Discuss the nature and significance of cultural diversity in India.

Linked PYQ

5. Read the following passage and answer the questions that follow : 10x5=50 The complexity of a culture is to be found not only in its variable processes and their social definitions—traditions, institutions and formations—but also in the dynamic interrelations, at every point in the process, of historically varied and variable elements. In what I have called 'epochal' analysis, a cultural process is seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant features : feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from one to the other. This emphasis on dominant and definitive lineaments and features is important and often, in practice, effective. But it then often happens that its methodology is preserved for the very different function of historical analysis, in which a sense of movement within what is ordinarily abstracted as a system is crucially necessary, especially if it is to connect with the future as well as with the past. In authentic historical analysis, it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific and effective dominance. It is necessary to examine how these relate to the whole cultural process rather than only to the selected and abstracted dominant system. Thus 'bourgeois culture' is a significant generalizing description and hypothesis, expressed within epochal analysis by fundamental comparisons with 'feudal culture' or 'socialist culture'. However, as a description of cultural process, over four or five centuries and in scores of different societies, it requires immediate historical and internally comparative differentiation. Moreover, even if this is acknowledged or practically carried out, the 'epochal' definition can exert its pressure as a static type against which all real cultural process is measured, either to show 'stages' or 'variations' of the type (which is still historical analysis) or, at its worst, to select supporting and exclude 'marginal' or 'incidental' or 'secondary' evidence. Such errors are avoidable if, while retaining the epochal hypothesis, we can find terms which recognize not only 'stages' and 'Variations' but the internal dynamic relations of any actual process. We have certainly still to speak of the 'dominant' and the 'effective', and in these senses of the hegemonic. But we find that we have also to speak, and indeed with further differentiation of each, of the 'residual' and the 'emergent' which in any real process, and at any moment in the process, are significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the characteristics of the 'dominant'. (a) What does the epochal analysis usually take into account? (b) What has traditionally been the treatment of cultures in relation to the culture? (c) What should be the ideal way to study the historical processes of cultural formation? (d) Explain the viewpoint of the author towards cultural study at a given point in history. (e) Bring out the relation between dominant, residual and emergent cultures.