English · Chapter 26
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Arts and Creations is a Language Development unit of the Grade 11 Compulsory English course, and it takes human creativity as its theme: painting, sculpture, music, dance, drama, craft, architecture and the newer digital forms. Like every Language Development unit it is examined through comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, speaking and writing rather than through literary criticism, so the reading text is a vehicle for language work. The unit trains students to read an informative passage closely, to handle the specialised vocabulary of the arts, to describe objects and processes in which the doer matters less than the thing done, and to write descriptions and reviews. NEB questions on it reward accurate reading, precise use of that vocabulary, correct grammatical transformation, and organised writing that stays on the theme.
Confirm the exact title and author of this unit's reading text against your own textbook copy before you revise, because the comprehension questions are set on that passage, and what follows develops the theme as the unit's reading treats it.
The reading in a unit of this kind is an informative or descriptive prose piece about art and the people who make it. Art, as such a text presents it, is not confined to galleries. It includes the painting on a wall, the carving on a window frame, the shape of a water jar, the tune played on a madal at a festival, the steps of a folk dance, the pattern printed on cloth and the design of a building. Wherever human beings have had to make something useful, they have also tried to make it beautiful, and that added care is what we call art.
Such a text usually begins with the question why people create at all. The answers it offers are practical and human. Art records what a community believes and remembers; it gives shape to feelings that are difficult to put into plain words; it teaches and warns through images; it earns a living for the maker; and it gives pleasure to the person who looks or listens. A second movement of the text describes the kinds of art. The visual arts, such as drawing, painting and sculpture, produce objects that can be seen and touched. The performing arts, such as music, dance and drama, exist only while they are being performed. Crafts join usefulness to beauty, and architecture shapes the spaces in which people actually live. Newer forms, from photography to film to digital design, extend the same impulse with new tools.
A third movement turns to the maker. Creation is presented as work rather than magic: an idea, then observation, sketching, trial, mistake, correction, and long practice in a chosen medium. In Nepal much of this skill has been carried within families and workshops and taught by watching and repeating, in the woodcarving and metalwork of the Kathmandu Valley, in the paubha and thangka painting traditions, in the folk painting of the Terai and in the pottery of Bhaktapur. From this the text draws its final concern, which is preservation. When a young generation leaves such work for better paid employment, a skill refined over centuries can disappear within a single lifetime, and unlike a lost book it cannot be reprinted.
Comprehension questions on a text of this kind ask what art is, why human beings create, how a particular form or object is made, what threatens traditional art, and what the writer recommends. Answer them in the text's own terms and in complete sentences.