CLAT English Passages 2020 to 2025: What the Consortium Picks

The set we analysed

CLAT English had six passages a year from 2020 to 2023 and four a year in 2024 and 2025, each with five or six questions. All 32 are solved, with explanations, in the CLAT PYQ vault.

Fiction is a big part of the paper

Unlike CAT, CLAT regularly sets literary extracts. Recent examples include:

• George Orwell's "Why I Write" (2025)
• R. K. Narayan's "An Astrologer's Day" (2025)
• J. Krishnamurti on the right kind of education (2025)
• Anita Desai's "Fire on the Mountain" (2024)
• Salman Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories" (2023)
• Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Scandal in Bohemia" (2021)
• Graham Greene's "The Case for the Defence" (2020)
• Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "The Cat" (2020)

Literary passages test inference about character, tone and the meaning of a phrase in context more than argument structure.

Non-fiction: education, society and the pandemic years

The non-fiction passages cluster around a few themes: education (2021, 2025), technology and the internet (2020, 2023), public health and the pandemic (2020 to 2022), justice and society (2021, 2024), and economics and work (2021, 2022). Many come from Indian writing, such as books on Indian archaeology and on English and class in India (2023).

What it means for your reading

• Read literary fiction regularly, especially short stories and novels by Indian writers in English.
• Read reflective non-fiction on education, society and technology.
• Practise inference and vocabulary-in-context questions, the two most common types. The GRADFLIX essay library has passages at the right length.

The 2024 and 2025 shift

The two most recent papers reduced English to four passages but kept six questions each, and leaned more heavily on literature: Orwell, Krishnamurti, R. K. Narayan and Anita Desai. Expect literary reading to stay central.