The languages that Ramanujan tried to bring to limelight in Indological…

Concept

A passage-based question is answered from the passage itself, not from outside knowledge or general association. The governing rule is that the answer must be traceable to a specific assertion the text makes; a phrase that merely appears in the passage is not an answer unless the sentence containing it actually predicates the thing the question asks about.

So the method has two parts. First, translate the question stem into the grammatical relation it is asking for — here, “X tried to bring Y to limelight” asks for the object of a verb of advocacy or proclamation performed by X. Second, locate the sentence in which the passage assigns that relation, and read the object of that verb literally. Every other occurrence of a candidate term must then be classified by the role its own sentence gives it.

Application

1. fix the relation being asked for. The stem asks which languages Ramanujan himself sought to bring into prominence within Indological studies. The required grammatical shape is therefore: Ramanujan (subject) + a verb of championing (proclaimed, asserted the relevance of) + the languages (object).

2. find the sentence that supplies that shape. The passage states: “At a time when Indian literature meant Sanskrit, and Sanskrit meant Greek and Latin, Raman arrived in Chicago to join Edward C. Dimock and the other ‘founding fathers’ in proclaiming to the world the relevance of Tamil and Bengali and the other mother tongues.” Here Raman is the subject, “proclaiming to the world the relevance of” is the verb of advocacy, and its object is “Tamil and Bengali and the other mother tongues”.

3. read the object literally. What Ramanujan tried to bring to limelight is therefore Tamil, Bengali and the other mother tongues.

Contrast

The same sentence opens with a subordinate clause of time, “At a time when Indian literature meant Sanskrit, and Sanskrit meant Greek and Latin”. Grammatically this clause describes the state of affairs that existed when Ramanujan acted; it is the background he worked against, not the content of his advocacy. Classify each candidate by the clause it belongs to:

• Sanskrit — sits in the temporal clause as the whole of what “Indian literature” was then taken to be; it names the prevailing narrowness, and the passage nowhere makes Ramanujan its champion.

• Greek and Latin — sit inside the same temporal clause, one step further removed: they are what Sanskrit in turn “meant”, the classical European frame through which Indian material was read.

• French and German — do not occur in the passage at all; the passage names no modern European language.

• Tamil, Bengali and the other mother tongues — sit in the main clause, as the object of what Raman went to Chicago to proclaim.

Cross-check

Two further signals in the text confirm the reading. The sentence immediately after says “he blazed a great path through the centre of Indological studies”, which fixes Indological studies as the arena named in the stem. And the sentence in question is itself built as a contrast — “At a time when [the older view held], Raman … proclaim[ed] [his own contribution]” — so whatever stands inside that temporal clause is by construction the background, and cannot also be what he brought to limelight.

Hence the languages Ramanujan tried to bring to limelight in Indological studies are Tamil, Bengali and the other mother tongues.