The passage has the message that

Concept

The message of a passage is the single claim that the whole text is organised to support. It is distinct from the details, episodes and background that the text supplies as evidence for that claim. A statement counts as the message only when the movement of the passage — its sequence of paragraphs and the generalisation it closes on — converges on that statement; a statement that merely repeats one episode, or that the text nowhere argues for, is not the message however plausible it may sound on its own.

Application

1. The passage opens with the last great war, whose effect on Indian literature was confined to sharpening the revulsion against violence and the disillusionment with the 'humane pretensions' of the Western World, voiced in Tagore's later poems and in Crisis in Civilisation.

2. It then sets out the moral dilemma of the Indian intelligentsia — sympathy for England, Russia and China on one side, an occupied homeland and Subhas Bose's army on the other — and records that no creative impulse could issue from such a confusion of loyalties.

3. Independence in 1947 is presented as the moment that should have released an upsurge of creative energy; the passage grants that it did, then shows that upsurge submerged in the agony of partition, the uprooting of millions, the martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi, the invasion of Kashmir and the atrocities in Bangladesh.

4. Those convulsions, the passage says, provoked poignant writing in Bengali, Hindi, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Sindhi and Urdu — and it immediately qualifies that poignant or passionate writing does not by itself make great literature.

5. The passage closes by generalising from this history: great literature has always emerged out of chains of convulsions, and Indian literature today is richer in volume, range and variety than it ever was in the past. This closing generalisation is what the whole narrative has been built to support, so it carries the message of the passage.

Contrast

• 'Disasters are inevitable' — the passage records particular calamities as historical events and traces what they produced in writing; it advances no claim that such events had to occur, so this restates background rather than the argument.

• 'Indian literature does not have a marked landscape' — the closing sentence characterises Indian literature as richer in volume, range and variety than ever before, which is a claim about its growth, not about an absence of distinct character.

• 'Literature has no relation with war and independence' — the passage links writing to the war, to Independence and to partition throughout; that relation is the very subject of the text rather than something it denies.

Result

Hence the message the passage carries is that great literature emerges out of chains of convulsions.