9 The Proposal Class 10 is Chapter 9 of the NCERT Class 10 English textbook First Flight — a one-act farce by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, translated into English from the Russian original, that runs across about 21 printed pages (NCERT, pp. 119–139). The official chapter PDF is right below, and everything the file actually contains is mapped out after it.
Download 9 The Proposal Class 10 NCERT PDF
The whole chapter — the pre-reading activity, the Russian wedding article, the complete play text, the three exercise blocks and the closing activity pages — sits inside the official First Flight e-book.
Open the NCERT Class 10 English First Flight Chapter 9 The Proposal PDF directly from NCERT’s official textbook portal at ncert.nic.in, which hosts every chapter of the current NCERT edition free of cost.
| What the chapter holds | Count | Where it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Printed pages | 21 | |
| Figures with NCERT captions | 4 | |
| Tables | 2 | |
| Exercise questions | not fully captured | our text of this chapter is incomplete; the printed book has more |
| Activities | 1 | |
| Official NCERT PDF | Download the chapter PDF | the chapter exactly as NCERT publishes it |
9 The Proposal Class 10: What’s Inside the Chapter
Before you open the PDF, here is the shape of the file: the chapter’s sections, figures and exercise questions are counted in the table below, rendered directly from the NCERT text, and the walkthrough after it explains what each part teaches.
The chapter is built around the play itself, with three rings of material around it:
- a pre-reading activity on the word ‘proposal’ plus a short article on Russian wedding customs with a compare-and-contrast table (NCERT, pp. 120–121);
- the complete play text with its cast list, from Lomov’s entrance to the final curtain (NCERT, pp. 122–135);
- three exercise blocks — Thinking about the Play, Thinking about Language (with its Reported Speech section), and Speaking and Writing (NCERT, pp. 135–138);
- a closing activity page with a dictation and a homophones puzzle (NCERT, p. 139).
For the numbers — how many sections, figures and exercises the chapter holds — read the table above; the rest of this page explains what those parts are and how to read them.
What This Chapter Actually Contains
The lesson gives you context first, then the play, then the work NCERT expects you to do with it. The four parts below are the whole chapter in order, so you know what to expect before you read a single line.
Why the Chapter Opens with a Russian Wedding
The play you are about to read is Russian, and Russian wedding customs colour everything in it — so NCERT opens with two warm-up steps before the drama begins.
First, an activity on the word ‘proposal’. It is given three meanings: a suggestion, plan or scheme for doing something; an offer for a possible plan or action; and the act of asking someone’s hand in marriage (NCERT, p. 120). The play, the activity hints, is about the third.
Second, a short article on a real Russian wedding (NCERT, pp. 120–121). The groom arrives in a car procession, then has to climb the stairs of his bride’s building one landing at a time — at each landing he must answer riddles or pick out his bride from photographs of babies, and pay cash if he guesses wrong.
After registration the couple tours the city, then comes the reception with toasts, and finally the bride gets ‘stolen’ while a fee is demanded for her return — and a separate fee for her shoe. The chapter then asks you and a partner to compare these customs with Indian weddings in an empty two-column table (NCERT, p. 121).
The connection matters for the play: the groom who must win his bride through tests, riddles and cash payments is exactly the kind of test Lomov fails spectacularly — without a single riddle being asked.
The Play: Characters and the Three Quarrels
The cast list tells you everything about social standing first: Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov is a landowner, his daughter Natalya Stepanovna is twenty-five years old, and Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov is a neighbour described as ‘large and hearty, but very suspicious’.
The setting is a drawing-room in Chubukov’s house; Lomov enters in a dress-jacket and white gloves (NCERT, p. 122) — formal dress for a formal purpose.
