BEGC 103 Solved Guess Paper 2026 for Indian Writing in English BA Honours English BAEGH

Drawn from The Exact Name (1965), this passage describes the response of the speaker's father after a scorpion has stung his wife on a rainy night. While the peasants chant the name of God and the holy man performs his rites, the father, described as ‘sceptic, rationalist’, ironically tries every remedy available, both rational and irrational: powders, mixtures, herbs and hybrids, and finally even paraffin set alight on the bitten toe.

The speaker watches ‘the flame feeding on my mother’. The passage operates on Ezekiel's central tension between the village world of superstition and the educated, urban rationalist temper, and gently shows that both fail. The father's so called rationalism collapses into desperate experiment. Ezekiel's irony here is mild and compassionate, not bitter; the participant observer ‘I’ remains involved yet detached, exemplifying his mature, ironic stance and his use of free verse that allows colloquial flow.

Meaning: A novel is a piece of prose fiction which dramatises life with the help of characters and situations. The novel has many forms or types.

1. Picaresque Novel – from the Spanish ‘picaro’ meaning a rogue; it records the adventures of a man or woman moving from place to place, so the plot is loose and episodic. Examples: Cervantes' Don Quixote, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, Fielding's Tom Jones.

2. Gothic Novel – named from the Goths, a Germanic tribe; it uses supernatural elements like ghosts and haunted houses, evokes fear, suspense and uncertainty, and has a medieval setting. It became popular with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764).

3. Epistolary Novel – from ‘epistle’ meaning a letter; the story advances through letters exchanged between characters. The form became popular in the eighteenth century with Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) and Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778).

4. Psychological Novel – concerned with the innermost motives and desires of a character; events are seen through the individual's feelings and reactions. The stream of consciousness technique suits it best. Examples: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Joyce's Ulysses. In Indian writing, Anita Desai, Arun Joshi and Shashi Deshpande probe the psyche.

5. Historical Novel – takes its setting and some characters and events from history. Sir Walter Scott brought it into prominence with Ivanhoe. In Indian English fiction, Manohar Malgonkar's The Princes and The Devil's Wind are good examples; Rushdie's Midnight's Children too uses a historical event.

6. Regional Novel – set in a particular geographical region, dealing with the life and society of that area. Thomas Hardy's Wessex and R. K. Narayan's Malgudi, an imaginary town in South India, are classic instances.

Conclusion: The novel as a genre is rich and flexible, expanding into picaresque, gothic, epistolary, psychological, historical and regional forms, each shaped by its own conventions, themes and techniques to serve different aspects of human experience.

Form and structure: ‘Bangle Sellers’ is a poem of four stanzas of six lines each, rhyming aa bb cc. It appears in The Golden Threshold (1905), Naidu's first volume. The bangle sellers are on their way to the temple fair, carrying ‘lustrous tokens of radiant lives, for happy daughters and happy wives’.

Conception of Indian womanhood:

1. Maiden – bangles of silver and blue, like the mountain mist, and flushed buds dreaming on a woodland stream; suggestive of innocence, dream and youth.

2. Bride – bangles like sunlit corn fields or the flame of the marriage fire; rich with ‘the hue of her heart's desire’, tinkling like her bridal laughter and bridal tear.

3. Mature woman or mother – purple and gold flecked grey bangles for one who has journeyed through life midway, whose hands have cherished and cradled fair sons, and who worships the Gods at her husband's side.

Theme and style: Naidu's conception is that a woman's life should be radiant; her first duty is to be happy, since her happiness radiates to others. The poem confines itself to the different stages in a woman's life, relating each stage to the bangles appropriate to it. Marriage is treated as the turning point in an Indian woman's life since she is, in most cases, economically dependent.

Conclusion: ‘Bangle Sellers’ presents a luminous, idealised vision of Indian womanhood through the bangle as a symbol, moving from maiden through bride to matron, combining ornamental imagery, controlled rhyme and quiet philosophical reflection.

The story and its author: Anand himself wrote, ‘Remembering our aphorism of Guru Nanak that we are all children lost in the world fair, I wrote an allegory entitled The Lost Child.’ The story tells of a small boy who goes to the festival of Spring with his parents and is enchanted by toys, sweets, balloons, flowers and music, but the moment he is separated from his parents, every attraction loses its hold.

Level one, the surface story:

1. Festival of Spring – from the wintry shades of narrow lanes, ‘gaily clad humanity’ streams towards the fair; the child, brimming with life and laughter, runs between his parents' legs.

