What type of literary forms were mainly created and preserved by women as…

Concept: A literal-comprehension question is answered from what the passage itself states, not from outside knowledge or general plausibility. Fix the exact predicate or predicates the stem asks about, then locate the sentence in which the passage attaches those predicates to a body of writing; that body is the answer. Anything the passage never links to those predicates, however plausible it sounds, lies outside the answer.

Application to this passage: the stem asks for the forms that were both created by women and preserved by them.

1. The passage states that "the great corpus of nursery rhymes, vratakatha, fairy-tales, festival songs and various types of labour songs were created partly, if not entirely by women". This sentence supplies the "created" predicate.

2. The very next sentence states that "although this body of literature was enjoyed by all members of society, it was preserved and transmitted mainly by women". The pronoun "it" refers back to the same corpus, supplying the "preserved" predicate.

3. Both predicates therefore attach to one and the same body of writing: nursery rhymes, vrata katha, fairy-tales, festival songs and labour songs.

Cross-check against the other forms named in the choices:

• Political essays: the passage never mentions essays or political prose at all, so none of its predicates attach to them.

• Religious texts: the passage names medieval women poets such as Andal, Karaikkal Ammaiyar, Lalla Ded, Mahadeviyakka and Mirabai, but calls them exceptions and says there is hardly any evidence that social patronage was available to them; it nowhere states that women created or preserved a body of religious texts.

• Novel and short stories: the passage says women writers were rare, and it raises anonymity among women who ventured into other genres only as one of two explanations it invites the reader to weigh, not as an established fact; in either case prose fiction is not the corpus to which the passage attaches created and preserved.

Hence the forms mainly created and preserved by women, as stated in the passage, are nursery rhymes, vrata katha, fairy-tales, festival songs and labour songs.