINK ABOUT IT — Page 221
Regional saints and their messages

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 Why do you think music and dance played a significant role in spreading the
message of bhakti?

Because a sung message needs no reader, no teacher, no permission and no copy — and it
spreads by being enjoyed. Five reasons, each of which the chapter supplies evidence for.

1. It did not require literacy. Most people could not read, and manuscripts were few and
expensive. A bhajan is learnt by hearing it once or twice. That single fact decides who a
movement can reach.
2. It was in the local language. “Verses and songs were composed in local languages,
expressing love, compassion, and equality.” A teaching in Sanskrit reached those trained in
Sanskrit; a teaching in Bhojpuri, Braj, Marathi, Bengali or Kannada reached the street.
3. It gathered people, and gathering is the message. “People from all sections of society
participated in gatherings where these bhajans were sung accompanied by musical
instruments and dancing.” Bhakti taught the equality and oneness of all — and the kīrtan
itself put that teaching into practice, because everyone in the circle was singing the same
line. The form demonstrated the content.
4. Melody makes words stick, and travel. A tune is a container. Set to music, a verse survives
repetition without changing, and moves with singers, pilgrims, travelling bards and
puppeteers from village to village. The chapter’s own test of this is that the bhajans
“composed during that time continue to be sung today”, six centuries later.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

5. It matched what bhakti actually is. The bhakti mārga is devotion, and it needs no rituals or
priests. Devotion is felt before it is argued. Song and dance carry feeling directly — Fig. 8.7
shows Chaitanya Mahaprabhu dancing surrounded by his followers — where a sermon
would only describe it.

The same logic worked on the Sufi side: Sufi saints “sang devotional songs called
qawwālīs”, and Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti and Nizamuddin Auliya “encouraged music
as a way to connect with god”. Two different traditions, reaching for the same tool,
for the same reason — and that shared tool is part of why they came to overlap.

Check it yourself: the paintings in this chapter were made almost two centuries
after the lives of the sants, and in them the saints are still shown holding
instruments (Fig. 8.5, Fig. 8.7, Fig. 8.8). Even the pictures remember bhakti as
something sung.

LET’S EXPLORE — Page 224
Musical Traditions — Continuation and Evolution

LET’S EXPLORE

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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

4. Prepare five questions in advance and record the session (with permission). One question
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must be: “Who taught you, and whom are you teaching?” — that is the answer that tells you
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whether the tradition will survive.

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agl (a person you actually spoke to), the accompaniment and language, and an honest line
What a good answer must contain — at least two named local traditions, one first-hand
source
on whether it is still being performed and who is learning it.

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s e m the oldest storytelling form is paṭṭachitra
Sample answer: “In our district of Odisha

a gla picture. Painters of Raghurajpur paint scenes
— paṭṭa means cloth and chitra means
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
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visitors more often than they are sung. We also have Pala, in which a lead singer

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with a chāmara, a drummer and two chorus singers perform a long verse story

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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

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Why the chapter sets this task: its whole argument is that culture survived

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because it lived in ordinary hands, not only in courts. Puppetry in Rajasthan and

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LET’S EXPLORE — Page 228
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From Walls to Paper — Miniature Paintings

LET’S EXPLORE

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Observe all the miniature paintings featured here. What are
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The five paintings to compare are the Rajput Bhāgavata Purāṇa folio (Fig. 8.15, 1520), Jahangir’s
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darbar from the Jahangir-nama
Bikaner Holi painting (Fig.g8.18,
What all five share

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Small scale, dense detail. Every one is a page-sized painting meant to be held and looked at
closely, not hung on a wall — the shift the chapter describes, “from walls to paper”, after
paper reached India in the 10th or 11th century.
Bright opaque mineral colour laid flat, with fine outlines and gold. Nothing is sketchy;
every figure is finished.
Storytelling. Each is a moment from a narrative, and the moment chosen is the one that
explains the whole episode.
Ruled borders framing the picture, and figures shown mostly in profile or three-quarter view
with patterned textiles carefully picked out.

