Meera, a college student in Kolkata, is preparing a project on what the rule of the English East India Company meant for rural India. She plans to begin with powerful landholders who paid a fixed yearly sum to the Company. Next she will study two communities: one of hunters and shifting cultivators who gathered forest produce, and another of settled peasants who came later and cleared the forests for farming. Along the way she wants to see how new laws changed the lives of ordinary people, and her guide has given her a reading list of sources to work through.
Meera reads that laws made by the state decide to an extent who grows richer and who poorer. What further point about the response of people to such laws will she find in her reading?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → People resisted the laws by acting on what they believed to be just, and so modified their effects.
Option (1) People mostly fled to new regions to escape the laws, leaving their effects unchanged. — Incorrect. Some peasants did desert their villages under high revenue. Here the point is that people changed how laws worked and so altered their effects.
Option (2) People shaped the laws mainly by sending petitions to the Company's courts in Calcutta. — Incorrect. Petitions to courts are not the way people are said to have shaped laws. They did so by their own actions on the ground.
Option (3) People resisted the laws by acting on what they believed to be just, and so modified their effects. — Correct. People were not only subject to laws. They resisted the law by acting on what they thought just, and so modified its consequences.
Option (4) People left the laws to the zamindars, who adjusted them to suit village custom. — Incorrect. Zamindars did not adjust Company laws to village custom. The point is about ordinary people defining how laws operated.
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