Q1: UPPSC Mains 2022 General Hindi: Mains Question

Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions that follow: To think of life in its completeness and to think of life as a particular, isolated entity are two different kinds of preparations; and in this sense, whenever literature, like politics, uses language in a levelled or one-dimensional manner, it limits or frustrates its entire power. While speaking in the idiom of politics we speak the language of a class for which language itself is not the principal thing; it is merely a second- or even third-grade means of reaching a particular end. Therefore, the capacity, effectiveness or spontaneity of that language is not of the same concern as it is in literature. Political language may be dominated by grand rhetoric and even a fabricated personality, because for politics language is something practical and makeshift, whereas for a litterateur language is a living, breathing part of the refinement of life that he wants to establish or re-establish in its original dignity and power by saving it from the violence, vandalism and intrigues of political, utilitarian or vested interests. The task of literature is not to lose its identity in the language of politics; rather, it is to distance itself almost completely from that language—alone like a hermit—so that politics is compelled time and again to borrow language from literature for its own effectiveness and interest, yet literature itself does not lose its identity by becoming the language of politics.