NCERT Solutions for Class 7 Social Science History Chapter 9: The Making of Regional Cultures

Language is a common way for anyone to use as a way to describe others. As we tend to associate different regions with their distinctive kinds of food clothes, poetry, dance and other forms of culture, we meanwhile should understand that the regional cultures that exist today are more often the product of a complex process of intermixing local traditions with ideas from other places and parts of the subcontinent. Due to this, we sometimes describe people in terms of the language they speak. For example, we tend to infer somebody speaking Tamil or Oriya language to live in Tamil Nadu or Orissa or at the very least to be a Tamil or Oriya person.

While some traditions are specific to their regions, others are cross-listed across many and derive from older practices and take a brand-new kind form in different regions. The same practice of heroic traditions can also be found in different forms, such as dancing. Kathak, a dance form now associated with several parts of north India comes from the word from Katha, a word used in Sanskrit and other languages for a story.

The kathaks were originally a caste of storytellers in temples of north India who did their performances with gestures and songs. Slowly and gradually Kathak began evolving into a dance form of its own in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries due to the spread of the bhakti movement. Soon enough the legends of Radha-Krishna started getting enacted in folk plays called Rasa Lila which started combining folk dance with the gestures of the kathak storytellers. This is what the chapter explores- how dance and art spread throughout the subcontinent and became regional cultures.