This is the official Winds of Change class 9 PDF page for Chapter 3 of the NCERT Class 9 English textbook, Kaveri. The chapter runs across printed pages 69 to 96 — 28 pages — and is published by NCERT on ncert.nic.in. The official PDF is below; the rest of the page maps the file and explains each text.
Download the Winds of Change Class 9 PDF
The file you want is the official NCERT Kaveri textbook chapter — Chapter 3, Winds of Change — free on the NCERT textbook portal, which publishes the full set of NCERT school textbooks. Use it when you need the chapter exactly as printed, with every activity, table and the closing poem intact.
Download the Winds of Change Class 9 PDF (NCERT English Kaveri, Chapter 3) from the official NCERT textbook portal at ncert.nic.in — the authoritative source for this edition, where the whole Kaveri book is available free along with every other NCERT textbook.
Everything after this point explains what is inside the file — where each text sits, which pages each activity uses, and what the chapter teaches — so you can also use this page to revise without the download.
What the Winds of Change Chapter Contains
This chapter is a single unit on art, craft and creativity: a craft essay on the Indian hand fan, an abridged story by O. Henry, and two garden poems, wrapped in a repeated set of activity sections.
The counts table on this page shows how much of the chapter there is; the organiser table below shows where each text sits in the file.
| Text | Printed pages | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Winds of Change (prose) | 69–81 | A craft essay on the history of the Indian hand fan, or pankha, region by region |
| The Last Leaf | 82–85 | An abridged story by O. Henry about hope, the will to live and a painter’s sacrifice |
| Canvas of Soil | 86–96 | A poem by Maya Anthony, with its full activity block from warm-up to mini-project |
| A Sea of Foliage Girds Our Garden Round | 96 | A closing read-and-enjoy poem by Toru Dutt |
The listening activities depend on transcripts printed at book pages 263 and 264 — the pankha dialogue for the first Listen and Respond task, and the school-garden description for the second. Both are marked “for teacher”, so these tasks run in class with the teacher’s transcript.
How the Chapter Is Organised: The Skill Cycle
This section tells you where every skill lives in the file, so you can navigate the chapter without hunting. The same cycle repeats for the pankha essay and the poem — once you know the pattern, you know the whole chapter.
| Stage | What it does | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|
| Reflect and Respond | Warm-up that links the topic to the student’s own experience | p. 69 (essay), p. 86 (poem) |
| Reading text | The pankha essay, or the poem Canvas of Soil | pp. 70–73, p. 87 |
| Check Your Understanding | Comprehension drills, including the state-wise fan table | p. 73, p. 87 |
| Critical Reflection | Extract-based and long-answer questions | pp. 74–75, pp. 89–91 |
| Vocabulary and Structures in Context | Word pairs, collocations and present perfect (essay); colour shades and painting words (poem) | pp. 76–78, p. 92 |
| Listen and Respond | Listening comprehension from the teacher’s transcripts | p. 79 (transcript p. 263), p. 93 (transcript p. 264) |
| Speaking Activity | Imagined speech and a preference debate | p. 80, p. 94 |
| Writing Task | Factual description and descriptive writing | p. 80, p. 94 |
| Learning Beyond the Text | Projects, presentations and further reading | pp. 80–81, pp. 95–96 |
The activities are playful by design. In the first Speaking Activity, students imagine themselves as a hand, ceiling, table or handheld fan and introduce themselves from the fan’s point of view (p. 80). The second block is a flower-garden versus vegetable-garden debate, with sentence prompts for expressing preference (p. 94).
The mini-project offers four assignments — researching five famous gardens of India, analysing a garden-inspired art piece, designing your own garden, or interviewing a gardener or landscaping expert — from which students choose two (pp. 95-96).
The Last Leaf and the Toru Dutt poem enter through Learning Beyond the Text as read-and-enjoy texts. Neither has an exercise block of its own: the story follows the pankha project, and the poem closes the chapter.
The two language blocks drill different material. The essay’s block covers fixed word pairs such as bread and butter, collocations such as take a seat, and the present perfect tense (pp. 76-78). The poem’s block covers colour shades — from rusty red and vermilion to pine green, jade and indigo — and painting vocabulary such as portrait, mural, tonal range and underpainting (p. 92).