The engine of the plot is the gap between that formal purpose and what actually happens. Lomov wants to propose; the proposal is derailed twice, finished in a burst of impatience, and then picked apart again in the final line. The timeline below keeps the order straight.
| Stage of the play | What happens | NCERT pages |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The formal visit | Lomov arrives in evening dress and white gloves; the request for Natalya’s hand gets started three times and is interrupted each time by water, trembling and asides. | pp. 122–124 |
| 2. Quarrel 1: Oxen Meadows | Natalya challenges the words ‘my Oxen Meadows’; documents and ancestral stories replace the proposal, insults build up, and Lomov staggers out. | pp. 125–130 |
| 3. The turn | Chubukov lets slip that Lomov had come to propose; Natalya is hysterical, calls him back, and suddenly the Meadows become his. | pp. 130–131 |
| 4. Quarrel 2: Guess versus Squeezer | A dispute over which dog is finer — Lomov’s Guess or Chubukov’s Squeezer — escalates into family insults; Lomov collapses mid-shout. | pp. 131–134 |
| 5. The blessing | Chubukov revives Lomov, joins the two hands together and gives his blessing; the marriage is agreed with a kiss. | p. 135 |
| 6. The last word | The final exchange before the curtain is the same dog quarrel — Natalya insists Squeezer is better, Lomov insists Guess is — while Chubukov tries to drown it with champagne. | p. 135 |
Hidden inside those two big quarrels is a third one, the family-insult quarrel: the characters run out of arguments about land and dogs, and start attacking each other’s families instead — from ‘pettifogger’ (p. 129) to ‘old rat! Jesuit!’ (p. 134). Chekhov stacks it inside the other two, so that every new quarrel reopens the previous one.
Each character wants something different at every moment, and their own lines give the evidence.
| Character | What they want | Evidence from their own lines |
|---|---|---|
| Lomov | A settled, quiet, regular life; a wife who will say yes quickly, and the principle that his property is his | ‘The great thing is, I must have my mind made up. If I give myself time to think, to hesitate, to talk a lot, to look for an ideal, or for real love, then I’ll never get married.’ (p. 125 |
| Natalya | The marriage once she learns it exists; before that, the Meadows at any cost | ‘I’m dying! Fetch him!’ then, once he returns, ‘The Meadows are yours, yes, yours. We were wrong.’ (pp. 130–131 |
| Chubukov | The burden of a grown-up daughter off his shoulders — and peace | ‘I’ve been hoping for it for a long time.’ (p. 123); later ‘Hurry up and get married… She’s willing! I give you my blessing and so on. Only leave me in peace!’ (p. 135 |
The funniest part of the table is the contradiction: Chubukov’s private aside tells the audience he believes Lomov has ‘come to borrow money’, while his public speech showers the visitor with love (NCERT, p. 123). The audience gets the joke before the characters do.
The Three Exercise Blocks After the Play
Once the play ends, NCERT gives you three blocks of work in a fixed order — understand the play, work on the language, then speak and write.
- Thinking about the Play (p. 135): three tasks: judge whether Chubukov’s first suspicion of Lomov’s purpose and whether his loving words to Lomov are sincere; decide whether Natalya is truly a ‘lovesick cat’; and a hunt through the whole play for the accusations and insults the characters hurl at each other, followed by five adjectives of your own for each character and a guess at what they will quarrel about next.
- Thinking about Language (pp. 136–137: three language tasks, then a full Reported Speech section. Task I.1 asks you to spot expressions that feel more Russian than English — an older man calling an adult a ‘darling’ or ‘treasure’ — and to contrast them with idiomatic modern English in the same play; I.2 is a pronunciation and syllable-stress table of words like palpitations, pedigree, malicious, accustomed; I.3 asks dictionary meanings and sentences for three phrases, including ‘you may take it that’. The Reported Speech section defines a reporting clause, a reporting verb and a reported clause, gives five pairs of direct-to-reported pairs built from the play’s own lines, and lists the changes in a fill-in-the-blank exercise (NCERT, pp. 136–137).
- Speaking and Writing (p. 138): four ideas for oral and written work: a discussion on anger management with three ill effects and ways to avoid losing your temper; writing a script of five exchanges from an excerpt from Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World, with stage directions; a group discussion on the qualities of a marriage partner; and a chat about which scenes feel like moments from romantic comedy films.
