The Making of Regional Cultures Summary Class 7 History Chapter 7

The Cheras and the Development of Malayalam

• The Chera kingdom of Mahodayapuram was established in the ninth century in the south-western part of the peninsula, part of present-day Kerala.
• The rulers introduced the Malayalam language and script in their inscriptions.
• The first literary works in Malayalam, dated to about the twelfth century, are directly indebted to Sanskrit.

Rulers and Religious Traditions: The Jagannatha Cult

• The best example of this process is the cult of Jagannatha (literally, lord of the world, a name for Vishnu) at Puri, Orissa.
• In the twelfth century, one of the most important rulers of the Ganga dynasty, Anantavarman, decided to erect a temple for Purushottama Jagannatha at Puri.

The Rajputs and Traditions of Heroism

• In the nineteenth century, the region that constitutes most of present-day Rajasthan, was called Rajputana by the British.
• Rajput rulers cherished the ideal of the hero who fought valiantly.
• Stories about Rajput heroes were recorded in poems and songs.

Beyond Regional Frontiers: The Story of Kathak

• The term kathak is derived from katha, a word used in Sanskrit and other languages for story.
• The kathaks were originally a caste of story-tellers in temples of north India.
• It began evolving into a distinct mode of dance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the spread of the bhakti movement.
• Under the Mughal emperors and their nobles, Kathak was performed in the court.
• It developed in two traditions or gharanas: one in the courts of Rajasthan (Jaipur) and the other in Lucknow.
• By the third quarter of the nineteenth century it was firmly established as a dance form in the adjoining areas of present-day Punjab, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

Painting for Patrons: The Tradition of Miniatures

• Miniatures are small-sized paintings.
• The Mughal emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan patronised highly skilled painters.
• With the decline of the Mughal Empire, many painters moved out to the courts of the emerging regional states.
• They retained and developed their distinctive characteristics.
• Basohli and Kangra School of miniature paintings developed in the Himalayas from the seventeenth century.

A Closer Look: Bengal

The Growth of a Regional Language

• Now-a-days, People in Bengal spoke Bengali.
• From the fourth to the third centuries BCE, commercial ties began to develop between Bengal and Magadha, which led to the growing influence of Sanskrit.
• During the fourth century the Gupta rulers established political control over north Bengal and began to settle Brahmanas in this area.
• In the seventh century the Chinese traveller Xuan Zang observed that languages related to Sanskrit were in use all over Bengal.
• In 1586, when Akbar conquered Bengal, it formed the nucleus of the Bengal suba.
  • During this period, Bengali developed as regional language.
• In fact by the fifteenth century the Bengali group of dialects came to be united by a common literary language.
• Early Bengali literature may be divided into two categories: Sanskritic and Nath literature.

Pirs and Temples

• From the sixteenth century, people began to migrate in large numbers from the less fertile western Bengal to the forested and marshy areas of south-eastern Bengal.
• The early settlers sought some order and assurance in the unstable conditions of the new settlements.
• The community leaders, called pirs, were the source of order and stability for the early settlers.
  • They included Sufi saints, soldiers, colonisers, Hindu and Buddhist deities and spirits.
• From the fifteenth century onwards, temple construction started on a large scale.

Fish as food

• Fish and rice are available in plenty in the riverine plains of Bengal. Thus, these became the staple food items.