Where they differ

FEATURE RAJPUT WORKS (8.15, 8.18, 8.19) MUGHAL WORKS (8.16, 8.17)

Subject Kṛiṣhṇa defeating the whirlwind Tṛiṇāvarta; The emperor in darbar, and a
women playing Holi; Rāma and Lakṣhmaṇa wrestling match — court, event and
searching for Sītā — devotional and epic person

Colour Hot flat fields — a solid red pavilion in 8.15, a Softer, more graded tones; modelled
yellow text band and blue sky in 8.19 green hills, dark rounded trees, a
crowd of muted robes

Space No depth: hills, trees and figures are stacked in Receding ground; figures get smaller
bands across the surface further back; architecture is drawn at
an angle

Faces Type faces — large eyes, one ideal profile repeated Individual likenesses; in 8.16 dozens of
courtiers with different features,
beards and turbans

Text Devanagari written into the picture — along the Text kept out of the picture; the
bottom edge of 8.15 and in the yellow band above painting itself carries the account
8.19

Retained — the epic and Purāṇic themes; flat jewel colour and firm outline in the Rajput stream;
profile faces and patterned cloth; the decorated border; the habit of packing a whole story into
one page.
Changed — naturalism and portrait likeness enter; landscape gains depth and real trees,
animals, gardens and hunting scenes; palettes become subtler; subjects become secular. And
the change goes both ways: Fig. 8.17 is a Hindu epic painted in the Mughal manner for a
Persian translation, while Fig. 8.18 is a Rajput Holi set on a garden terrace with Mughal-
influenced softness — painted at Bikaner, the very city to which, the chapter says, Mughal court
painters migrated.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Why the exchange happened: the chapter gives the mechanism rather than
leaving it as a mystery — “based on the patrons’ taste and demand”. Painters moved
to where the work was, and painted what the patron wanted. In Akbar’s atelier the
work was even split up — one artist drew the lines, another filled the colours, a third
finished — so styles mixed inside a single sheet of paper.

LET’S EXPLORE — Page 230
Changing Landscapes — Gardens

LET’S EXPLORE

Q1 Take up a group project. Identify the local forms of art and craft in your area. Are
they being continued? How are the knowledge and skills in these being transferred
from generation to generation?

A group project, so divide it before you start: one pair on identifying crafts, one on visiting and
interviewing, one on transmission and livelihood, one on the report.
Method

1. Find them. Look for a craft street or a caste-based cluster of workshops, the district
industries office, the state handicrafts emporium, and any local product with a GI tag. Ask
what people buy for weddings and festivals — that is usually where the surviving craft is.
2. Record each craft on one sheet: name · raw material and where it comes from · the tools ·
how long one piece takes · what it sells for · who buys it now.
3. Ask the transmission questions. Who taught you? At what age did you start? Are your
children learning it? If not, why not? Is there a guild, cooperative or society? Has anything
been mechanised?
4. Test the claim. Compare the number of working households today with what an elder says
it was 30 years ago. That single number tells you whether “being continued” is true.

What a good answer must contain — at least two named local crafts; the raw material and the
tools; a named source you interviewed; a clear statement of how the skill passes on (family,
guild apprenticeship, a government training centre, a design school); and an honest verdict on
whether it is growing, holding or dying, with a reason.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Sample answer: “Our town has two living crafts. The first is brass utensil-making;
about forty households still beat and polish brass in the old bazaar. Skill passes
exactly as the chapter describes for weavers — as apprenticeship within the family,
boys joining their father in the workshop after school. The second is hand-block
printing on cotton. Here transmission has changed: the carvers still train sons, but
printing is now taught in a six-month course at a government training centre, and
half the trainees are women, which was not so a generation ago. Both crafts are
shrinking because machine-made goods are cheaper, but block printing has partly
recovered because city buyers pay more for handwork. Our conclusion is that a craft
survives when the skill is still taught and the product still has a buyer — either alone
is not enough.”

How this connects to the chapter: the same transmission system it describes for
the Koshti weavers — “knowledge and skills were transferred through
apprenticeships, either within a family or with a master in the guild” — is what you
are looking for on your own street. The chapter also shows how such a system
adapts: weavers from Gujarat brought their expertise to Banaras with Akbar’s
encouragement, the Mughals introduced zarī and brocade, and the result became
the ‘signature style’ of the Banarasi sari — kept alive, it says, “through the same
traditional training system”.

LET’S REMEMBER — Page 232
Women in Society — Contextual Variations in Their Role and Status

LET’S REMEMBER

Q1 Recall the names of other women from history that you have met so far who went
against the grain. What was their motivation?

Begin with the three in this chapter itself, then reach back into what you have read earlier.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

WHO WHAT SHE WENT AGAINST HER MOTIVATION

Razia Sultan The first and only female ruler of the Delhi To rule properly rather than nominally.
first half of the Sultanate; she faced fierce opposition from She led military campaigns in person,
13th century nobles who objected to a woman ruler, and founded educational institutions across
she broke tradition by appearing unveiled Delhi and insisted on a merit-based
at court and addressing the public directly administration — a ruler cannot do those
things from behind a curtain

Nur Jahan Women of royal Muslim households were Ability and interest, backed by the
early 17th generally secluded; she issued royal orders, emperor’s trust — and, the chapter
century attended court meetings and had coins suggests, a real appetite for governance,
minted in her name art, architecture and trade

