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St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)
End Semester Examination – October 2013
B.Com (Travel & Tourism) – I Semester
General English
Time: 3 Hrs Max Marks: 100
Note: 1.Exceeding the paragraph limit will result in loss of marks.
2. Each paragraph should contain about six sentences.
Section – A
I) Answer any three of the following questions in about three paragraphs.
(3×10 = 30)
1. Give an account of Naipaul’s visit to Bombay in your own words.
2. Write about Pankaj Mishra’s analysis of those writers who have written about India.
3. Comment on Paul Theroux’s desire to travel long and slow. Is such long and slow
travel worth the time according to you?
4. Narrate a travel experience of your own which has shocked, surprised or
disappointed you.
Section – B
II) Read the following passage and answer the questions below in about
four paragraphs.
India has always been a spiritual rainforest, teeming with religions and their mutations.
Fittingly, its greatest rulers have been as notable for their spiritual experiments as for their
political ones. Ashoka, who ruled the Mauryan Empire, India’s first, at its apogee in the
third century before Christ, was a convert to Buddhism. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s political
leader to independence from British rule in 1947, and its first prime minister, was born into a
high-caste Hindu family and became a resolute secularist. Mahatma Gandhi, his saintly
fellow-worker for independence, was a devout Hindu, but challenged the orthodox with his
campaign against untouchability. When political genius encounters India’s sectarian
profusion, it seems to breed a wayward spirituality.
No ruler took more liberties with his religion than Akbar, the greatest of the Mughals, the
Muslim dynasty that dominated India between the early 16th and 18th centuries. Like
Ashoka and Gandhi, Akbar constructed a religious ideology that served to hold together a
diffuse polity as it fed his own soul.
It began with pragmatic policies of tolerance. Akbar had inherited the throne, at the age of
13, in 1556. In 1579 he abolished the jiziya, a tax imposed on all but the poorest non-Muslims.
This was the most notable in a series of measures to recruit the Hindu majority and others to
the cause of unifying and expanding his empire. He could be ruthless: his troops massacred
20,000-25,000 non-combatants after a four-month siege of Chitor, a nearly impregnable
Hindu fortress in Rajasthan. But he preferred incentives to coercion. He defeated the warlike
Rajputs, but gave them rank and married their princesses, who were permitted to
conduct Hindu rites in the harem. The Mughal-Rajput alliance was a bulwark of his empire.
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Akbar’s liberalism in religion buttressed his other achievements. His generalship widened
and enriched the Mughal empire. His administrative and fiscal innovations underpinned it
for a century after his death. Not least, he fashioned a multicultural nobility into a kind of
meritocracy, through a system of ranks dependent not on inheritance but on imperial
favour.
Yet it is Akbar’s religious tolerance that marks him—a fierce autocrat in politics—for his
special place in history. It sprang as much from his character as from calculation. He was
curious. Wondering whether speech was learned or innate, he had several infants reared in
silence to find out. He is credited with innovations in textiles and artillery alike. Unable to
read, perhaps because of dyslexia, he loved learning and disputation. He was subject to
bouts of melancholy and what were probably epileptic fits early in life. He saw these as
spiritual experiences; maybe they gave his curiosity a religious twist.
As his reign progressed Akbar moved ever further from Islamic orthodoxy. He built a
capital, Fatehpur Sikri, around the tomb of a Sufi (Islamic mystic) saint who had prophesied
the birth of his heir. Later he took to inviting clerics from various religions, including
Portuguese Jesuits from Goa, to debate their faiths.
He collected the opinions of everyone, especially non-Muslims, retaining whatever he
approved of, lamented a Muslim historian at his court.
The king cared little that in allowing everyone to follow his own religion he was violating
all, one of them wrote. They saw in him the common fault of the atheist, who refuses to
make reason subservient to faith, accepting nothing as true which his feeble mind cannot
fathom.“If this is the definition of an atheist, the more we have of them the better,” Nehru
commented acidly 350 years later.
Eventually, Akbar came up with his own “religion of God”, more a fraternal order, headed
by himself, than a religion, based on a creed of harmony among peoples and a practice that
involved making disciples of his leading nobles. Unsurprisingly, Muslim clerics saw this as
blasphemy.
Eventually, it became official policy to discourage, if not to prohibit, Islamic forms of prayer.
Akbar paid the price in an abortive rebellion by his son, claiming to be a defender of the
faith. Akbar softened towards Islam thereafter, and is thought to have died, in 1605, a
Muslim, not an apostate.
His descendants had learned the lesson—the wrong one. Successively, they became ever less
tolerant. A century later, in 48 years of rule, his irreproachably pious and deeply bigoted
great-grandson Aurangzeb tore down Hindu temples and revived the jiziya—and a Hindu
consciousness that after his death was to help pull the Mughal empire apart and let in the
British.
They, like Akbar, tried to deal equally with their diverse subjects. But the tensions remained;
the Indian cliché that these were largely due to a British policy of “divide and rule” is a selfexcusing
fantasy. As British rule faded, Muslim leaders demanded and in 1947 got a
country, Pakistan, of their own. India’s new rulers stuck to their belief that the state must
remain above religion. Even so, Hindu hegemonists have recently come to the fore there.
Yet Akbar’s fusion of religions is not quite dead: there is a Hindu village in the Kulu valley
of the Himalayas whose local god is a reincarnation of him.
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