Who is A. K. Ramanujan compared to in the text?

Concept: A "who is X compared to" question is a literal-comprehension task. In prose a comparison is carried by an explicit marker — like, as, similar to, resembles — and the answer is the noun that marker attaches to. It is read off the sentence in which the marker stands, and it is never supplied from outside knowledge about the person being written about. Two further cautions follow from this: a name that merely appears in the passage is not thereby a comparison, and a simile whose subject is somebody else does not transfer to X.

Application: The marker stands in the very first sentence — "A. K. Ramanujan was one of those thinkers, like Freud (whom he greatly, though not uncritically, admired), who so transform our way of looking at a subject that we are in danger of undervaluing their contribution." Like attaches directly to Freud, and the relative clause that follows spells out the shared property: both are thinkers who so transform our way of looking at a subject that their contribution is afterwards taken for granted. The comparison is therefore with Sigmund Freud.

Cross-check — what each of the other candidate values is doing, or not doing, in the passage:

• Chomsky: no linguist of that name appears anywhere in the passage; the only scholars it names besides Ramanujan are Edward C. Dimock and the other ‘founding fathers’ he joined in Chicago, and "join" marks an association, not a comparison.

• Brunvand: no folklorist of that name appears in the passage either; the folk material it credits Raman with valuing is Indian — the poetry, the stories and the counter-systems of women and of ‘illiterate’ peasants.

• British mill owners: the mills belong to a second, separate simile — native Indian scholars were regarded "like the raw fibres that were taken from India to be processed in British mills". The subject being compared there is those scholars, not Ramanujan, so that simile cannot answer this stem.

Result: in this passage A. K. Ramanujan is compared to Sigmund Freud.