Tirumalamba Scholarship in Sanskrit kāvya was Learning itself, and the confidence of a
16th century overwhelmingly a male preserve; she was a court where kings and queens were
celebrated poet at Achyutadevaraya’s court, themselves poets
a polymath and a polyglot, and wrote
Varadambika Parinaya

Mirabai A woman of a royal household who took the Devotion — the bhakti mārga needs no
Rajasthan path of a wandering devotee and sang her priest and no permission, which is exactly
devotion in public what let a woman take it

You will also have met, in Part 1 and in earlier grades, women such as the Vedic scholars Gargi
and Maitreyi, who questioned in assemblies of learned men; the queens of Vijayanagara who
issued grants in their own names; and later figures like Rani Lakshmibai. Add to the table
whichever ones your class has actually studied — the point is the pattern, not the length of the
list.

The pattern in the motivations: none of these women set out to break a rule for its
own sake. Each was doing something she was good at — ruling, governing, writing,
worshipping — and the rule stood in the way. That is what “going against the grain”
usually means in history: not rebellion as a goal, but competence that a custom had
no room for.

And the cost: the chapter is blunt about it. Razia’s ‘rebellious’ acts “ultimately
contributed to fuelling a conspiracy that ended her brief reign”. Recording what it
cost is part of recording what she did.

LET’S EXPLORE — Page 232

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Women in Society — Contextual Variations in Their Role and Status
co m
em.
m as
LET’S EXPLORE

.co a g l
a s em the chronicle of the Portuguese traveller to India, Fernão Nunes, who visited
gl
From
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the Vijayanagar Empire: “He [the King] has also women who wrestle, and others
who are astrologers and soothsayers; and he has women who write all the accounts

. com
of expenses that are incurred inside the gates, and others whose duty it is to write
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all the affairs of the kingdom andecompare
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their books with those of the writers

a l music, who play instruments and sing.” What are
outside; he has women alsogfor
the different vocations women were involved in as a part of the King’s staff?

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Six, and they are of four quite different kinds.
a g
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a glVOCATION NUNES’S OWN WORDS WHAT KIND OF WORK IT IS

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Wrestlers “women who wrestle” Physical and professional —

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trained athletes retained at court

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Astrologers
a g
“others who are astrologers” Learned — it needs calculation
and knowledge of texts

. c om
Advisory, consulted before
decisions m
Soothsayers “and soothsayers”

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. co ag and financial — they must
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asehousehold
Accountants of the “women who write all the accounts of Clerical

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expenses that are incurred inside the gates” be literate and numerate

Record-keepers and “others whose duty it is to write all the Administrative, and the most
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striking of all — they check the
a
auditors of the affairs of the kingdom and compare their

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kingdom books with those of the writers outside” male scribes’ books

Musicians
a gl
“women also for music, who play instruments Artistic, both instrumental and
and sing” vocal

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What the list proves, beyond the six jobs: two of the six require reading, writing
o ag One of them is an audit
.cand arithmetic, so women at Vijayanagara were educated.
m function — comparing the inside books against the outside writers’ books — which
l a se
ag means these women were trusted with the check on other officials, the most
.c
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a
sensitive position in any treasury. This is exactly why the chapter says that “for the
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most part, the situation for women in south India did not change during this period”,
e agl
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and why the wall engravings at Hampi show women in many public activities.
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a

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Read the source carefully: Nunes is describing the King’s staff — women employed
in a royal establishment. It is strong evidence about what elite and professional
women could do, and it should not be stretched into a claim about every woman in
the empire. Knowing the limits of a source is part of using it.

LET’S EXPLORE — Page 233
Women in Society — Contextual Variations in Their Role and Status

LET’S EXPLORE

Q1 What conclusions can we draw from such acts about the economic and social status
of these women?

The acts in question are the ones just described: inscriptions recording donations to temples by
queens and women of the richer strata — donations that “included entire villages”, with a part
of the crop going to the temple as its share — and records of community halls and wells built at
the initiative of women, all for public use.
Four conclusions follow directly, and each one needs the evidence beside it.

1. They owned property in their own right. You cannot give away a village you do not own.
Gifting land that generates a recurring share of the crop means holding a productive asset,
not merely wealth handed over for one occasion.
2. They could act without a man’s name attached. The inscription records the donation as
hers. A grant made in a woman’s own name, cut in stone, means she had the legal standing
to make it and the community accepted it.
3. They had public standing, not just private wealth. A temple grant, a community hall or a
well is a public act. Endowing them puts a woman’s name into the religious and civic life of
the town permanently — donors were remembered, and that is a form of social power.
4. They took decisions about the common good. A well and a community hall are chosen —
someone judged what the town needed. That is initiative, not merely generosity.

