What is the striking feature of modern India ?

Concept: A comprehension question that asks for the “striking feature” of something is answered by locating the writer’s own contrastive marker — the sentence in which one description is withheld and another is then asserted. In a construction of the form “there is little X … but Y and Z”, the elements introduced after the contrast word are the features the passage actually attributes to the subject. Where several options are thematically plausible, the option that reproduces the passage’s named feature in the passage’s own words is preferred over one that only sounds related.

Application: The closing sentence of the passage reads: “There is little about modern India that strikes one at once as Utopian : but the insistence upon the inculcation of norms, and the absence of bigotry and institutionalized exploitation of human or natural resources, are two very different features which link the realities of India and her tradition with the essence of all Utopians.” The clause before “but” withholds the Utopian description from modern India. The clause after “but” names the two features the writer does attribute to modern India: the insistence upon the inculcation of norms, and the absence of bigotry together with the absence of institutionalized exploitation of human or natural resources. Of the four offered phrases, “Absence of Bigotry” reproduces the second of those named features in the passage’s own words.

Cross-check: The same reading is supported earlier in the passage, which describes modern Indian secularism as requiring the state to make a fair distribution of attention and support amongst all religions, and adds that Indian kings so rarely persecuted religious groups that the exceptions prove the rule. Both remarks describe an absence of religious bigotry, so the closing sentence is restating a thread the passage has already built.

Contrast with the other offered phrases:

• “A replica of Utopian State” — the closing sentence states that there is little about modern India that strikes one at once as Utopian, and it invokes Utopia only to say that two features link India’s realities with the essence of all Utopians. The passage therefore stops short of calling modern India a replica of a Utopian state.

• “Uniform laws” — the passage says modern Indian law will determine certain rules, especially in relation to the regime of the family, upon the basis of how the loin-cloth is tied or how the turban is worn, because these identify litigants as members of a regional group governed by its traditional law. That is differentiation of law by regional group, not uniformity of law.

• “Adherence to traditional values” — traditional values frame the passage’s opening discussion, but the passage describes groups that adhere to one another geographically, economically and politically without ever assimilating socially, in ways of thinking, or even in language. The feature the closing contrast names alongside the absence of bigotry is “the insistence upon the inculcation of norms”, which is a narrower claim about norms rather than a general adherence to traditional values, and no offered phrase matches it as exactly as “Absence of Bigotry” matches the passage’s wording.

Result: Among the phrases offered, the striking feature of modern India named by the passage is the absence of bigotry.