"The hold of the nationalist imagination on our colonial past is such that anything inadequately or improperly nationalist is just not history." Which of the following statements best reflects the author's opinion? A. Nationalists are highly imaginative. B. History is viewed through the filter of nationalism. C. Nationalists have a strong grip on the colonial past. D. Nationalism is the only way to view history.

GATE 2017 · General Aptitude · Passage Reading · medium

Answer: B. History is viewed through the filter of nationalism — the author's point is that nationalist thinking so dominates the interpretation of colonial history that any non-nationalist account is dismissed as 'not history'.

1. Decode the key sentence: The sentence says: 'The hold of the nationalist imagination on our colonial past is such that anything inadequately or improperly nationalist is just not history.' Breaking this down — 'hold of nationalist imagination' = nationalist thinking dominates; 'anything not nationalist is not history' = the nationalist lens acts as the gatekeeper of what counts as history.
2. Eliminate options that misinterpret the sentence: Option A misreads 'imagination' as literal creativity (wrong). Option C converts an epistemological point into a political-power point (partially right but incomplete). Option D reads a descriptive observation as a normative prescription (wrong direction).
3. Confirm Option B: Option B — 'History is viewed through the filter of nationalism' — directly matches the decoded meaning. The 'filter' metaphor precisely captures how nationalism screens out non-nationalist narratives from counting as legitimate history.