Question

Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the question that follows.

India is renowned for its diversity. Dissimilitude abounds in every sphere, from the physical elements of its land and people to the intangible workings of its beliefs and practices. Indeed, given this variety, India itself appears to be not a single entity but an amalgamation, a "construct" arising from the conjoining of innumerable, discrete parts. Modern scholarship has, quite properly, tended to explore these elements in isolation. (In part, this trend represents the conscious reversal of the stance taken by an earlier generation of scholars whose work reified India into a monolithic entity, a critical element in the much maligned "Orientalist" enterprise.) Nonetheless, the representation of India as a singular "Whole" is not an entirely capricious enterprise, for India is an identifiable entity, united by, if not born out of, certain deep and pervasive structures. Thus, for example, the Hindu tradition has long maintained a body of mythology that weaves the disparate temples, gods, even geographic landscapes that exist throughout the subcontinent into a unified, albeit syncretic, whole.

In the realm of thought, there is no more pervasive, unifying structure than karma. It is the "doctrine" or "law" that ties actions to results and creates a determinant link between an individual's status in this life and his or her fate in future lives. Following what is considered to be its appearance in the Upanishads, the doctrine reaches into nearly every corner of Hindu thought. Indeed, its dominance is such in the Hindu world view that karma encompasses, at the same time, life-affirming and life-negating functions, for just as it defines the world in terms of the "positive" function of laying out a doctrine of rewards and punishments, it also defines the world through its "negative" picture of action as an all but inescapable trap, an unremitting cycle of death and rebirth.

Despite, or perhaps because of, karma's ubiquity, the doctrine is not easily defined. Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty reports of a scholarly conference devoted to the study of karma where, although the participants admitted to a general sense of the doctrine's parameters, considerable time was spent in a "lively but ultimately vain attempt to define...karma and rebirth". The base meaning of the term "karma" (or, more precisely, in its Sanskrit stem form, karman, a neuter noun) is "action". As a doctrine, karma covers a number of quasi-independent concepts: rebirth (punarjanam), consequence (phala, literally "fruit," a word that suggests the "ripening" of actions into consequences), and the valuation or "ethic-ization" of acts, which marks them as either "good" (punya or sukarman) or "bad" (papam or duskarman).

In a general way, however, for at least the past two thousand years, the following passage (from the well known text, the Bhagavata Purana) has held true as a statement of the main elements of the karma doctrine: "The same person enjoys the fruit of the same sinful or meritorious act in the next world, in the same manner and to the same extent, according to the manner and extent to which that (sinful or meritorious) act has been done by him in this world." Even so, depending on the context in which the doctrine appears, ranging from its use across a wide range of literary sources to its use at the popular level, not all these elements may be present, though in a general way they may still be implied.

Question: According to the passage, how did the orientalist perspective view India?

• A. Viewed India as a country of diversity.
• B. Viewed India as if it was a single and unitary entity devoid of diversity.
• C. Viewed India both as single and diverse entity.
• D. Viewed India as land of karma.

Hint:

Find the sentence with the word "monolithic" and work out what that word implies about diversity.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is B

This question is checking whether you can restate a fact from the passage in your own words, without getting distracted by the surrounding context about diversity. Let us test every option against the actual sentence in paragraph one.

1. Viewed India as a country of diversity: this is the opposite of what the passage says about the orientalists; the passage credits modern scholarship, not the orientalist enterprise, with studying India's parts, and it explicitly calls the orientalist output a "monolithic entity", so this option is ruled out.
2. Viewed India as if it was a single and unitary entity devoid of diversity: "monolithic" means made of one uniform block, so a monolithic entity has no internal diversity by definition; this lines up with the text word for word.
3. Viewed India both as single and diverse entity: the passage gives only one description for the orientalist view (monolithic), never a combined single-and-diverse one, so this cannot be supported.
4. Viewed India as land of karma: karma is discussed later as a separate topic tied to Hindu thought in general, not as something the passage attaches to the word "Orientalist", so this is an irrelevant mix-up.

Working through every option this way, only the second one survives, since it is a direct restatement of "reified India into a monolithic entity".

Let us summarize:

• "Monolithic" in the passage signals a single, undivided whole.
• The orientalist view is being set up in contrast to the diversity described at the start of the passage.

So the orientalist perspective treated India as one unitary entity with no diversity, which is option (BB).