The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the
best answer for each question.
For early postcolonial literature, the world of the novel was often the nation. Postcolonial
novels were usually [concerned with] national questions. Sometimes the whole story of the
novel was taken as an allegory of the nation, whether India or Tanzania. This was important
for supporting anti-colonial nationalism, but could also be limiting – land-focused and inward looking.
My new book “Writing Ocean Worlds” explores another kind of world of the novel: not the
village or nation, but the Indian Ocean world. The book describes a set of novels in which the
Indian Ocean is at the centre of the story. It focuses on the novelists Amitav Ghosh,
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Lindsey Collen and Joseph Conrad [who have] centred the Indian Ocean
world in the majority of their novels. . . . Their work reveals a world that is outward-looking –
full of movement, border-crossing and south-south interconnection. They are all very different
– from colonially inclined (Conrad) to radically anti-capitalist (Collen), but together draw on
and shape a wider sense of Indian Ocean space through themes, images, metaphors and
language. This has the effect of remapping the world in the reader’s mind, as centred in the
interconnected global south. . . .
The Indian Ocean world is a term used to describe the very long-lasting connections among
the coasts of East Africa, the Arab coasts, and South and East Asia. These connections were
made possible by the geography of the Indian Ocean. For much of history, travel by sea was
much easier than by land, which meant that port cities very far apart were often more easily
connected to each other than to much closer inland cities. Historical and archaeological
evidence suggests that what we now call globalisation first appeared in the Indian Ocean.
This is the interconnected oceanic world referenced and produced by the novels in my book. .
. .
For their part Ghosh, Gurnah, Collen and even Conrad reference a different set of histories
and geographies than the ones most commonly found in fiction in English. Those [commonly
found ones] are mostly centred in Europe or the US, assume a background of Christianity and
whiteness, and mention places like Paris and New York. The novels in [my] book highlight
instead a largely Islamic space, feature characters of colour and centralise the ports of
Malindi, Mombasa, Aden, Java and Bombay. . . . It is a densely imagined, richly sensory
image of a southern cosmopolitan culture which provides for an enlarged sense of place in
the world.
This remapping is particularly powerful for the representation of Africa. In the fiction, sailors
and travellers are not all European. . . . African, as well as Indian and Arab characters, are
traders, nakhodas (dhow ship captains), runaways, villains, missionaries and activists. This
does not mean that Indian Ocean Africa is romanticised. Migration is often a matter of force;
travel is portrayed as abandonment rather than adventure, freedoms are kept from women
and slavery is rife. What it does mean is that the African part of the Indian Ocean world plays
an active role in its long, rich history and therefore in that of the wider world.
Q.1 On the basis of the nature of the relationship between the items in each pair below,
choose the odd pair out:
1. Postcolonial novels : Border-crossing
2. Indian Ocean world : Slavery
3. Indian Ocean novels : Outward-looking
4. Postcolonial novels : Anti-colonial nationalism
Explanation
Answer- 1 Postcolonial novels : Border-crossing
Q.2 All of the following claims contribute to the “remapping” discussed by the passage,
EXCEPT:
1. cosmopolitanism originated in the West and travelled to the East through
globalisation.
2. the global south, as opposed to the global north, was the first centre of globalisation.
3. Indian Ocean novels have gone beyond the specifics of national concerns to explore
rich regional pasts.
4. the world of early international trade and commerce was not the sole domain of white
Europeans.
Explanation
Answer- 1-
cosmopolitanism originated in the West and travelled to the East through
globalisation.
Q3-
All of the following statements, if true, would weaken the passage’s claim about the
relationship between mainstream English-language fiction and Indian Ocean novels
EXCEPT:
1. the depiction of Africa in most Indian Ocean novels is driven by a postcolonial
nostalgia for an idyllic past.
2. the depiction of Africa in most Indian Ocean novels is driven by an Orientalist
imagination of its cultural crudeness.
3. very few mainstream English-language novels have historically been set in American
and European metropolitan centres.
4. most mainstream English-language novels have historically privileged the Christian,
white, male experience of travel and adventure.
Explanation
Answer- 4
most mainstream English-language novels have historically privileged the Christian,
white, male experience of travel and adventure.
Q 4-
Which one of the following statements is not true about migration in the Indian Ocean
world?
1. The Indian Ocean world’s migration networks were shaped by religious and
commercial histories of the region.
2. Geographical location rather than geographical proximity determined the choice of
destination for migrants.
3. Migration in the Indian Ocean world was an ambivalent experience.
4. The Indian Ocean world’s migration networks connected the global north with the
global south.
Explanation
Answer- 4-
The Indian Ocean world’s migration networks connected the global north with the
global south.
The passage below is accompanied by four questions. Based on the passage, choose the
best answer for each question.