Key Concepts in the Winds of Change Chapter
Three big ideas run through the chapter: a craft object carries a region’s cultural identity, art can give a person the will to live, and a garden can be read like a painting. Each text below develops one of these ideas, and the page references let you follow along in your own copy of the book.
The Pankha: From Feather to Regional Craft
The word story comes first. Pankha originates from pankh, the feather of a bird, and pankhi was a small plumed fan whose use appears in the Buddhist wall paintings at Ajanta, dating to the 2nd century CE (NCERT, p. 70). The hand fan begins, in other words, as a bird’s wing turned into a tool for cooling.
From there the fan’s career widens. Pankhas were used in temples to fan deities and in royal courts to fan kings; they ranged from a tiny two-inch fan to ones needing a person’s full arm strength to move them (p. 70). They travelled along trade routes as “exotic and stylish” goods, and each place developed its own materials and designs.
Materials followed geography: bamboo, cane, palm leaf, silk, brass, leather and silver, decorated with beads and stones (pp. 70-71). In modern times the pankha is used mostly for decoration and has become a traditional craft item — the book’s key line is that the structure of each fan reflects the cultural core of the region that crafts it (p. 71).
Pankha Varieties State by State
This table is built from the chapter’s Check Your Understanding table (p. 73) and the essay text (pp. 71-72), and it is the state-wise map the chapter asks students to build for themselves.
| State | Type of fan | Material |
|---|---|---|
| Rajasthan | Appliqué hand fan | Fabric pieces sewn onto cloth with ornamental needlework |
| Rajasthan | Zardozi hand fan | Gold threadwork |
| Rajasthan | Temple hand fan | Engraved brass with a long handle |
| Rajasthan | Painted hand fan | Cardboard, usually offered to gods |
| Gujarat | Mirror-work hand fan | Cotton embellished with mirror work |
| Gujarat | Beads hand fan | Colourful beads with a silver handle |
| Gujarat | Kutch leather hand fan | Leather decorated with thread and wool at the seams |
| West Bengal | Sola hand fan | The milky-white spongy centre of sola |
| West Bengal | Tal Patar palm-leaf fan | Palm leaf |
| Uttar Pradesh | Phadh hand fan | Pure gold, silver zari, silk and satin frills |
| Bihar | Bamboo hand fan | Colourful, sturdy bamboo |
| Odisha | Large palm-leaf fan | Palm leaf |
The chapter adds the tribal versions of the fan — grass and metal embedded on bamboo sticks, geometrical patterns, and white ink on a red background (p. 72). Keep the linking idea in mind: because the materials are local, each fan is its region in miniature (p. 71).
Preserving the Craft: Celebration, Workshops, Livelihood
The essay’s closing argument is the one you need for the preservation questions on p. 75.
In outline: technology and changing habits put the pankha at risk of losing its presence among Indians; the craft has shifted from personal use into a commercial business that gives artisans a livelihood; and the first step of preservation is celebration — appreciating the culture, stories and artistry the craft invokes (p. 73).
Pankha-making workshops, inside and outside handicraft exhibitions, spread awareness and give contemporary makers a commercial platform for a sustainable livelihood (p. 73). Those three moves — celebration, workshops, livelihood — are the material the long answers on p. 75 ask you to evaluate.
The Last Leaf: Hope, Will to Live, and a Masterpiece
The Last Leaf is an abridged O. Henry story offered as enrichment reading under Learning Beyond the Text, and it is the emotional heart of the chapter. It has no exercise block of its own, but the plot is worth knowing because its theme — art as a reason to live — is the chapter’s second big idea.
- Johnsy, a young artist, falls seriously ill with pneumonia in November and lies gazing out of the window (p. 82).
- The doctor tells Sue that Johnsy has made up her mind not to get well — medicines will not help someone who does not want to live (p. 82).
- Johnsy counts the leaves falling from the old ivy creeper opposite the window — twelve, eleven, ten — and says she will die when the last leaf falls (p. 82).
- Sue confides in Behrman, the sixty-year-old painter whose lifelong dream of painting a masterpiece never came true (p. 83).
- That night the creeper is nearly bare and a storm is blowing. Behrman says nothing and goes back to his room (p. 84).
- The next morning one leaf still clings to the creeper, green and healthy, and it survives a second storm (p. 84).
- Johnsy turns: the leaf shows her how wrong she was to give up — she calls wanting to die a sin (p. 85).
