a) Ans.

The passage belongs to the genre called non-fictional prose. It is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work
whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be factual. This presentation may be accurate or notthat is, it can give either
a true or a false account of the subject in questionhowever, it is generally assumed that authors of such accounts believe them to
be truthful at the time of their composition or, at least, pose them to their audience as historically or empirically true. Note that
reporting the beliefs of others in a non-fiction format is not necessarily an endorsement of the ultimate truthfulness of those beliefs;
it is simply saying it is true that people believe them (for such topics as mythology, religion). Non-fiction can also be written about
fiction, giving information about these other works. Simplicity, clarity and directness are some of the most important considerations
when producing non-fiction. In fiction, the writer believes that readers will make an effort to follow and interpret an indirectly or
abstractly presented progression of theme, whereas the production of non-fiction has more to do with the direct provision of
information. Understanding of the potential readers' use for the work and their existing knowledge of a subject are both
fundamental for effective non-fiction. Despite the truth of non-fiction it is often necessary to persuade the reader to agree with the
ideas and so a balanced, coherent and informed argument is vital.
The passage under discussion is about the theatre movement in Bengal, and it offers us what the writer of the work deems
true about the movement. In three paragraphs, the writer talks about the attitude of the theatre movement to the classics like the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the fundamental principles of the peoples theatre movement, and importance of street drama in
the peoples theatre movement. We must note that the approach of the writer is serious and prosaic. It seems as if he has taken the
onus of explicating the relevance of the peoples theatre movement in the modern Bengal. The writer of the passage tries to make a
statement; he or she does not want to narrate a tale conceived by imagination. He or wants his readers to understand what his or
her ideas are. His aim is coherence and comprehensiveness rather than aesthetic pleasure. Hence he or she uses a literary
mediumnon-fictionthat suits his approach.

b) Ans.
I presume, the passage can be considered to be literary. The word literary means something of or relating to literature or
characteristic of literature. It is hard to find any fixed category called literary. Usually, a work is called literary when it is deemed
appropriate to literature rather than everyday speech or writing by the academia. According to the Russian formalists, literature is a
special use of language which achieves its distinctiveness by deviating from and distorting practical language. Here, practical
language means that type of language which is used for acts of communication only. On the other hand, literary language has no
practical function of this kind at all except to make us see differently. What distinguishes it from practical language is its
constructed quality, whose special property is its foregrounding of the rhetorical devices themselves, and which, in so doing, draws
attention to the fact that the utterance is uncommon (peculiar language). However, the theorists/critics associated with the
Bakhtin School returned the literary to its wider cultural, historical and social relations in their belief that language was a social
phenomenon and could not be separated from ideology. Further, by shifting the emphasis of interest from the device (static) to
function (dynamic), defamiliarisation becomes not an essentialist property of the literary, but a historically determinate effect of
its textuality in resisting the relentless processes of naturalization and habitualisation. Drawing on Louis Althussers concept of art, it
can be said that the literary sometimes achieves an escape from ideology, and thereby, critiques it. It also follows from this
functional conception of defamiliarisation that literatures variability of function, meaning and evaluation in different societies and
periods is a reflex of change and historical process, thereby undermining any idea of a fixed canon of Literature in which eternal
verities are enshrined. It can be said that a work can be considered literary if it is realised in a tangible object which is readily present
for close inspection or re-reading, and that it does not have to be performed (pre-emptively interpreted) in order to be read for the
first time as unmediated text.
The passage under discussion seems to be a non-fictional prose work. This can be categorised as a literary non-fiction, the
genre that recognises both the inherent power of the real and the deep resonance of the literary. It is a form that allows a writer
both to narrate facts and to search for truth, blending the empirical eye of the reporter with the moral visionthe Iof the
novelist. Literary nonfiction writers commonly use the techniques of fiction, including creation of a narrative arc, character
development, scene-setting, action sequences, dialogue and interior monologue. The writer of the passage sometimes uses the
narrative mode of interior monologue (What should be the theatre movements attitude to the classics, he asks only to answer
himself), sometimes uses the journalistic mode of writing to convey his views of the peoples theatre movement in modern Bengal.
The aim of the writer is not merely to attain any aesthetic effect; instead, he or she wants to produce an eye-opening prose work
that will make its reader politically conscious about the development and relevance of the peoples theatre movement in modern
Bengal.