Why the chapter puts this here: it is building towards the sentence that follows —
“economic prosperity in this period could not have reached the heights it did without
the active participation of women.” Inscriptions are the strongest kind of evidence
for that claim, because they are contemporary, they were not written to flatter
anyone in particular, and they survive by the hundred.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Keep the conclusion the right size: this evidence is about “queens and women
from the richer strata of society”, in the chapter’s own words. It shows what
property-owning women could do, and it says nothing about a landless woman’s life.
Historians face this problem constantly: the people who leave inscriptions are the
people who could afford stone.

LET’S EXPLORE — Page 233
Women in Society — Contextual Variations in Their Role and Status

LET’S EXPLORE

Q1 Imagine that you are a historian in the 22nd century looking at the lives and status
of girls and women in 21st-century society. What are the different aspects you
would write about? Exchange your thoughts with your classmates. How similar or
different are they?

The exercise is really about method: which aspects would a future historian even be able to see,
and what would they use as evidence? Plan your answer in those two columns.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

ASPECT I WOULD WRITE ABOUT EVIDENCE A 22ND-CENTURY HISTORIAN
WOULD USE

Education — how many girls finish school, and which Enrolment and board-exam data, school registers,
subjects they take scholarship schemes

Work — which jobs women hold, what they are paid, Census and labour surveys, pay records, time-use studies
how much unpaid housework they do

Law and rights — inheritance, marriage age, maternity Statutes, court judgments, case records
leave, laws against harassment

Political participation — voting, panchayat seats, Election Commission records, reserved-seat data
women in legislatures

Health and safety — nutrition, maternal health, the sex Health surveys, hospital records — and the sex ratio,
ratio at birth which is a number very hard to argue with

Mobility and technology — travelling alone, owning a Transport and banking data, phone-ownership surveys
phone, using a bank account

Sport, art and public visibility Match records, film and television, news archives

Everyday attitudes — what families expected of a The hardest to recover: interviews, letters, social media,
daughter advertisements, school textbooks

Sample answer: “Writing in 2150, I would say the 21st century in India was a period
of fast change but uneven change. Girls’ school enrolment rose until it nearly
matched boys’, and women won Olympic medals and flew fighter aircraft — yet the
share of women in paid work stayed low, unpaid housework stayed mostly theirs,
and the sex ratio at birth in some districts showed that daughters were still not
equally wanted. I would argue that the law moved faster than everyday attitudes,
and I would use the gap between the two as the theme of my chapter.”

Why the chapter asks this at all: it has just shown you how much a historian can
reconstruct about women in the 13th–17th centuries from inscriptions, a Portuguese
chronicle and some wall engravings — and how much stays invisible because it was
never recorded. Turning the telescope on your own century teaches the lesson from
the other end: what survives about you will be someone’s choice, and it will not be
the whole truth. Comparing your list with your classmates’ makes the point again —
if ten people in one room choose different aspects, so did the chroniclers.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

THINK ABOUT IT — Page 235
Institutions of learning

THINK ABOUT IT

Q1 What impact do you think the destruction of major universities like Nālandā and
Vikramaśhilā had on the development of education and knowledge in India and
around the world?

The loss was largest at the top of the system and smallest at the bottom — and that is the
shape of the answer. The chapter calls it “an immense cultural loss to humanity”, and gives two
mechanisms: manuscripts and buildings were destroyed, and “an entire ecosystem was
disrupted”.
What was lost

Libraries. Before printing, a text existed only as the copies people had made. Burning a
library could remove a work from the world permanently — we know of many titles now only
because they are quoted or were translated elsewhere.
The ecosystem, not just the buildings. A large university concentrates teachers, students,
copyists, debate and long-term work. Once the scholars were dispersed, that concentration
could not be rebuilt by any one of them.
The international connection. These centres drew students from across Asia and sent
scholars out. Their end cut a channel through which Indian mathematics, logic, grammar,
medicine and Buddhist philosophy had reached the rest of the world — which is why the
chapter says the loss was to humanity, not only to India.
Whole fields of advanced study that only a large institution can carry, because they need
many specialists in one place over many years.

What was not lost

Learning continued in “decentralised systems” — gurukulas, maṭhas, temple schools,
Buddhist vihāras, Jain pallis, village pāṭhaśhālās, madrasās and guild apprenticeships. These
were “not affected by political turmoil, except in cases where whole cities and towns were
devastated”.
Some of the finest work of the whole period came after the destruction and from outside the
ruined north: Narayana Pandita’s Gaṇitakaumudī in the 14th century, and the Kerala School
— Madhava’s series expansions and Nilakantha Somayaji’s planetary model of 1500.