- The doctor reports that Johnsy now has the will to live, then adds that Behrman has pneumonia and no hope (p. 85).
- Behrman dies. A ladder, a lantern, brushes and green and yellow paints by his bed reveal the truth: he painted the leaf on the stormy night, and the leaf that never flutters in the wind is his masterpiece (p. 85).
Carry the theme, not just the twist: Behrman’s masterpiece is not a framed painting but a leaf painted in the night to keep a dying girl alive. Art, in this story, is a selfless act that gives another person a reason to live.
Canvas of Soil: Reading the Garden as a Painting
Maya Anthony’s poem Canvas of Soil turns gardening into painting: the earth is a palette, seeds are brushstrokes, and every plot is a canvas (p. 87). The chapter reads the poem stanza by stanza and then device by device (p. 88).
Stanza one calls the earth a palette where gardeners’ dreams grow as seeds, planted straight, awaiting spring’s vibrant hue — a canvas before its colours arrive. Stanza two shows blossoms blooming as a painted sight, dancing in the morning light, with shades of green, red and blue making nature’s artwork.
Stanza three declares each plot a “canvas wide” where art and life coincide, so that gardens become still-life paintings in the hands of those who till (p. 87). The device table on p. 88 then names what each stanza does.
| Device | What it means in the poem |
|---|---|
| Imagery | Mind pictures made by colours, brushstrokes, blossoms and shades of green |
| Metaphor | Garden as a painting, plot as canvas, seeds as brushstrokes — comparison without like or as |
| Rhyme scheme | AABB — the pattern of end rhymes |
| Tone | Appreciative — what the poet feels |
| Mood | Joyful — what the reader feels |
| Speaker | A gardener |
| Alliteration | “Blossoms bloom” — the same consonant sound repeated |
The chapter then opens the poem out as an allegory — a literary device that works on two levels, the surface meaning and the deeper meaning (p. 88).
Here the garden can symbolise life’s journey and growth, with changing seasons standing for the cyclical nature of existence; and the interaction of different colours can symbolise the beauty and importance of harmony and diversity (p. 88).
When a question asks you to justify the title Canvas of Soil (p. 91), the frame is simple: the soil is the canvas, seeds are the brushstrokes and the gardener is the painter, and the metaphor runs through every stanza.
Figure Walkthrough: The Image That Celebrates the Pankha
The chapter’s single captioned photograph sits on p. 73, beside the Check Your Understanding table, and its caption is the essay’s closing argument in one sentence. It is worth stopping at because it connects the comprehension table to the long answers on p. 75.
The caption states the chapter’s argument directly: celebration is the first step of preservation. Appreciating the culture, stories and artistry of the pankha lets contemporary makers demonstrate their craft, regain its popularity, and reach a commercial platform for a sustainable livelihood (p. 73).
Read the photograph together with the chapter’s title. The winds of change are exactly what celebration and workshops are — a current of change that carries a decorative craft toward a sustainable livelihood. That connection is what the long answers on p. 75 look for.
Key Words and Definitions from the Chapter
The chapter teaches its vocabulary by name — the opening matching activity, the margin glosses, the poem’s device list and the grammar block all define words overtly. This three-column table is the fastest revision tool: the term, its meaning, and where the chapter teaches it.
| Term | Meaning | Where taught |
|---|---|---|
| indigenous | Local, from where it originated | p. 69 |
| innovative | New and original in approach | p. 69 |
| industrious | Hardworking | p. 69 |
| intricate | Elaborate or detailed | p. 69 |
| invoked | Brought out | p. 69 |
| initiatives | Actions to improve a situation | p. 69 |
| encrusted | Covered or decorated | p. 71 |
| sola | A type of water grass, used for its milky-white spongy centre | p. 71 |
| perpetually | Constantly | p. 71 |
| antiquity | The distant past | p. 72 |
| advent | Arrival | p. 72 |
| palette | The board a painter mixes colours on | p. 86 |
| hue | Shade of a colour | p. 86 |
| canvas | A painting; the surface a painter works on | p. 86 |
| fixed expression | A word pair with a fixed order that cannot be changed | p. 76 |
| collocation | Words that conventionally go together | p. 77 |
| present perfect tense | Has/have + past participle for past actions with present relevance | p. 78 |
| imagery | Words that create mind pictures | p. 88 |
| metaphor | Comparison without like or as | p. 88 |
| rhyme scheme | The pattern of end rhymes — AABB here | p. 88 |
| tone | What the poet feels | p. 88 |
| mood | What the reader feels | p. 88 |
| speaker | The voice of the poem — a gardener | p. 88 |
| alliteration | Repetition of the same consonant sound | p. 88 |
| allegory | A device expressing larger ideas on two levels, surface and deeper | p. 88 |
Common Language Traps in This Chapter
The chapter’s exercises are built on the points where students typically slip, and the book flags them directly. Six traps repeat across the activity blocks; read them before you attempt the questions.
