Class 7 Arts (Kriti) Chapter 19, The Art of Calligraphy, traces India’s 5,000-year script heritage from Indus seals and Ashokan Brahmi edicts to Prem Behari Narain Raizada and Vasant Krishan Vaidya’s handwritten Constitution of India, teaching students expressive lettering and poster typography.
What Class 7 Art Chapter 19 Covers
Evolution of Indian Scripts & Letter Anatomy (Activities 19.1–19.3) shows how modern Indian scripts evolved from Brahmi, examines stroke weight, serifs and curves across scripts, and hunts for typographic styles in print.
Expressive Lettering & Calligraphy in Posters (Activities 19.4–19.5) draws words whose visual style reflects their meaning (‘Writing Like We Speak’) and designs a balanced informational poster combining hand-lettered calligraphy and illustration.
Letters around us: India’s writing can be traced to the Indus-Sarasvati civilisation, about 5,000 years old. The Indian rupee symbol ₹ comes from the Devanagari letter र, and its top line, the shiro-rekha, gives it an Indian identity. A letter hunt in old print material shows how printing worked before digital technology.
Letters with feeling: the same letter can be written in many styles, like bodies that share the same parts but look different, which the chapter calls letter anatomy. Activity 19.4 writes words the way you would say them, louder or softer, and Activity 19.5 designs a poster title with the date, time, venue and contact details below it.
Exercises in Chapter 19
- Activities, Circle Time reflections and end-of-chapter Assessment rubrics.
Read Class 7 Art Chapter 19 Online
More Chapters
- Previous: Chapter 18: Textiles and Traditions
- Next: Chapter 20: Integration of All Art Forms — Sculptures Come Alive!
- Hindi medium: Class 7 Arts Chapter 19 PDF in Hindi (Kriti)
- All Art chapters and the other Class 7 books: Class 7 NCERT books 2026-27
- All Class 1 to 12 NCERT Textbooks: NCERT Books PDF (Class 1–12)
- Every book chapter by chapter: NCERT chapter wise PDF
FAQ
Who calligraphed the original handwritten Constitution of India?
Prem Behari Narain Raizada hand-calligraphed the original English Constitution of India in flowing italic script, and Vasant Krishan Vaidya calligraphed the Hindi version, illuminated by Nandalal Bose and his Shantiniketan artists.
Which ancient script is the mother of most modern Indian scripts?
The Brahmi script (seen in Emperor Ashoka’s 3rd-century BCE rock and pillar edicts) is the ancestor of Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Odia, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and many Southeast Asian scripts.
Which letter is the Indian rupee symbol derived from?
The Devanagari letter र (ra); its top line is the shiro-rekha of Devanagari script.