Page 18 of 37

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

co m
m.
Why the impact was so uneven: a university is a single point of failure and a village

m l a se
pāṭhaśhālā is not. Destroying one building could end an institution that had taken
o g
c build; you would have had to destroy thousands of ahouseholds
centuries.to
m
and

l a se to end the other. India kept teaching; what it lost was the capacity to
g
temples
aconcentrate its best minds in one place — and that took a very long time to recover.

o m
e
. c
m and Vikramaśhilā were destroyed in the ag
s
Where historians disagree: that Nālandā
invasions of the late 12th centuryla
a g is not in dispute, and Persian chronicles of the
period describe it. Historians do argue about how much of the decline of these
centres to attribute to that single blow — some point out that royal patronage for
co m
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large Buddhist monastic universities had already been thinning for a century or
m.
o m l a
g them fragile, and
.c position holds both: the withdrawal of patronage made
more, so that the invasion finished an institution that was already weakening. The
m a
se destruction of their libraries and the dispersal of their scholars made the loss
strongest

g l a
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irreversible.

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ag
LET’S EXPLORE — Page 238
Growth of Literature and Language

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LET’S EXPLORE

m l as
.co a g
m Over this period loan words from Persian also began to enter regional languages
l a se Q1

ag and literature. Today we can hardly identify them as having Persian roots. Create a

m
list of words in your regional language that might have Persian roots. You may be

a se
com l
surprised by your findings!
. a g
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Method first. Persian entered Indian languages mainly through administration, trade, court

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life and food, because Persian was the language of the Mughal administration. So hunt in those
m
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fields: words for offices and paperwork, for money and markets, for buildings, clothes and

m l as
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dishes. Then check each guess in a good dictionary — many Hindi dictionaries mark the origin

m a
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as फ़ ा० (Persian) or अ० (Arabic).

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

FIELD WORDS WITH PERSIAN MEANING
ROOTS

Administration sarkār, daftar, kāġaz, tārīḳh, government, office, paper, date, salary,
tankhwāh, rozgār employment

Market and money bāzār, dukān, sauda, kharīd, nafā- market, shop, deal, purchase, profit and
nuqsān loss

House and things darwāza, dīwār, mez, kursī, chādar, door, wall, table, chair, sheet, spectacles
chashmā

Land and time zamīn, āsmān, roz, haftā, sāl land, sky, day, week, year

Food nāshtā, sabzī, namak, gosht, shorbā breakfast, vegetables, salt, meat, broth

Everyday describing safed, garm, sust, āsān, ḳhūbsūrat, white, warm, slow, easy, beautiful, friend
words dost

And it is not only Hindi. The same administrative vocabulary travelled with the administration:

Bengali — jomi (land), kagoj (paper), dokan (shop), bazar, khobor (news), tarikh (date).
Marathi — jamin, bazar, dukan, khurchi (chair), tarikh, hushar.
Telugu and Kannada — kāgitamu/kāgada (paper, from kāġaz), jamīnu, dawākhāna (hospital),
tarājū (weighing scales).
Odia — kagoja, bajāra, jami, tārikha.

One distinction worth making, and it will impress a teacher: several of these
words are originally Arabic and reached India through Persian — kāġaz, kursī, daftar,
aḳhbār, zilā, jeb. Persian was the carrier, not always the source. This is exactly how
the chapter describes Hindavi itself: Indian grammar and vocabulary, “where words
from Persian and Arabic were also integrated”.

Check it yourself: pick five words from your own list and ask an elder whether they
think each one is “a Hindi word” or “a foreign word”. Almost everyone will call
darwāza and kāġaz perfectly Indian — which is the surprise the chapter is promising.
A loan word that has been used for six hundred years has stopped being on loan.

LET’S EXPLORE — Page 246

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Cultural Exchange in Daily Life — Food

LET’S EXPLORE

Q1 Make a list of popular dishes in your region. Explore their origins and discover
various cross-cultural influences.

Method. For each dish, ask three questions: (1) where does each ingredient come from? (2)
where does the technique come from — tandoor, deep-frying, fermenting, marinating in curd?
(3) where does the name come from? A dish is very often Indian in one of these and foreign in
another, and that is exactly what the chapter means by adaptation.
The chapter’s own worked examples — use these as your model:

DISH CAME FROM WHAT INDIA CHANGED

Samosa Sambūseh, a Persian dish brought to The stuffing — meat, pistachio, almonds and walnuts
the courts of the Delhi Sultanate by became potatoes and peas
chefs from West Asia (Fig. 8.36)

Jalebi The Persian zalabiyeh The shape and the syrup — zalabiyeh has an
asymmetric floral coil and uses honey and rose-water
syrup; the Indian jalebi has circular coils and simple
sugar syrup

Naan A Persian influence, cooked in a clay It became part of the everyday cuisine of north India
oven