- Opinion vs fact (p. 74). “They were considered exotic and stylish” is a judgement, not a verifiable fact — the exercise asks you to explain exactly that. The test: can the claim be checked against evidence?
- Assertion and reason (pp. 74, 89). Both statements can be true while the reason does not explain the assertion. Test the link between them, not the truth of each alone.
- Fixed word-pair order (p. 76). The shortest word comes first — bread and butter, never butter and bread. The book’s set: high and dry, wear and tear, facts and figures, all and sundry, time and again, thick and thin, cut and run, hard and fast.
- Collocations (p. 77). The book’s choices are take the exam, take a seat, ran into a car, take responsibility and improve my grammar — choose the conventional word, not the one that seems logical.
- Present perfect vs simple past (p. 78). Use has/have with the past participle when a past action connects to the present — “pankhas have become traditional craft items” — rather than the simple past, which closes the action off.
- Metaphor vs simile (p. 89). “She has a heart of gold” is a metaphor; a simile needs like or as. The poem’s “Brushstrokes of seeds” is likewise a metaphor — seeds are called brushstrokes directly.
| Mistake | Correct rule | How to check your answer |
|---|---|---|
| Treating “exotic and stylish” as a fact | It is an opinion — a judgement, not a verifiable fact | Ask: can this claim be proved from the text? |
| Marking an assertion-reason pair correct just because both are true | The reason must explain the assertion, not merely be true | Ask: does the reason cause or justify the assertion? |
| Writing “butter and bread” | The shortest word comes first: bread and butter | Say both orders aloud; the fixed one sounds natural |
| Choosing “give the exam” or “have a seat” | The collocations are take the exam and take a seat | Match the book’s collocation list on p. 77 |
| Using the simple past where the present still matters | Use has/have + past participle for past actions with present relevance | Ask: does this action still affect now? If yes, use the present perfect |
| Calling “heart of gold” a simile | It is a metaphor — a comparison without like or as | Look for like or as; if absent, it is a metaphor |
Question Formats in This Chapter and How to Approach Them
These are the question shapes the chapter itself uses, so mastering them is the preparation this chapter asks for. The list below comes straight from the printed exercises, with the style of answer each one expects.
- True or false with evidence — decide, then state the line from the text that settles it (p. 74).
- Opinion vs fact — complete a statement explaining why a given line is an opinion, not a fact (p. 74).
- Assertion-reason with four options — pick the option that links the assertion and reason correctly (pp. 74, 89).
- Inference — infer one reason for the commonality in pankha use, or one negative impact of technological advancement (pp. 74-75).
- Complete the statement — finish a sentence with an appropriate reason drawn from the text (pp. 74, 90).
- Select a line — find the line in the extract that depicts a change, or the line that shows gardening blending aesthetic beauty with natural growth (pp. 75, 90).
- Multiple-choice — the factor behind commercialisation (p. 75), the true metaphor among four options (p. 89), the option that imitates the rhyme scheme (p. 90).
- Long answers — evaluate, assess, support with two examples, justify a title (pp. 75, 91).
- Listening formats — choose four true statements from a dialogue of seven (p. 79), and identify what a school-garden description does not mention before circling detail answers (p. 93).
A full answer to the long questions on p. 75 opens with a clear position, supports it with two examples from the chapter, and ends with a judgement — the command words (evaluate, assess) demand evaluation, not description. One honest reminder: textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical — check the current official syllabus.
Winds of Change: Quick Chapter Recap
The chapter has no printed summary, so this recap is built from its content in four blocks — a night-before version of the whole unit.
- The pankha — from pankh (a bird’s feather) to the plumed pankhi of Ajanta; temple and court use; state-wise varieties in bamboo, palm leaf, silk, brass and leather; now mostly decorative, preserved through celebration and workshops (pp. 70-73).
