Arjun, a history student, visits a museum gallery on religious life in early medieval India. In the first hall he sees a wooden image of a deity from Puri in Orissa, shown with a sister and a brother; a label explains that such images are made even today by local tribal specialists. In the next hall is a stone smeared with ochre, worshipped in a village shrine, and beside it a tenth-century sculpture of a Buddhist goddess from Bihar. A last panel compares the gods of the Vedic hymns with the gods of later religious stories. Arjun writes down questions for his teacher.
Arjun's teacher explains the village shrine with the terms 'great' and 'little' traditions. Why do scholars often write these terms in quotation marks?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → They accept the categories but are uncomfortable with the hierarchy the terms suggest.
Option (1) They accept the categories but feel the terms suit urban elites more than peasants. — Incorrect. Robert Redfield made these terms to describe the cultural practices of peasant societies. The quotation marks deal with the ranking in the words, so this reason fails.
Option (2) They accept the categories but are uncomfortable with the hierarchy the terms suggest. — Correct. Scholars find the categories useful, but calling one tradition great and the other little suggests a ranking. The quotation marks show this unease with the hierarchy.
Option (3) They accept the categories but feel the terms hide how both traditions changed over time. — Incorrect. Redfield himself noticed that both traditions changed over time through interaction. So the terms already allow for change, and the marks have another reason.
Option (4) They accept the categories but mark the terms as borrowed from Sanskrit Puranic texts. — Incorrect. The terms were coined by a sociologist, Robert Redfield, in the twentieth century. They come from his study of peasant life.
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