The Closing Activity Pages
The final page closes the lesson with a teacher-led dictation (NCERT, p. 139). The teacher dictates a biography — born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564, married at eighteen to a woman eight years his senior, prosperous in the London theatre world, retired at forty-seven to a large house in Stratford, died in 1616 — and the students guess the name: the playwright William Shakespeare.
A short ‘what we have done’ note records that the lesson gave you a play by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov.
Beside it sits a one-line definition of homophones in practice: words that are spelt the same, and sometimes even pronounced the same, but have very different meanings.
The two model sentences play on close (near / to shut) and close (to shut), and present (the current time / to offer as a gift) and present (a gift), and you are asked to check each pronunciation in a dictionary (NCERT, p. 139).
Key Ideas in The Proposal: What to Understand First
Three ideas make the play fall into place before you read a single page of the drama. All three are visible from the chapter’s own introduction and the opening scenes.
Marriage as an Economic Alliance
Read the chapter’s own intro first and the whole play makes sense.
The note before the play says wealthy families seek ties with other wealthy families in order to increase their estates, through marriages that make good economic sense — and it promises that economic good sense will make the proposal happen in the end, even though the quarrelling perhaps continues (NCERT, p. 121).
Lomov’s private calculation proves it. Alone on stage he reasons that he is 35 — ‘a critical age’ — that he needs a quiet and regular life, and that Natalya is an excellent housekeeper, not bad-looking, and well-educated; his conclusion is, ‘What more do I want (NCERT, p. 125). Love is never once mentioned as a reason to marry.
Chubukov, for his part, has been hoping for the match for a long time and has always loved Lomov ‘as if you were my own son’ (p. 123). Everyone has a practical motive; nobody mentions love, and that is the joke.
How the Play Works: Farce and Exaggeration
Knowing the genre stops you misreading the play as a study of madness or real hatred. The chapter names it outright: a one-act play — a play complete in a single act — and a farce, a comedy of exaggerated situations (NCERT, p. 121). Farce has simple rules: nobody is really hurt, the stakes are small, and every reaction is blown up.
- Asides: characters speak their true thoughts where only the audience can hear. Chubukov mutters, ‘He’s come to borrow money. Shan’t give him any!’ the moment Lomov arrives (p. 123); Natalya mutters, ‘I wish I knew how to get him started’ once she needs him to propose (p. 131).
- Escalating insults: the comfortable talk of neighbours collapses into abuse — ‘landgrabber’ (p. 127), ‘pettifogger’ (p. 129), ‘lunacy in your family’ and a hump-backed mother (pp. 129–130, ‘malicious, doublefaced intriguer’ (p. 130), and ‘old rat! Jesuit!’ (p. 134).
- Physical comedy: Lomov clutches his heart, calls for water, declares his heart has burst and a shoulder has come off, demands a doctor, and appears to die — then revives the instant marriage is mentioned (pp. 133–135). The final kiss is followed at once by a return to the dog argument.
- Small stakes: the whole Oxen Meadows prize is about five dessiatins of land worth perhaps 300 roubles (p. 127), and the dogs are priced at 125 and 125 roubles (pp. 131–132) — small sums for ruinous rows, which is exactly why it is farce.
Dramatic Irony: What the Audience Knows
This term is a teacher’s word, not one NCERT prints, and it names the play’s best comedy engine: the audience constantly knows more than a character does, so the characters fight in the dark while we see the whole picture.
- Chubukov privately decides Lomov has come to borrow money (p. 123) while we have just seen the evening dress and gloves of a marriage proposal.
- Natalya greets her suitor as ‘a merchant come for his goods’ (pp. 124–125) and quarrels with him over land for pages, never knowing he wants to marry her — and collapses into hysterics the second she finds out (p. 130).
- Her apology and the sudden surrender of the Meadows to Lomov follow immediately after she learns the proposal is at risk (p. 131). The reversal is instant, and its instantness is the joke.
The Four Illustrations in the Chapter, Read Closely
Four images appear in the NCERT pages — two inside the play and two on the closing activity page. Each one captures a comic or teaching moment, and their captions are, in every case, the characters’ own lines from the text (NCERT, pp. 124, 132, 139, 139).