Khichri An Indian dish of lentils and rice, It “took on new flavours” as court spices and practices
made for over a millennium spread

Sample answer: “Three popular dishes in our part of Maharashtra show three
different histories. Puran poli is entirely local and very old — wheat, jaggery and
gram, with no outside ingredient. Misal pav is a mixture: the sprouted-bean misal is
local, but the pav is a bread the Portuguese brought to the western coast, and even
the word is Portuguese. Biryani came with West Asian and Mughal kitchens, but our
version uses local rice and masala and is made with the meat and spice we prefer.
And one ingredient runs through all our ‘traditional’ cooking without being
traditional at all — the chilli reached India from the Americas only in the 16th
century, through Portuguese traders. Before that, heat in Indian food came mainly
from black pepper.”

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

The point of the exercise: almost no famous dish is pure. The chapter says two-way
influence “naturally occurred”, and gives both directions — Indian spices such as
cardamom, clove, turmeric, coriander and black pepper entering the imperial
kitchens, and Persian dishes entering ours. Even Akbar, it notes, tried to reduce meat
consumption at his court, “partly under the influence of Jain and Hindu traditions
prevailing at the time”. Food is the quietest and most reliable record of who a society
has lived alongside.

LET’S EXPLORE — Page 247
Cultural Exchange in Daily Life — Clothing

LET’S EXPLORE

Q1 What are your observations about continuity and change in clothing styles today?
What might be the reasons for the changes we see?

Answer it in the chapter’s own two columns — what has continued, what has changed — and
then give the reasons, which is where the marks are.

CONTINUITY CHANGE

The sari, “with its rich regional variations”, is still worn It is now worn far more for occasions than for daily
— and still tells you the wearer’s region by its drape and work in cities, while the salwar-kameez and Western
weave clothes are everyday wear

The pyjama and the kurta, adopted in court in this very Cut, fabric and fastening have changed — zips, elastic,
period, are still in daily use machine stitching, synthetic blends

The dupatta, which the chapter traces to fine muslin Now often a light accessory rather than a covering
sari-inspired dupattas

Wedding and festival clothing stays the most The same motifs are now machine-woven and mass-
conservative of all — zarī, brocade, the būtā motif produced

Handloom regions still carry their identity — Banarasi, Uniforms, jeans and T-shirts have become the shared
Kanjeevaram, Pochampalli, Chanderi clothing of school, office and travel across the whole
country

Reasons for the changes

1. Work and mobility. Clothes follow what people do. Commuting, riding two-wheelers,
factory and office work all favour stitched, close-fitting, easily washed clothes.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

2. Manufacturing and price. Power looms and ready-made garments made stitched clothing
cheaper than the tailoring or the handloom it replaced.
3. Exposure. Cinema, television, advertising and the internet spread a style nationally within
months. In the period the chapter describes, exposure came through courts and trade
instead — which is why the jama and the angrakha spread “especially among the ruling
class”.
4. New materials. Synthetic fibres, and blends that need no ironing, changed what could be
made.
5. Identity and occasion. This is why the change is never total. People keep traditional dress
for weddings, festivals and rituals precisely because clothing signals who you are, not only
what you are doing.

The chapter’s own point, tested on today: the angrakha “is believed to have
evolved from Persian court fashion and was adapted to Indian aesthetics and
fabrics.” The mechanism has not changed at all — a garment arrives from outside,
the elite adopt it first, local makers rework it in local cloth for local weather, and two
generations later nobody thinks of it as foreign. That is exactly what has happened
to the shirt, the trouser and the T-shirt in India.

Questions and activities — Pages 248 – 249
End of chapter

QUESTIONS AND ACTIVITIES

Q1 What is the path to mokṣha that became popular in the period from the 13th to
17th centuries?

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.

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co m
m.
Why it became popular again just then: the chapter gives the reason plainly —

m l a se
this renewal “reflected cultural continuity and society’s search for spiritual resilience
o g were unstable, a
.c and religious upheaval”. When rulers and institutions
a
m
amid political
a e needed no institution at all was exactly the one people could still walk. And
sthat
g l
path
abecause 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
co m
learned few.
e m . ag
g l as
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Q2 Name three bhakti saints from different regions of India and identify the key
co m
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messages they promoted.

