CLAT 2011

Instructions

The questions in this section are based on a single passage. The questions are to be answered on the basis of what is stated or implied in the passage.

In recent weeks, the writers William Dalrymple and Patrick French, among others, have come before a fusillade of criticism in India, much of it questioning not their facts, not their interpretations, but their foreignness.

"Who gels to write about India?" The Wall Street Journal asked on Wednesday in its own report on this Indian literary feuding. It is a complicated question, not least because to decide who gets to write about India, you would need to decide who gets to decide who gets to write about India. Rather than conjecturing some Committee for the Deciding o! the Deciding of Who Gets to Write About India, it might be easier to let writers write what they please and readers read what they wish.

The accusations pouring forth from a section of the Indian commentarial are varied. Some criticism is of a genuine literary nature, fair game, customary, expected. But lately a good amount of the reproaching has been about identity.

In the case of Mr. Dalrymple, a Briton who lives in New Delhi, it is—in the critics' view - that his writing is an act of re-colonization. In the case of Mr. French, it is that he belongs
to a group of foreign writers who use business-class lounges and see some merit in capitalist and therefore do not know the real India, which only the commentarial member in question does.

What is most interesting about these appraisals is that their essential nature makes reading the book superfluous, as one of my Indian reviewers openly admitted. (His review was not about the book but about his refusal to read the book.) The book is not necessary in these cases, for the argument is about who can write about India, not what has been written.

For critics of this persuasion, India surely seems a lonely land. A country with a millennial history of Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists living peaceably together; a country of hundreds of dialects in which so many Indians are linguistic foreigners to each other, and happily, tolerantly so; a country that welcomes foreign seekers (of yoga poses, of spiritual wisdom, of ancestral roots) with open arms: a country where, outside the elite world of South.

Delhi and South Bombay, I have not heard an Indian ask whether outsiders have a right to write, think or exist on their soil.

But it is not just this deep-in-the-bones pluralism that challenges the who-gets-to-writeabout- India contingent. It is also that at the very heart of India's multifarious changes today is this glimmering idea: that Indians must be rewarded for what they do, not who they are.

Identities you never chose - caste, gender, birth order - are becoming less important determinants of fate. Your deeds - how hard you work, what risks you take - are becoming more important.

It is this idea, which I have found pulsating throughout the Indian layers, that leaves a certain portion of the intelligentsia out of sync with the surrounding country. As Mr. French has observed, there is a tendency in some of these writers to value social mobility only for themselves. When the new economy lifts up the huddled masses, then it becomes tawdry capitalism and rapacious imperialism and soulless globalization.

Fortunately for those without Indian passports, the nativists' vision of India is under demographic siege. The young and the relentless are India's future. They could not think more differently from these literates.

They savour the freedom they are gaining to seek their own level in the society and to find their voice; and they tend to be delighted thought that some foreigners do the same in India and love their country as much as they do.

Question 21

Which of the following statements you likely to be inferred from the passage.

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Question 22

Which of the following would be the best substitute for the word 'fusillade’ in the passage

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Question 23

The writer uses the phrase, 'who-gets-to- write about-India contingent' in lit passage to refer to

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Question 24

The writer believes that the most peculiar aspect of the criticisms that Patrick French and William Dalrymple have received is that

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Question 25

Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage

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Question 26

According to the information available in the passage, the writer is of the opinion that

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Question 27

The writer refers to the history of Hindus, Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists living peaceably together in India for millions of years in order to

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Question 28

The writer argues that the nature of criticism he, Dalrymple and French have received for their books renders reading their books superfluous because

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Question 29

According to the passage, the question 'who gets to write about India' is complicated because

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Question 30

"But with many outsiders' India-related books recently hitting bookstores there, the sensitivity - flared into a bout of vigorous literary nativism, with equally vigorous counterpunches." Select the most appropriate choice to fill in the blank in the above sentence

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