Question

excerpt from \by any other name\
by santha rama rau
this excerpt from santha rama raus memoir gifts of
passage takes place in the late 1920s. india was a colony
of the british empire from the 1700s to 1947, when it
attained independence. during the period of colonial rule,
the british set up schools in india based on the british
curriculum with lessons taught in english. many indians
bjected to the total replacement of their traditional
curricula.

at the anglo - indian day school in zorinabad to
which my sister and i were sent when she was
eight and i was five and a half, they changed our
names. on the first day of school, a hot, windless
morning of a north indian september, we stood in
the headmistresss study and she said,
ow
youre the new girls. what are your names?\

my sister answered for us. \i am premila, and
she\—nodding in my direction—\is santha.\

the headmistress had been in india, i
suppose, fifteen years or so, but she still smiled
her helpless inability to cope with indian
names.... \oh, my dears, those are much too
hard for me. suppose we give you pretty english
3
which detail from the text shows santhas point of view of the headmistress?
○ a. \she shrugged in a baffled way....\ (paragraph 3)
○ b. \i cant remember too much....\ (paragraph 4)
○ c. \... her helpless inability to cope with indian names.\ (paragraph 3)
○ d. \... they changed our names.\ (paragraph 1)

Explanation:

To determine Santha's point of view of the headmistress, we analyze each option:

• Option A: Describes the headmistress's action, not Santha's view.
• Option B: Is about Santha's memory, not her view of the headmistress.
• Option C: "her helpless inability to cope with Indian names" is Santha's observation (point of view) about the headmistress's difficulty with Indian names.
• Option D: Describes an action (name change), not a view of the headmistress.

Answer:

C. "... her helpless inability to cope with Indian names." (paragraph 3)