English - Prose Chapter 10: India through Traveller's Eye Long Answer Questions
Long Answer Questions
Question 1.How does Pearl S. Buck describe Kashmir?
Answer:In Kashmir where the white barbarian invaders from Europe long ago penetrated India, the people are often fair. Auburn-haired blue-eyed women are beauties there. A young India friend of mine has recently married a Kashmiri man who though his hair is dark, has eyes of clear green. The skin colour of the Kashmiri a lovely cream and the features are as classic as the Greek. But all the people of India must be reckoned as belonging to the Caucasian race, whatever the colour of the skin in the South, though it be as black as any African’s
Question 2.How has India influenced the world in the post-independent era?
Answer:The Indians make the third group between the South Africans and the black and white for that matter there was our Indian family doctor, and why should there have been an Indian doctor in a Chinese port or tend an American family and rumours of India. Persist, for they are memorable people, dramatic and passionate and finding dramatic lives. You see how India has a way of permeating human life and consider how India has managed, merely by maintaining her independence and yes by producing superior individuals to influence the world in these few short years of freedom, they have put to good use the benefits the English gave and left the knowledge of west.
Question 3.Why had the Indian intellectuals decided not to support the British in the Second World War?
Answer:The English, they declared had no real purpose to restore India to the people. I could believe it fresh as I was from China, where the period of people’s tutelage seemed endless and self-government further off every year. When you are ready for independence, conquerors have always said to their subjects, etcetera! But who is to decide when that moment comes, and how can people learn to govern themselves, expert, by doing it? So the intellectuals in India were Restless and embitter as, and I sat for hours watching their flashing dark eyes and hearting the endless flow of language the purest English into which they poured their feelings. The plants than was that when the second world war broke, in India world rebel immediately against England and compel her by this complication to set her free. They would not be forced, as they declared they had won the First World War, to fight at England’s command.
Question 4.What lesson had India taught humanity by gaining independence?
Answer:India has managed, merely by maintaining her independence and yes, by producing superior individuals, to influence the world in these few years of freedom, they have put to good use the benefits the English gave and left. The knowledge of west the pure and exquisitely enunciated English tongue of men and women educated on both sides of the globe-witness Nehru and with him a host of men learning how to govern, and the first women to be the President of the general assembly of the united nations a woman of India and the men in charge of the prisoner exchange in kore an Indian General, who won trust from all.
Question 5.What was the psychological impact of colonisation on Indian people?
Answer:I find that among the many impressions of India, absorbed while I live among them, and still clear in my mind, is their reverence for great men and women. Leadership in India can only be continued by those whom the followers consider being good that is capable of renunciation therefore, not self-seeking. This one quality for them contains all others A person able to renounce personal benefit for the sake of an idealistic and is by that very fact also honest, also high minded, therefore also Trustworthy. I felt that the people, even those who know themselves full of faults, searched for such persons.
Question 6.Who, according to Buck, could be the real leaders of Indian people?
Answer:The devotion was given by the people to Gandhi and finally even internationally is well known, but I found the same homage paid to a local person who in their measure were also leaders because of their selflessness. Thus I remember a certain Indian village where I had been invited to visit in the Home of a family of some modem education though not much, and some means, though not wealth, the house was mud-walled and the roof was made of thatch. Inside were several rooms however, the floors smooth and polished with the usual mixture of cow-dung and water.
Question 7.What are some of the features of Indian family Life, as noticed by Buck?
Answer:The maturing culture of organised human family life and produced philosophical religions had shaped his mind and soul, even though he could not read and write. And the children, the little children of the Indian villages, how they tore off my heart, thin, big believer, and all with huge sad dark eyes. I wondered that any Englishmen could look at them and not accuse himself. Three hundred years of English occupation and rule, and could there be children like this? Yes, and Millions of them! And the final indictment surely was that the life span in India was only twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years! No wonder, then, that life was hastened, that a men married very young so that there could be children, as many as possible before he died.
Question 8.Give a portrait of India seen through the writer’s eyes.
Answer:In India through a Traveller’s Eyes, Pearl Buck gives her personal impression of India. On the basis of these impressions, a portrait of India flashes before our eyes. This portrait is of India of the nineteen-fifties. Thus it appears idyllic to us. Even for that period, the portrait is not very realistic. The writer is a fond lover of India and the Indian people. Thus she sees only bright sides of Indian life. In a sense this was inevitable. Mrs Buck saw only those things and people that her hosts showed her. The hosts naturally did not show her the seamy sides of Indian life. So this portrait of India formed through this writer’s eyes is very bright. The picture includes scenes of poverty, disease, starvation and overall economic backwardness of the country. Bui for all these ills the British rulers are blamed. The writer begins at a very bright note.
She speaks about India’s superior individuals who have influenced the course of modem history with their non-violent freedom movement as also by human-faced administration and reconstruction work after independence. She finds that Indian intellectuals have made excellent use of some of the good gifts including the English language that the British rule gave to India. The writer is charmed by quality calibre and self-confidence of the Indian intellectuals. She finds Indian Freedom Movement a rare thing in which the whole people including the intellectuals and the peasants fought hand in hand. And this Freedom Movement was far loftier than the American War of Independence. It was the triumph of a bloodless revolution. Here noble means was used to achieve noble ends. It has a great lesson for the world as it shows the futility and destructiveness of movement carried on by violence and blood-shed.
Mrs Buck gives an impressive picture of Indian village life. Here people live according to the great ideals of their tradition. Their conception of goodman is quite lofty. They think only those people good who practise self-renunciation rather than self-seeking. Such people sacrifice their personal good for the sake of noble ideals. Mahatma Gandhi is the supreme example of such great good man of Indian conception. But all through the country, such people are to be found and people flock to them and follow their wise advice in a village Mrs Buck finds a paralytic elderly man who for being such a liberated man is surrounded by people all through the day.
Despite his suffering, he lives in a cage-like enclosure where people may come unrestricted. All his life he has been a selfless Wiseman. Now he has become a saint for the people. In the same way, the writer is impressed by the cleanliness and clean habits of Indian Villagers. Even the paralytic man was spotlessly clean. In people’s home, she found homespun towels to cleanse the hands. The custom of taking food from green banana leaves through the right hand only also convinced Mrs Buck of the clean habits of the Indian people. Thus the portrait of India seen through Mrs Buck’s eyes is impressive though bit over-bright. It is not as realistic as E. M. Forester’s portrait of India But it has an idyllic charm that is very appealing.
