Nineteenth-century drawings of Indian village life often reinforced which notion?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 4
The correct answer is Option (4) → An unchanging rural society
Option (1) A rural society with a strong middle class — Incorrect. Bernier claimed India had no middle state at all, so a strong middle class had no place in this picture.
Option (2) A rural society marked by considerable differentiation — Incorrect. Considerable social and economic differentiation is what rural society really showed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such drawings hid this.
Option (3) A countryside led by improving landlords — Incorrect. Improving landlords belonged to Western Europe; Bernier said their absence marked India.
Option (4) An unchanging rural society — Correct. Such drawings showed village life as fixed and the same over time, which fed the idea of an unchanging rural society.
NCERT (2026-27): “6.1 The question of landownership … “This idea was further developed as the concept of the Asiatic mode of production by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century. He argued that in India (and other Asian countries), before colonialism, surplus was appropriated by the state. This led to the emergence of a society that was composed of a large number of autonomous and (internally) egalitarian village communities. The imperial court presided over these village communities, respecting their autonomy as long as the flow of surplus was unimpeded. This was regarded as a stagnant system. However, as we will see (Chapter 8), this picture of rural society was far from true. In fact, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rural society was characterised by considerable social and economic differentiation. …” |