Lomov: ‘I Shall Try to Be Brief’
This image sits where Lomov finally begins his speech to Natalya at last (NCERT, p. 124), after a full page of hesitation. The line is comic because he has already been anything but brief — he has drunk water, trembled, shared asides about his palpitations and rewritten his opening sentence twice.
Before he speaks a word, ask what the evening dress and white gloves already tell us: this is a formal visit with a formal purpose, and the costume is the first illustration of everything that is about to go wrong.
Chubukov: ‘The Count’s Whipper-in Hit Him’
This is the peak of the dog quarrel (NCERT, p. 132). Lomov has just announced that at the Marusinsky hunt his dog Guess ran neck-and-neck with the Count’s dog while Squeezer was left a whole verst behind. Chubukov’s answer is the caption: Squeezer fell behind only because the Count’s whipper-in hit him with his whip.
Every ‘fact’ in a farce can be instantly re-explained to favour the speaker, and this line is the play’s own example.\
‘He Retired to a Large House in Stratford’
The dictation activity on the closing page supplies the biography to be dictated, and this image carries the clue that identifies the playwright (NCERT, p. 139). Born at Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564, married at eighteen, prosperous in London theatre, retired to a large house in Stratford at forty-seven, dead in 1616 — the answer is William Shakespeare.
The caption line is the giveaway, so students are answering the question before the dictation ends.
‘Time to Present the Present’
The homophones activity on the closing page works on words ‘spelt similarly, and sometimes even pronounced similarly, but have very different meanings’ (NCERT, p. 139). The captioned sentence plays on present twice: the present moment and the act of giving a present. Check each pronunciation in a dictionary, as the activity asks, and you have the definition of homophones in practice.
Key Terms in The Proposal, Explained
A quick glossary, so the play reads smoothly the first time — dramatic terms, Russian words and the word ‘proposal’ itself.
| Term | Meaning in this chapter |
|---|---|
| proposal | Three meanings from the opening activity: a suggestion, plan or scheme; an offer for a possible plan or action; the act of asking someone’s hand in marriage (p. 120). The play is about the third. |
| one-act play | A play that completes itself within a single act (p. 121) — here, one continuous scene in a drawing-room. |
| farce | A comedy of exaggerated situations (p. 121); nobody is really hurt and the stakes stay small. |
| landowner | The social standing of all three characters — the cast list names Chubukov and Lomov as landowners, and Natalya as the daughter of one (p. 122). |
| aside | A character’s private words that the audience can hear but other characters cannot; Chubukov, for example, aside says ‘He’s come to borrow money. Shan’t give him any!’ (p. 123. |
| dessiatin | A Russian land measure. Natalya says the Oxen Meadows come to five dessiatins (p. 127) — a tiny plot to fight over. |
| rouble | Russian currency. The Meadows are worth perhaps 300 roubles, Guess cost Lomov 125 roubles, and Squeezer cost Chubukov 85 roubles (pp. 127, 131, 132). |
Common Mistakes Students Make with The Proposal
The classic errors of this chapter are predictable — plot order, dog ownership and the grammar exercise — so here they are named before you make them.