[Fifty] years after its publication in English [in 1972], and just a year since [Marshall] Sahlins
himself died—we may ask: why did [his essay] “Original Affluent Society” have such an
impact, and how has it fared since? . . . Sahlins’s principal argument was simple but
counterintuitive: before being driven into marginal environments by colonial powers, huntergatherers, or foragers, were not engaged in a desperate struggle for meager survival. Quite
the contrary, they satisfied their needs with far less work than people in agricultural and
industrial societies, leaving them more time to use as they wished. Hunters, he quipped, keep
bankers’ hours. Refusing to maximize, many were “more concerned with games of chance
than with chances of game.” . . . The so-called Neolithic Revolution, rather than improving life,
imposed a harsher work regime and set in motion the long history of growing inequality . . .
Moreover, foragers had other options. The contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who had long
been surrounded by farmers, knew they had alternatives and rejected them. To Sahlins, this
showed that foragers are not simply examples of human diversity or victimhood but
something more profound: they demonstrated that societies make real choices. Culture, a
way of living oriented around a distinctive set of values, manifests a fundamental principle of
collective self-determination. . . .
But the point [of the essay] is not so much the empirical validity of the data—the real interest
for most readers, after all, is not in foragers either today or in the Paleolithic—but rather its
conceptual challenge to contemporary economic life and bourgeois individualism. The
empirical served a philosophical and political project, a thought experiment and stimulus to
the imagination of possibilities.
With its title’s nod toward The Affluent Society (1958), economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s
famously skeptical portrait of America’s postwar prosperity and inequality, and dripping with
New Left contempt for consumerism, “The Original Affluent Society” brought this critical
perspective to bear on the contemporary world. It did so through the classic anthropological
move of showing that radical alternatives to the readers’ lives really exist. If the capitalist
world seeks wealth through ever greater material production to meet infinitely expansive
desires, foraging societies follow “the Zen road to affluence”: not by getting more, but by
wanting less. If it seems that foragers have been left behind by “progress,” this is due only to
the ethnocentric self-congratulation of the West. Rather than accumulate material goods,
these societies are guided by other values: leisure, mobility, and above all, freedom. . . .
Viewed in today’s context, of course, not every aspect of the essay has aged well. While
acknowledging the violence of colonialism, racism, and dispossession, it does not thematize
them as heavily as we might today. Rebuking evolutionary anthropologists for treating
present-day foragers as “left behind” by progress, it too can succumb to the temptation to use
them as proxies for the Paleolithic. Yet these characteristics should not distract us from
appreciating Sahlins’s effort to show that if we want to conjure new possibilities, we need to
learn about actually inhabitable worlds.
Q 5-
The author of the passage criticises Sahlins’s essay for its:
1.
critique of anthropologists who disparage the choices of foragers in today’s society.
2.
cursory treatment of the effects of racism and colonialism on societies.
3.
failure to supplement its thesis with robust empirical data.
4.
outdated values regarding present-day foragers versus ancient foraging communities.
Explanation
Answer- 2 cursory treatment of the effects of racism and colonialism on societies.
Q 6-
The author of the passage mentions Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society” to:
1.
show how Sahlins’s views complemented Galbraith’s criticism of the consumerism and
inequality of contemporary society.
2.
show how Galbraith’s theories refute Sahlins’s thesis on the contentment of pre-huntergatherer communities.
3.
contrast the materialist nature of contemporary growth paths with the pacifist content ways of
living among the foragers.
4.
document the influence of Galbraith’s cynical views on modern consumerism on Sahlins’s
analysis of pre-historic societies.
Explanation
Answer- 1-
show how Sahlins’s views complemented Galbraith’s criticism of the consumerism and
inequality of contemporary society.
Q7-
The author mentions Tanzania’s Hadza community to illustrate:
1.
how two vastly different ways of living and working were able to coexist in proximity for
centuries.
2.
that hunter-gatherer communities’ subsistence-level techniques equipped them to survive
well into contemporary times.
3.
that forager communities’ lifestyles derived not from ignorance about alternatives, but from
their own choice.
4.
how pre-agrarian societies did not hamper the emergence of more advanced agrarian
practices in contiguous communities.
Explanation
Answer- 3-
that forager communities’ lifestyles derived not from ignorance about alternatives, but from
their own choice.
Q 8-
We can infer that Sahlins’s main goal in writing his essay was to:
1.
highlight the fact that while we started off as a fairly contented egalitarian people, we have
progressively degenerated into materialism.
2.
put forth the view that, despite egalitarian origins, economic progress brings greater
inequality and social hierarchies.
3.
hold a mirror to an acquisitive society, with examples of other communities that have chosen
successfully to be non-materialistic.
4.
counter Galbraith’s pessimistic view of the inevitability of a capitalist trajectory for economic
growth.
Explanation
Answer- 3-
hold a mirror to an acquisitive society, with examples of other communities that have chosen
successfully to be non-materialistic.