2. The five temptations – the child longs for a toy, a burfi from the sweetmeat seller, a gulmohur garland from the flower seller, the rainbow coloured balloons, and the juggler's music. Each desire is met by the parents' silent or imagined refusal.

3. The bold request – before the roundabout, his overpowering love of his anticipated sensation makes him plead, ‘I want to go on the roundabout, please father, mother.’ Turning, he finds his parents gone.

4. The reversal – panic stricken, he runs to and fro; a kind man picks him up and offers him in turn the roundabout, the juggler's music, the balloons, the flowers, the burfi. The child rejects them all and cries only, ‘I want my mother, I want my father.’

Level two, the symbolic reading:

1. The child equals human beings in general, not named, of no particular age, time or place; the child is every child, so universal that the reader fills in the figure.

2. The fair equals the world, with its spectacle of attractions, crowds, noises and movement.

3. The attractions equal the temptations of the senses; toys appeal to the eye and mind, burfi to the palate, flowers to sight and smell, balloons to sight, the juggler's music to the ear.

4. The parents equal God, the abiding reality from which the child has wandered.

5. The lost child equals the human soul, lost in worldly pleasures, having lost touch with God; once awakened to that loss, no temptation can satisfy.

Style supporting both levels: Anand blends the concrete and the abstract. Visual images such as the flowering mustard field like a river of yellow light, aural images such as the weird strange sound of Siva's mad laughter, and olfactory images such as the sweet perfume of pollen mingled with the cool breeze create the festive surface. The third person narrator never intervenes; the story is told entirely through showing.

Conclusion: Yes, ‘The Lost Child’ truly works at two levels. The surface is a tender story of a child lost at a fair; the deeper level, in Anand's own words, is an allegory of every soul lost in the temptations of the world fair and longing for God.

R. K. Narayan takes a tiger as the protagonist of his novel who narrates the story of his life in the first person. The narrative develops through four distinct stages corresponding to Raja's growth as a character, from ferocity to spiritual realisation.

Stage one, cubhood and jungle life: Raja spends his early days in the Mempi hills in a cave with his mother; on her death he learns to fend for himself. Grown strong, he thinks himself king of the forest, above the lion. He meets a tigress, fights her, befriends her, and begets four cubs. One day hunters kill his tigress and cubs. ‘I never knew that human beings could be so devilish,’ he exclaims. He starts poaching village cattle for revenge, but escapes their stockade trap when fire breaks out. This stage shows youthful vigour, pride, instinctive ferocity and the first encounter with human cruelty.

Stage two, capture, circus and film set: Captain, owner of the Grand Malgudi Circus, traps Raja by placing a goat baited iron cage. He trains the tiger with whip and chair, makes him jump through fire, sit on a stool, and finally share a saucer of milk with a goat in the Jubilee Show. Madan, a film producer, wants a film around Raja. To force Raja to stand on his hind legs Captain uses an electric gadget. Raja, blinded with pain, raises his paw taking care to retract his claws so as not to hurt the master, but the blow tears off Captain's head. This stage shows the tiger's intelligence, discipline and loyalty; in contrast, the humans display greed and brutality.

Stage three, Malgudi and the Master: Raja enters Malgudi, takes refuge in the headmaster's room of a school, and creates panic. The hunter Alphonse, bribing the Save Tiger Committee, secures a permit to shoot him as a man eater. The Master, a holy man, intervenes: with his power of suggestion he puts the drunken Alphonse to sleep, unlocks the door, and leads Raja out of Malgudi. The Master remarks, ‘What our country needs most is a tiger for every village and town to keep people disciplined.’ This is the transitional stage of spiritual awakening.

Stage four, Mempi hermitage and the zoo: At the Master's ashram Raja listens to discourses on the Bhagavad Gita and on Karma. His hunger slackens; he kills only to satisfy need, fasts on consecutive days, and feels remorse. Old age overtakes him; his teeth fall and his hearing weakens. The Master, about to attain samadhi, hands Raja to a zoo head who is kind and holds no whip. The parting whisper: ‘Both of us will shed our forms soon and perhaps we could meet again, who knows?’

Conclusion: Raja's four stages, ferocity, intelligent loyalty under discipline, transitional surrender to the spiritual, and final sublimation, trace the soul's evolutionary journey from the sub human to the supramundane, which is the heart of Narayan's allegory.