- The Last Leaf — Johnsy’s countdown of the ivy leaves, Behrman’s painted leaf, his sacrifice, her recovery: art as a reason to live (pp. 82-85).
- Canvas of Soil — earth as palette, seeds as brushstrokes, plots as canvases; the garden as an allegory of growth, harmony and diversity (pp. 87-91).
- Toru Dutt’s closing garden — a sea of foliage that is not “dull unvaried green”: tamarinds, mango clumps, palms like gray pillars, seemuls red-red like a trumpet’s sound, and the white lotus turning into a cup of silver in the moonlight (p. 96).
Related Chapters and Study Resources
This listing is maintained for the 2026-27 academic session using the NCERT textbook information available to us. NCERT remains the authority for confirming the latest edition.
This chapter sits inside the Kaveri reader, the NCERT Class 9 English textbook.
For revision support on the texts around it, the Class 9 English notes hub collects material for the chapters in this book, and the Class 9 hub links the NCERT subjects this site covers at this level. From there, the CBSE notes home page reaches every class and subject.
The chapters around Winds of Change in the Kaveri reader — The Pot Maker and Vitamin M — each have their own page if you want the full set.
| What the chapter holds | Count | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Printed pages | 28 | |
| Figures with NCERT captions | 1 | |
| Tables | 12 | |
| In-text questions | 8 | |
| Official NCERT PDF | Download the chapter PDF | the chapter exactly as NCERT publishes it |
Chapter-wise notes for this subject are not published yet. The unit-wise syllabus on this page is complete and verified against the official CBSE curriculum document.
Reference: NCERT Class 9 English textbook (Kaveri), chapter 3, official edition on ncert.nic.in.
Sources and Data Verification
The page numbers, section titles and the figure caption on this page describe NCERT’s Class 9 English textbook Kaveri, Chapter 3, “Winds of Change”, in the official edition published on ncert.nic.in.
This page covers this one chapter of this one book. It does not cover the other NCERT Class 9 English books, so its page references and activity counts should not be read as applying to them.
The page is maintained for the current academic session from the NCERT edition available to us.
NCERT settles textbooks, editions and PDFs; CBSE settles curriculum, syllabus and examinations.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where can I download the official Winds of Change class 9 PDF?
From the official NCERT textbook portal at ncert.nic.in — use the download link at the top of this page. The file is the full Kaveri textbook; Chapter 3, Winds of Change, occupies printed pages 69 to 96 and is free to download.
What texts are inside the Class 9 English Chapter 3 ‘Winds of Change’?
Four texts: the pankha craft essay (pp. 69-81), The Last Leaf, an abridged O. Henry story (pp. 82-85), the poem Canvas of Soil with its full activity block (pp. 86-96), and the closing read-and-enjoy poem by Toru Dutt (p. 96).
What does the word pankha mean and where does it come from?
‘Pankha’ comes from ‘pankh’, the feather of a bird; ‘pankhi’ was a small plumed fan whose use appears in the Buddhist wall paintings at Ajanta, dating to the 2nd century CE (NCERT, p. 70).
Is The Last Leaf part of the class 9 English syllabus?
The Last Leaf is printed in the Kaveri textbook as a read-and-enjoy text under Learning Beyond the Text, with no exercise block of its own (pp. 82-85). Textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical — check the current official syllabus for what is examinable in your session.
What grammar and vocabulary does the Winds of Change chapter teach?
The essay’s language block covers fixed word pairs such as bread and butter, collocations such as take a seat and take responsibility, and the present perfect tense (pp. 76-78).
The poem’s block covers colour shades such as vermilion, jade and indigo, plus painting vocabulary such as portrait and mural (p. 92). The opening matching activity on p. 69 teaches indigenous, innovative, industrious, intricate, invoked and initiatives.
What are the main poetic devices in the poem Canvas of Soil?
The book’s own device table (p. 88) names imagery, metaphor, rhyme scheme (AABB), tone (appreciative), mood (joyful), speaker (a gardener) and alliteration (‘Blossoms bloom’), with allegory as the larger reading — the garden as life’s journey, and as harmony and diversity.
Explore Class 9 English Books
- Previous: The Pot Maker
- Next: Vitamin-M
Related chapters:
- How I Taught My Grandmother to Read
- The World of Limitless Possibilities
- Twin Melodies