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

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SAINT REGION AND TIME
em
.co KEY MESSAGE agl
a s
Kabirdas (Kabir)
a gl
North India, present-day One god — and a rejection of ritual as the road to him.
Uttar Pradesh; 15th century; His compositions “decry the rituals of both Hinduism
presumably raised by a
com
and Islam”, and his dohā on wheat and flour says the

m .
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weaver couple difference between Ram and Rahim dissolves in that

m l as
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one reality

a g
se m
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Ravidas North India; early 16th The equality and oneness of all people — poetry

a g century; born in a family of aimed at “breaking down the rigid walls that had

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leather-workers developed around varṇa and jāti”

a se
. com One God and the equality of all people. His teachings, a g l
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Guru Nanak He journeyed across regions

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along with the hymns of several Hindu saints, are

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preserved in the Guru Granth Sāhib, the sacred text
of the Sikhs

c o m
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Chaitanya The east — Bengal; 16th Devotion expressed through collective singing and
Mahaprabhu
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century
s
literature, including aanew
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dancing (Fig. 8.7). He shaped 16th-century Bengali

. co agland episodes from his life
style of folk song, the

e m
as
Dhāmāli, on Kṛiṣhṇa

a g l
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Purandaradasa The south — the Devotion to Kṛiṣhṇa carried through music open to
Vijayanagara empire; 15th– everyone. He gave up his diamond business, may
s e m
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16th century have composed as many as 4,75,000 kīrtanās, and is

se m called the father of Carnatic music

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

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?

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

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?

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

1. 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.
2. 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.”
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

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?

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.

1. 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.”
2. 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.”
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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”.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

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?

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, You lose a real gain for nothing. And rejection rarely holds:
instrument, crop or word when the new thing arrives with the ruling power, refusing it
is refused isolates you from administration, trade and patronage
without stopping the thing itself

Copying The foreign form is It stays foreign. Its materials, taste and meaning belong
reproduced exactly 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 The new form is now made by local craftspeople, funded by local
and reworked in local buyers and understood by local people. It survives because it
materials, tastes and belongs to somebody — and the culture has gained a capability
meanings 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.

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The Mughals introduced zarī, zardozī and brocade, and Banaras absorbed them into the silk
co m
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sari, adding flora, fauna and geometric designs — and “the heritage has been kept alive
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rejection protects the core and lets the surface stagnate. Only one of the three does
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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

NEW FORM WHAT MET WHAT DETAIL FROM THE CHAPTER

Qawwālī Indian, Persian and Arabic Amīr Khusro, an Indo-Persian Sufi poet and singer of
singing traditions 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 Instrument makers and Their repertoires came from much older Indian
sitar and tabla musicians from various instruments — the tabla’s from the ancient pakhāwaj.
backgrounds, The chapter is careful: “exact origins remain debated
experimenting by scholars”

Mughal Persian influence and the A genre distinct from Rajput art, secular in subject, at
miniature Indian workshop its height in Akbar’s atelier where one artist drew the
painting lines, another filled the colours and a third finished

The Razmnama The Sanskrit Mahābhārata Fig. 8.17, from 1598, shows Yudhiṣhṭhira and Karṇa
folios and Persian book-painting wrestling — a Hindu epic scene painted in the Mughal
manner for a Persian translation commissioned by
Akbar

The Bikaner Rajput and Mughal styles Mughal court painters migrated to Bikaner; plants,
blend in Rajput gardens, animals and hunting scenes entered Rajput
painting painting “based on the patrons’ taste and demand”

Urdu and Hindavi with Arabic and Urdu grew in the Ganga-Yamuna plains; Amīr Khusro is
Dakhini Persian; then Dakhini with known as the ‘father of Urdu literature’, though he
Telugu and Marathi wrote primarily in Hindavi, and also in Punjabi and Braj
Bhasha

Dhāmāli and its Bhakti devotion and Bengali Chaitanya Mahāprabhu influenced 16th-century
entry into folk song Bengali literature, including this new style of folk song
kathak 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.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

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.

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.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

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.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

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.

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

co m
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Sample answer — “Temple music in our town: what has continued and what
has changed”
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se the same families supply the players, and the boys still begin learning at
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rituals;
about eight from a senior relative — the family apprenticeship the chapter describes

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Changed: the players are amplified now, and a recording is used for the smallest
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daily services. Two of the four families we spoke to have no one in the next

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now also play at weddings and at school functions, which was rare a generation ago,

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and one has a channel where the temple’s festival music is uploaded.
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Why: the ritual has protected the music, because a fixed ceremony fixes what must

a gl 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

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the ritual: the technology of sound, the sources of income, and who is willing to
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those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome it has stayed alive and continuous.
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Through all the turbulence the chapter notices three common patterns: continuation of

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all sections of society. instability disrupted; it did not stop.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

