Directions: In this section, you have a few short passages. After each passage, you will find some items based on the passage. First, read a passage and answer the items based on it. You are required to select your answers based on the contents of the passage and the opinion of the author only.

In the time of Brexit, when questions of ‘Englishness’ are popping up, the Raj days seem to be undergoing a re­examination, if the new crop of books about the Empire in India is anything to go by. Since Rudyard Kipling fashioned himself as the great apologist for the Raj once he settled in England after leaving India in 1889, his life lends itself to a case study of the white and brown man’s mutual burden in the Raj era. Sudhir Kakar chooses to do this through fiction in The Kipling File: here Kay Robinson, editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore in the 1880s, narrates the tale of the young, brilliant and unpredictable “Ruddy”, who worked as his understudy. Kipling’s life has been mined nearly empty of information by now. Among the last studies to come out on him is Charles Allen’s Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling in 2007, to which Kakar acknowledges his “biggest debt”. With letters, interviews, Kipling’s fiction, Allen had pieced together an account of Kipling’s India years which left almost no gap to be filled. But Kakar obviously felt that he had something more to say. The additions involve Kakar’s informed guesses as a psychoanalyst about the experience that shaped Kipling. There’s his conflicted childhood, of course: as a child often left to his devices, he developed an Oedipal attachment to the native ayahs and suffered keenly when he was transplanted from Bombay to England and placed in charge of the haranguing and righteous Aunty Rosa, who made for a bitter contrast to the unquestioningly affectionate ayats. So here, being played out all over again, but in the microcosm of Ruddy’s personal life, is the allegedly insuperable difference between the East and the West the emotive ways of the former and coldness of the latter and “never the twain shall meet”. The conflicts created within Ruddy cause him to seek out the squalid opium dens and brothels of Lahore his subconscious love for India, perhaps his deepest, could express itself only under the cover of night and in his fiction. Not a rare insight, is it?