The Adventure — Class 11 MCQs with Answers

Key concepts: The Adventure (Class 11 English)

Jayant Narlikar's story sends the historian Gangadharpant Gaitonde into an India where the Marathas won the Battle of Panipat. It uses catastrophe theory and quantum physics to argue that history could have taken another course.

Professor Gaitonde

A historian and the author of a five-volume history of India, and a veteran of 999 public meetings — both facts matter to the plot.

Sarhad and Khan Sahib

The train stops at a small station called Sarhad, where an Anglo-Indian checks permits. Khan Sahib tells him, 'This is where the British Raj begins.'

Signs of a different India

Blue carriages lettered GBMR — Greater Bombay Metropolitan Railway — each with a tiny Union Jack painted on it 'as a gentle reminder that we are in British territory'.

East India House

Outside Victoria Terminus stands the headquarters of the East India Company — a shock, since in his history the Company was wound up shortly after 1857.

A different Bombay

On Hornby Road there is no Handloom House but Boots and Woolworth stores and the offices of Lloyds and Barclays, like an English high street.

The missing son

At Forbes building no Mr Vinay Gaitonde can be found. If the professor himself is dead in this world, his son may never have been born.

The library

At the Town Hall he reads his own five volumes. Volumes one to four — to Ashoka, Samudragupta, Mohammad Ghori and the death of Aurangzeb — are as he knows them. The change is in volume five.

The altered Panipat

The Marathas 'won it handsomely'. Abdali was routed and chased back to Kabul by Sadashivrao Bhau and his nephew Vishwasrao.

The consequences

The East India Company shelved its expansion and was reduced to pockets near Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. The Peshwas kept a puppet Mughal regime in Delhi and India moved towards democracy.

Bombay's lease

India allowed the British to keep Bombay as their sole outpost, on a lease due to expire in 2001 under a treaty of 1908.

The two Bakhars

In that world's Bhausahebanchi Bakhar a shot brushes Vishwasrao's ear and 'God was merciful'. In the professor's own copy, 'God expressed His displeasure. He was hit by the bullet.'

Azad Maidan

He is drawn to an unoccupied presidential chair, declares that 'an unchaired lecture is like Shakespeare's Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark', and is pelted with tomatoes and eggs.