The bhakti mārga (path of devotion) is one of the multiple paths to mokṣha, and it needs
neither rituals nor priests. It had crystallised by the 6th century and became powerfully
popular again now — because it was sung, in local languages, at gatherings anyone could
join. Kabirdas, Ravidas, Guru Nanak, Mirabai, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Tukaram,
Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Purandaradasa and Kanakadasa belong to this current.
Sufism is a path of Islam focused on devotion and an inner, personal search for god. Sufi
saints such as Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti and Nizamuddin Auliya used music — the qawwālī,
developed by Amīr Khusro — to bring people closer to the divine. Sufis also adopted yogic
and Vedantic techniques, and Dara Shikoh saw Vedanta and Sufism as converging on
universal truth. So the two traditions often overlapped.
Every other field shows the same mixture of continuity and exchange: dhrupad raised to
new heights under Raja Mansingh Tomar and carried into Akbar’s court by Tansen; Rajput
and Mughal miniature painting borrowing from each other; the Persian charbagh garden
reworked at Amer Fort; Urdu growing out of Hindavi; sambūseh becoming the samosa.
Learning survived the destruction of Nālandā and Vikramaśhilā because it was
decentralised — gurukulas, maṭhas, temple schools, vihāras, Jain pallis, village pāṭhaśhālās,
madrasās and guild apprenticeships. The same centuries produced Narayana Pandita’s
Gaṇitakaumudī, Madhava’s infinite series for π, and Nilakantha Somayaji’s planetary model
of 1500 — decades before Copernicus.
Women’s position did not change the same way everywhere. Purdah spread in parts of
north India after the invasions; in the south, older norms continued and elite women went
on issuing grants, running administration, keeping the kingdom’s accounts and endowing
temples, villages and wells.

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

Quick revision

TERM WHAT IT MEANS WHERE IT WORTH REMEMBERING
APPEARS IN
THE CHAPTER

Culture The shared way of life that defines a Opening pages, It shapes how people see the
group of people, often passed down p. 216 world, deal with each other
through generations — values, customs and live their daily lives
and traditions as well as art, music,
literature, philosophy and science

bhakti mārga The path of devotion — one of the The power of It requires no rituals and no
multiple paths to mokṣha the bhakti priests; it had crystallised by
tradition, p. 218 the 6th century

mokṣha Realisation of Truth, or release from the p. 218 The chapter gives both
cycle of death and rebirth meanings side by side

Sufism A path of Islam that focuses on devotion, Sufism, p. 221 Sufis also used yogic and
and an inner and personal search for god Vedantic techniques — inner
silence, asceticism and
meditation

qawwālī A Sufi devotional song fusing Indian, p. 221; DON’T Amīr Khusro (mid-13th to early
Persian and Arabic singing traditions MISS OUT, p. 14th century) is credited with
224 developing it

Zikr Remembrance of God through the Margin note, p. Compared in the chapter to
repetitive chanting or silent recitation of 221 Vedantic meditation
divine names

dhrupad Dhruva = fixed, pada = verse — a music Musical Raised to new heights under
genre of great antiquity Traditions, p. Raja Mansingh Tomar of
224 Gwalior in the late 15th
century

paṭṭachitra Paṭṭa = cloth, chitra = picture — painted p. 223 Themes usually from the
cloth storytelling of Odisha, West Bengal Rāmayaṇa, Mahābhārata and
and Andhra Pradesh the Puraṇās

Atelier An artist’s studio Margin note, p. In Akbar’s atelier one artist
226 drew the lines, another filled
the colours, a third added the
finishing

charbagh The Persian four-part garden design, with Changing Older Indian words for garden
waterways representing the rivers of Landscapes — — udyāna, vātikā, nandana —
Paradise mentioned in the Quran Gardens, p. 229

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Class 8 Social Science Chapter 15 Cultural Currents: 13th to 17th Centuries AglaSem · NCERT Solutions

TERM WHAT IT MEANS WHERE IT WORTH REMEMBERING
APPEARS IN
THE CHAPTER

are already in the Ṛigveda and
the epics

purdah Persian for curtain or veil; in north India p. 231 Largely confined to north
the ghūnghaṭ became part of the attire India; the chapter finds little
evidence of it elsewhere

Hindavi An early version of the Hindi-Urdu Margin note, p. Amīr Khusro wrote primarily in
language, with the grammar and 234 Hindavi; Urdu later grew out of
vocabulary of Indian languages but with it
Persian and Arabic words integrated

pūrvamaryade A Kannada word meaning ‘following DON’T MISS It is why Vijayanagara’s rulers
previously established practices of OUT, p. 234 kept supporting temples and
dharma and social norms’ maṭhas, so education
continued

Brocade A rich fabric woven with a raised pattern, Margin note, p. Banarasi brocade now carries a
typically with gold or silver thread 236 Geographical Indication (GI)
tag

Indian Potassium nitrate, used for gunpowder, Margin note, p. In Akbar’s time it was also used
saltpetre fertilisers and fireworks 241 to cool water and beverages

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