| Mistake | Correct rule | How to check your answer |
|---|---|---|
| Getting the quarrel order wrong and mixing the two big rows | The Meadows quarrel comes first (pp. 125–130; the dog quarrel follows it (pp. 131–134) and the very last exchange returns to the dogs (p. 135. New quarrels reopen old ones — the family insults appear inside both. | Name the two disputed things in order: first land, then dogs. If your retelling has the dogs first, it is wrong. |
| Confusing the dogs and their prices | Guess is Lomov’s dog (125 roubles, gone lame, p. 131); Squeezer is Chubukov’s and Natalya’s dog (85 roubles, ‘overshot’, pp. 132–132). Chubukov calls Squeezer the best dog in the district (p. 133; Lomov calls Guess purebred and firm on his feet. | Check who paid what and which dog has gone lame — Guess, not Squeezer. Check which dog Lomov calls overshot — Squeezer, not Guess, his own |
| Reading the collapses and insults as genuine hatred or real illness | This is farce, comedy of exaggerated situations (p. 121. Lomov appears dead, then revives the instant marriage is mentioned, kisses Natalya, and demands an admission about the dogs (pp. 134–135). The gestures are theatre, not psychology. | Ask: could a dying man immediately demand the last word on a dog? In farce, yes; in a psychological study, no. |
| Assuming ‘proposal’ means a business plan | The word has three meanings (p. 120; the play’s proposal is the offer of marriage — even though the economic motive is real (p. 121. | Notice Chubukov reacts to a marriage proposal, not to any document. |
| Reported-speech slips — here, this very day, tense and pronouns | The NCERT exercise itself lists the changes (pp. 136–137): here becomes there; this very day becomes that very day; present tense becomes past, past becomes past perfect; present continuous becomes past continuous; first-person pronouns I, me, our, mine shift to match the subject or object of the reporting verb; a respectful address adds respectfully to the reporting clause; a question is reported with the verb asked. | Account for at least four changes in every conversion you write: reporting verb, tense, adverb, pronoun — or be ready to explain why a pronoun stays the same. |
One original worked example, following the NCERT method exactly:
Direct: “You have no right to talk of my Meadows like that, Natalya Stepanovna!” shouted Lomov, trembling.
Reported: Trembling, Lomov shouted that Natalya Stepanovna had no right to talk of his Meadows like that.
- the reporting clause is placed first: Lomov shouted;
- present tense have becomes past tense had;
- the second-person you addressed to Natalya becomes the third-person name Natalya Stepanovna;
- the first-person my Meadows becomes his Meadows, matching the subject of the reporting verb, Lomov;
- the quoted words disappear and the sentence is joined with that.
How to Prepare This Chapter for the Exam
The NCERT exercise sections themselves show the kinds of question this chapter supports, so prepare against those sections and nothing fancier.
- Comprehension (Thinking about the Play, p. 135): you must judge characters with reasons taken from the text — is Chubukov sincere when he says he has always loved Lomov as a son, and is Natalya really a ‘lovesick cat’ — and you must list the accusations and insults the characters trade, then write five adjectives of your own for each character. A full answer needs the quote plus an explanation of what the line reveals.
- Language work (Thinking about Language, pp. 136–137): spotting translated or Russian-flavoured English; pronunciation and syllable stress in a table of words; dictionary meanings of three phrases; and Reported Speech — direct to indirect conversion with the correct reporting verb, tense shift and pronoun shift. The five pairs in the NCERT exercise are the model to practise against — do each pair and explain at least four changes, then try the newspaper-excerpt rewrite on p. 137 by converting only the direct-speech sentences.
- Speaking and Writing (p. 138): structured discussion practice — anger management and the qualities of a marriage partner — plus a scriptwriting task where the excerpt from Tagore is turned into five exchanges with stage directions, which is exactly the writing task this lesson supports.
Textbook contents and the examinable syllabus are not always identical — check the current official CBSE syllabus to confirm which parts of this chapter are examinable this session. No part of this page promises marks or question weightage.
The Proposal in One Read
Lomov, 35, dresses in evening wear and walks over to his wealthy neighbour Chubukov’s house to propose to Natalya, 25.
He wants a settled, regular life; the families are rich neighbours, and an alliance makes economic sense on both sides (NCERT, pp. 121, 125. Chubukov is delighted — but before the proposal is fully out, the Oxen Meadows argument erupts. Each side proves ownership through a different ancestral story, insults fly from ‘landgrabber’ to ‘old rat’ and ‘Jesuit’, and Lomov is driven out (pp. 125–130). When Natalya learns he had come to propose, she calls him back; the Meadows suddenly become his (pp. 130–131). Then a second quarrel breaks out over which dog is better, Lomov’s Guess or Chubukov’s Squeezer (pp. 131–134); the shouting ends with Lomov collapsed. Chubukov, desperate, joins their hands and gives his blessing, and the marriage is agreed with a kiss (pp. 134–135). The very last lines resume the dog quarrel, with champagne toasts shouted over them (p. 135). Economic good sense, as the chapter introduction says, guarantees the proposal is made after all — although the quarrelling perhaps continues (p. 121.
