List of top Questions asked in CUET (UG)

Read the given passage and answer the six questions that follow.

When I was in my late teens and still undecided about which language I should write in, he told me that the language one is born into, one’s mother tongue, can be the only possible medium of creative expression. For most of his life, my father, Sripat Rai, had been a Hindi editor and critic. Off and on, he translated writings into English from Hindi. He was fond of saying that a failed writer becomes a critic. The weight of his literary expectation came, eventually, to rest on me. He seemed happy that I was showing an inclination for writing. ‘‘She will go far,’’ he told my mother after reading the first story that I sent him from Melbourne. My father’s pronouncement on the mother tongue stayed with me when I later started writing fiction in Hindi. Another thing that I barely acknowledged even to myself was that I felt something like shame whenever I thought of writing in English. It seemed wrong for a granddaughter of Premchand even to be thinking so. Our family had a certain linguistic pride. I knew that Premchand was famous, but I had not at that time realised the extent of his popularity. The fact that I was the granddaughter of Premchand, followed me everywhere. Everyone had a story to tell about their personal engagement with his fiction — the shopkeeper, the long time cook in my father’s Delhi house, a tea vendor, etc. The list was long, for there was practically no one who had not read something by him that had moved them. However, it was this very ubiquity, the reverence and love that he inspired in people, that made of him something too large for me to comprehend in the early years of my life. It led also to the strange feeling that, without having read him and just by being related to him, I had somehow inhaled his writing. The reading happened much later.

India had an independent economy before the advent of the British rule. Though agriculture was the main source of livelihood for most people, yet, the country’s economy was characterised by various kinds of manufacturing activities. India was particularly well known for its handicraft industries in the fields of cotton and silk textiles, metal and precious stone works etc. These products enjoyed a worldwide market based on the reputation of the fine quality of material used and the high standards of craftsmanship seen in all imports from India. The economic policies pursued by the colonial government in India were concerned more with the protection and promotion of the economic interests of their home country than with the development of the Indian economy. Such policies brought about a fundamental change in the structure of the Indian economy — transforming the country into a supplier of raw materials and consumer of finished industrial products from Britain. Obviously, the colonial government never made any sincere attempt to estimate India’s national and per capita income. Some individual attempts which were made to measure such incomes yielded conflicting and inconsistent results. Among the notable estimators — Dadabhai Naoroji, William Digby, Findlay Shirras, V.K.R.V. Rao and R.C. Desai — it was Rao, whose estimates during the colonial period were considered very significant. However, most studies did find that the country’s growth of aggregate real output during the first half of the twentieth century was less than two per cent coupled with a meagre half per cent growth in per capita output per year.