NCERT Class 6 Social Science Chapter 7 PDF – India’s Cultural Roots (2026-27)

Download India’s Cultural Roots – NCERT Class 6 Social Science Chapter 7 PDF from the new NCERT Class 6 Social Science book Exploring Society: India and Beyond (2026-27). Read the chapter online or download the free PDF. Indian culture is drawn as a tree — many roots, one trunk, many branches. The chapter opens with that image and closes with a photograph of a banyan. The roots go back thousands of years, some of them as far as the Indus-Sarasvatī civilisation of…

India’s Cultural Roots PDF – Chapter 7 of Exploring Society: India and Beyond

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NCERT Book Class 6 Social Science (Exploring Society India and Beyond) Chapter 7 India's Cultural Roots Open PDF

What Is in India’s Cultural Roots? (Class 6 Social Science Chapter 7)

• Indian culture is drawn as a tree — many roots, one trunk, many branches. The chapter opens with that image and closes with a photograph of a banyan. The roots go back thousands of years, some of them as far as the Indus-Sarasvatī civilisation of Chapter 6. From the roots grows a common trunk of shared ideas, and out of the trunk grow branches — art, literature, science, medicine, governance, martial arts, and many schools of thought, that is, groups of thinkers or spiritual seekers who share similar ideas about human life and the world.
• The Vedas are India’s oldest texts, and they were memorised, not written. The word comes from Sanskrit vid, ‘knowledge’. There are four — the Ṛig, Yajur, Sāma and Atharva Veda — made of thousands of hymns, prayers in the form of poems and songs, composed by rishis (male seers) and rishikas (female seers) in an early form of Sanskrit, in the Sapta Sindhava region. Experts date the Ṛig Veda anywhere between the 5th and the 2nd millennium BCE, so for 100 to 200 generations these texts were carried in memory alone. In 2008 UNESCO recognised Vedic chanting as “a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity”.
• The Vedic message begins with unity. Hymns are addressed to many deities — Indra, Agni, Varuṇa, Mitra, Sarasvatī, Uṣhas — who, together with the seers, sustain ṛitam, truth and order in human life and in the cosmos. Yet the early rishis and rishikas saw those deities as one, not as separate beings: ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti — “The Existent is one, but sages give it many names.” Truth was often another name for God, and the last mantras of the Ṛig Veda call for people to come together, speak together and be united in mind and heart.
• The Upaniṣhads added rebirth, karma, brahman and ātman. Vedic society was organised in janas or clans — the Ṛig Veda alone lists over thirty — with words like rājā, sabhā and samiti as our only clues to how they governed themselves. Vedic culture developed yajña rituals, which grew steadily more complex. The Upaniṣhads built on Vedic ideas and introduced new ones: rebirth and karma. In the school later called Vedanta, everything is one divine essence, brahman — aham brahmāsmi, tat tvam asi — and the ātman or Self within every being is ultimately one with it. From this follows sarve bhavantu sukhinah, “May all creatures be happy”. Yoga, another school, developed methods to realise brahman in one’s consciousness. Together these schools became the foundations of what is called Hinduism today.
• Buddhism and Jainism did not accept the authority of the Vedas. Prince Siddhārtha Gautama, born at Lumbini (today in Nepal) about two-and-a-half millenniums ago, saw at the age of 29 an old man, a sick man, a dead body and a peaceful ascetic; he left his palace, and after meditating under a pipal tree at Bodh Gaya realised that avidyā (ignorance) and attachment are the source of human suffering. He became the Buddha, the ‘awakened one’, taught ahimsa — literally ‘non-hurting’ — and a sincere inner discipline, and founded the Sangha of bhikṣhus and later bhikṣhuṇīs. Prince Vardhamāna, born near Vaiśhālī in the early 6th century BCE, left home at 30 and after 12 years of ascetic discipline attained ‘infinite knowledge’, becoming Mahāvīra. Jain teachings rest on ahimsa, anekāntavāda (truth has many aspects) and aparigraha (non-possession).
• Different schools, one trunk — and complete freedom to choose. A third school, the Chārvāka or Lokāyata, held that only this material world exists and that there can be no life after death; it never became popular and disappeared, but the book mentions it to show how wide the diversity of belief systems was — “people were free to choose what suited them”. Despite important differences, the Vedic, Buddhist and Jain schools shared dharma, karma, rebirth, the search for an end to suffering and ignorance, and many values. That shared ground is the trunk of the tree.
• Folk and tribal traditions are cultural roots too — and the borrowing went both ways. India’s oral traditions pass on teachings and practices through everyday practice rather than written texts. A tribe, as anthropologists define it today, is a group of families or clans sharing common descent, a culture and a language, living as a close-knit community under a chief and holding no private property; ancient India had no word for it — tribes were simply janas living in forests or mountains. In 2011 India had 705 tribes and about 104 million tribal people. Jagannath of Puri was, by tradition, originally a tribal deity; some tribes long ago adopted Hindu deities and have their own Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa. Mountains, rivers, trees and even some stones are sacred in folk, tribal and Hindu belief alike, and many tribes also hold a concept of a supreme being — Donyipolo, Khandoba, Singbonga. As the sociologist André Béteille put it, the influence has run in both directions “since the beginning of history and before”.

Quick revision – India’s Cultural Roots

Old NCERT vs New – Class 6 Social Science

This chapter is from Exploring Society: India and Beyond, the new NCERT Class 6 Social Science book (NCF-SE 2023, used from 2024-25). It replaced the old book “Our Pasts, The Earth Our Habitat and Social and Political Life”, so chapter numbers and names differ from older PDFs.

Solutions and All Chapters

Answers to the exercises and the full chapter list of Exploring Society: India and Beyond:

India’s Cultural Roots – Overview

Class 6 Social Science Chapter 7 – FAQs