Related Class 10 English Chapters
Move forward or backward in First Flight, or across to the notes hubs for revision:
- The Sermon at Benares, Class 10 First Flight Chapter 8″>The chapter 8 lesson before this one in First Flight, The Sermon at Benares, ends with a very different kind of formal speech — calm where The Proposal is frantic.
- Class 10 English textbook hub lists every First Flight chapter and every Footprints Without Feet chapter in one place.
- Class 10 books hub covers the textbooks for every subject in the class.
- For revision support, the Class 10 English notes hub and the Class 10 notes hub collect chapter notes side by side. The story Bholi, in Bholi Class 10 notes, is the arranged-marriage story to compare with this play.
Sources and Data Verification
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 page describes the NCERT Class 10 English textbook First Flight, chapter 9, The Proposal — the pre-reading activity, the play text, its exercise blocks and its closing activity pages.
- Page numbers refer to the printed NCERT edition, where the chapter runs from p. 119 to p. 139; the official PDF is published on ncert.nic.in, linked above.
- This listing is maintained for the current academic session using the NCERT information available to us.
- NCERT settles the textbook texts, editions and PDFs; CBSE settles the curriculum, syllabus and examinations and no expert-review process is claimed here.
Reference: NCERT Class 10 First Flight textbook, chapter 9, official edition on ncert.nic.in.
The Proposal Class 10: Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the characters in The Proposal Class 10?
Three characters appear in the play: Stepan Stepanovitch Chubukov, a landowner; Natalya Stepanovna Chubukov, his daughter, twenty-five years old; and Ivan Vassilevitch Lomov, a wealthy neighbour described in the cast list as large and hearty but very suspicious (NCERT, p. 122. The setting is Chubukov’s drawing-room, and Lomov enters it in evening dress and white gloves.
Why do Lomov and Natalya quarrel over Oxen Meadows?
Both families claim the same strip of land between the birchwoods and the Burnt Marsh.
Lomov says his aunt’s grandmother gave the Meadows in free permanent use to the peasants of Natalya’s great-grandfather in return for bricks; Natalya and Chubukov answer that their grandfathers always counted their land as reaching the Burnt Marsh — nearly three hundred years of belonging (NCERT, pp. 126–127. The characters are quarrelsome people who fight over petty issues (p. 121), and the whole prize is five dessiatins worth about 300 roubles (p. 127) — which is the joke.
What is the theme of The Proposal by Anton Chekhov?
The chapter states it outright: the play is about the tendency of wealthy families to seek ties with other wealthy families to increase their estates through marriages that make good economic sense (NCERT, p. 121. Around that sits a second theme — how pride and petty quarrels keep overtaking common sense, and economic good sense has to force the proposal through in the end, although the quarrelling, the introduction adds, perhaps continues.
What does proposal mean in the chapter The Proposal?
The opening activity gives three meanings — a suggestion, plan or scheme; an offer for a possible plan or action; and the act of asking someone’s hand in marriage (NCERT, p. 120. The play is about the third meaning: Lomov comes to ask Chubukov for the hand of his daughter in marriage (pp. 122–123.
Do Lomov and Natalya get married at the end of the play?
Yes.
Chubukov joins Lomov’s hand into his daughter’s, gives his blessing and says she is willing; they kiss and both say they are happy (NCERT, p. 135. The curtain falls, however, on one more dog quarrel — Natalya insists Squeezer is better, Lomov insists Guess is better, and Chubukov tries to drown them with champagne. The marriage is agreed; the quarrelling is not.
Was The Proposal originally written in English?
No. It was originally titled ‘A Marriage Proposal’, a one-act farce written in 1888–89 by the Russian short story writer and dramatist Anton Chekhov (NCERT, p. 121. The First Flight text is a translation, and the first Language exercise asks you to find the expressions that feel more Russian than English — an adult man addressed as ‘my darling’ or ‘my treasure’ — and to contrast them with idiomatic modern English in the play (p. 136.
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